Sam changes lol

[SlickPaws]

maybe SE told themselves it was to reduce bloat

Fact of the matter is, it was never about bloat. If they were concerned about bloat, it could've been alleviated in a host of other ways like combining Senei and Guren onto the same ability (and giving Senei AoE drop-off so it can still be used in AoE/dungeons); Combining Shinten and Kyoten (with the same AoE stuff); having Shoha upgrade into Shoha 2 instead of giving us yet another single target/AoE version of what amounts to the same ability; Ikishoten could've changed into Ogi-Namakiri after pressing it, saving us a button; Iaijutsu could've changed to Tsubame-Gaeshi after activating, again saving us a button. Combine all these changes and they'd have opened up 5 buttons/hotkeys for brand new abilities moving forward, or simply leave them empty for the sake of reducing bloat and despite all this the feel of the class wouldn't have changed dramatically or at all.

The only real justification they have for these changes and the removal of Kaiten is crit variance and smoothing out damage over time so SAM's peaks are lower and valleys are higher on a graph - something that 90% of SAM players couldn't give a toss about, and something that ToS forbids us from looking at anyway... Not that that's ever stopped anyone. Speaking as a SAM player who doesn't really interact much with the savage/ex/ultimate content for lack of a static, I was fine with the crit variance and doing less damage during my rotation if it meant that my Midares had the chance to hit like a truck and it was *always* satisfying when they did, particularly when you got that Kaiten wind-up animation, the sound trigger, that castbar filling and you just knew that the enemy was about to have a very bad time. Genuinely feels like the soul of the class has been ripped out by the removal of that one ability.