What’s most frustrating about how they do job balance is how long it takes for anything to get done. To the devs it’s easy to say “just trust us, these changes will set the class in a better direction eventually”, but that better direction is 3-4 patch cycles away. It’s like they have zero foresight into their own development process. In what world does it make sense to remove staple abilities of the job and then add nothing to replace it, and on top of that completely eviscerate the potency numbers.
Maybe instead of making these idiotic changes and then waiting months to fix them, just stop neutering the class until you’re ready to fix it ENTIRELY.
The devs have this really harmful philosophy that if the class EVENTUALLY gets to where they want it, then all the months of misery prior are justified. Yeah sure maybe by 6.5 samurai will be baller and we will get laughed at for whining about it now, but that’s still months and months of playing with these changes.

I don’t even think Katien removal is that big of a deal anymore. I’ll miss it for sure, but the far more detrimental problem is with midare. Midare is samurai bread and butter, and now it hits for about as much as a Gekko or Kasha crit. They seriously messed up with the potency reductions on midare and ogi. I’m willing to bet they could ease a very big portion of the samurai players complaints with a very justified potency adjustment to midare and ogi. You can run the math all you want and insist that it’s the same damage as before the change, but it’s very hard to justify to a samurai player why one day their midares will be hitting for 50-60k and then the next they can barely break 20k. All the math in the world won’t stop my brain from comparing those two numbers and feeling like I’m substantially weaker.
But don’t worry guys, in two years by 6.5 I’m sure samurai will be where the devs want it!
Please look forward to it!