Don't merge Guren and Senei

[Edweena]

Sorry for the baity title, just want to draw attention to a better solution than the merging of Senei and Guren.
In image form!

Hope this helps get the idea around so the devs see more of it in place of the common idea that I and many others have had of merging Senei and Guren.
Do this, don't remove Kaiten.
Reduce CD drifting. Reduce the skill floor. Maintain the skill ceiling! Much better.
There's no reason Senei and Guren should exist as they are currently.

[Edweena]

Potencies, lvl acquirements and all that nonsense is irrelevant, and unedited for I am bad with ms paint lol.

[Apopopo]

yeah, this could work, nice idea

[YukiB]

Yes, I absolutely agree with transforming Shinten/Kyuten into Senei/Guren using Ikishoten.

I mean, they could do both, and consolidate the skills as well as the buttons. But it's not really worth giving up the pretty animations and gameplay feel to save a single button. Which means, if Kaiten is any indication, they're going to do it anyway.

Poor Ikishoten, though. It's starting to get overburdened. Maybe they need to rename it to "2 Minute Burst Window: Ready".

[HyoMinPark]

I’m in the merge Shinten/Kyuten, Guren/Senei, and Shoha/Shoha II camp simply because the skills are redundant and there’s no need for two variants when one can get the job done. SB Guren was perfectly fine as it was and didn’t need a single target variant, in my opinion. Just tells me that the developers had no idea what ShB skills to give SAM so they came up with a “Guren! But it’s single target only now!” skill. Giving new skills simply for the sake of giving new skills is bad design.

[YukiB]

Giving new skills simply for the sake of giving new skills is bad design.

Maybe the consistency of their release schedule is an enemy here. The devs have set an expectation for both themselves and the playerbase on what kind and what amount of content is released every 4 months. New expansion = 10 level, with a skill or trait every 2-4 levels whether they need it or not. Or more importantly, whether the devs know what to add or not. They'll figure out the why in the major patches every 4 months, when they take a sledgehammer to the square hole of job design until the round peg they made fits.

Senei is an innocuous example. It doesn't really do anything different than what we had before, just does more damage. It's filler. But they had to add something because it's a new expansion.

Ogi Namikiri, and arguably Tsubame-gaeshi, is an example of the dangerous kind. It's yet another big button to press in the opener then forget until raid buffs are back up. They didn't think about why SAM needed that, they just thought we needed another big flashy skill because it's a new expansion and everyone wants another big flashy skill. Then in 6.1 they decided we did too much damage in burst and removed Kaiten, redistributed potency to the base combo, etc. They have to remove an iconic skill to solve a perceived problem they created for no other reason than because it's a new expansion.

They need to understand that we don't want regular, consistent change if they're going to change things for the worse. Focus on releasing more content instead.

[CelestiCer]

Like would anyone be mad if it is fused together?

New Senei
- Guren removed
- Senei inherits Guren line Slash AoE animation
- Senei retains Senei's original Slash animation
- Senei's potency is kept the same
- Senei's new Line AoE potency has 50% fall off damage like Guren
Now you have 1 button less

New Ikishoten interaction
- Ikishoten activates Ogi Namikiri ( stays the same )
- Ikishoten button turns into Ogi Namikiri
Again one less button

New Shoha
- Shoha 2 removed
- Shoha now is a cone AoE
- Shoha potency is kept the same on the 1st target with fall off damage
Same idea one less button

3 button bloat removed if we considered Kaiten wasn't removed (table flips), gameplay for SAM mains kept the same... and the Dev's have 3 former hotkeys they can fill with something " NEW" cause they want to adjust our gameplay or something idk.

Honestly whatever is close to Pre-6.1 SAM butchering with Kaiten removal <- whatever is before that and close to that just give me that and I will be one happy SAM okey dokey

[Xenon_S]

Supporting this

this is the simplest option to impletment without having to remove existing animation, or add new ones.

by simply making ikishoten proc sen'ei and guren off shinten/kyuten saves 2 buttons already, and it still conserves the ST/AoE split option.

now just turn ikishoten into ogi namikiri while under buff like ninja's bunshin->phantom kamaitachi and we save 1 more

thats 3 buttons off the hotbar, without any practical change to gameplay.

[Faulko]

lol he thinks square will actually implement a logical idea.
Bruh, I’m calling it now, it’s just going to be another 10-20 potency on our combo strings.
I don’t even give a shit about kaiten anymore, I’m so disheartened by seeing 20k midares that the kaiten removal is just a nuisance. A DH Crit Midare can’t even beat a non crit pre 6.1 Midare.
Hell, even Shinten, Gekko, and kasha crits are barely weaker than Midare crits if not stronger sometimes.
They always do this with samurai changes, they mess up the potencies somewhere else and then just add them to hakaze and jinpu/shifu.
What’s most frustrating is that we are back to shinten spam. Like why the hell did we even go through that whole hagakure removal/rework shitshow in shadowbringers for? Wasn’t it explicitly to curb the shinten spam playstyle because people were prioritizing that over midares when hagakure gave the full kenki amounts.
•Kaiten removal is unfortunate
•The lack of foresight for synergy of our auto crits with buff sucks too.
•Making tenka gokken into a braindead circle is another appeal to casual play by removing band required effort from the player, no matter how minimal.
•Midare and Ogi being neutered so hard they can’t even come close to non crits from the previous patch, even with auto crit baked in!!

These are all really bad, but I don’t think anything compares to how insulting it is going back to shinten spam. It’s just such a fucking slap to the face of all the players that webt through that transition from Stormblood into shb. This shows the devs either have ZERO forward planning for where they want class direction to go, or worse, it shows the incompetence of being able to think of any other option instead of going back to shinten spam. OR EVEN WORSE, it’s shows malice because they openly lied about why the original shinten spam rotation got changed. They specifically stated back in the day that the shinten spam was not how they wanted samurai to be played (hence the big hagakure changes back then), but here we are back at shinten?

What people don’t understand is that it’s not just about a job ability removal, or unjustifiable low potencies. These are just symptoms of the ass backwards way square has handled job design for a long time now. The fact they’re still pulling this shit, and refusing to acknowledge or explain the reasoning for why were are going BACKWARDS in job design is why a lot of people are so angry about this.
Sorry for the novel, this shit makes my blood boil.

[Edweena]

Supporting this

this is the simplest option to impletment without having to remove existing animation, or add new ones.

by simply making ikishoten proc sen'ei and guren off shinten/kyuten saves 2 buttons already, and it still conserves the ST/AoE split option.

now just turn ikishoten into ogi namikiri while under buff like ninja's bunshin->phantom kamaitachi and we save 1 more

thats 3 buttons off the hotbar, without any practical change to gameplay.

Yeah and it's SO FEASIBLE, Warrior literally did this I ripped a lot of the text off of the warrior actions. (fell cleave turns into inner chaos under the effects of nascent chaos, also an action that is JUST a gauge spender)
Solutions to problems already exist in the game but in other jobs, and we could do with learning from them. (we referring to devs as well lol, quite literally everyone)