6.1 SAM Changes: A Discussion/Response

[NohimeOda]

Hello everyone as a brief introduction I am a long time SAM main since back in Stormblood (Taking breaks in Eden's Promise and recently Asphodelos) and although it is being discussed to death here on the forums and everywhere else I also felt compelled to give my thoughts in the form of a brief discussion on the changes, weighing them whilst giving my own opinions and feedback as that is what the devs want most. I will break down each section with what I believe are the positives and negatives, the perceived intent, and my own opinions. I also want to preface, this does not come from someone claiming to have mastered the job and knows all the answers, but someone who has enjoyed and loved playing it for years and hopes to keep doing so years into the future.

Hissatsu: Kaiten Removal:

Positives:
More able to freely press Hissatsu: Shinten without worrying about having the kenki for your Iaijustsu.
Easier to dump Kenki into burst windows without extra play-around kaiten.
More accessible to new players picking up the job for the first time.
One Less button to press

Negatives:
Less satisfaction in properly maintaining kenki for your midare/higanbana.
Loss of cool spinny sword animation.
No longer have play around kaiten that felt rewarding
Overall Job flow diminished

The removal of Kaiten has many confused and others thankful, it makes the job less involved to play albiet minorly, however this has a drastic impact on job feel. Although it is fun spamming Shinten and seeing that flood of numbers on the screen (like the good ol days back in Stormblood). it in my opinion feels far less rewarding than managing your resoures properly and knowing you had just the right amount of kenki for your burst. The moment-to-moment decision-making of holding kenki for a kaiten or unloading a Shinten is now gone, and although this is absolutely easier to play with it feels less interesting and less rewarding. Kaiten as a wind up also made each Iaijutsu cast FEEL more impactful as an ability. It felt as a SAM you were preparing to unleash a massive attack each time you used Kaiten. That feeling is now gone and makes each Iaijutsu cast feel less exciting than it once did. This also removes the possibility of pressing kaiten and accidentally using a weaponskil other than your Iaijutsu, and although that makes the job feel slightly less punishing and more playable it makes it far less rewarding/satisfying to execute.

[NohimeOda]

Midare Setsugekka/Ogi Namikiri Auto Crit:

Positives:
BIG NUMBER every time
Your highest potency abilities always feel like they hit hard
No longer need to worry about low-rolling these abilities

Negatives:
Job synergy with party buffs diminished
Less rewarding/satsifying to press in group play
Higanbana and Tenka Goken always feel like lesser Iaijusus

I fell in love with SAM all the way back in the day the moment I first built my three Sen and pressed Midare Setsugekka. It is without a doubt in my mind one of the most satisfying buttons to press in all of FFXIV and was always an incredible pay off to the long combo strings necessary to build it. The new change to make it and Ogi Namikiri Auto-Crit is a double-edged katana however. Each Midare still feels impactful however it is noticeably less exciting. Crit-Direct Hits still feel exciting but with one-half of that always being guaranteed it just feels lesser. One could argue that in the past fishing for crits on midare and Ogi Namikiri were annoying but you were able to mitigate that with the help of party synergy via buffs which is now also taken away from this change. Although SAM is a selfish DPS in the past coordinating with your team to synergize with buffs always felt incredible. However due to this change the crit chance buffs from a DRG Battle Litany, SCH Chain Strategem, DNC Devilment are now wasted on Midare and Ogi. Making most of the synergistic payoff of SAM null. Midare and Ogi are still fun buttons to press but now the group play payoff that made these buttons fun (and Kaiten included) are no longer there and I just can't help but feel bad that I am not longer synergizing as I once was. Making the most selfish job in the game even more selfish feeling.

As an important additional note to expand upon the auto-crit in Midare now inversely makes Higanbana and Tenka feel worse to press UNLESS they also crit. In the past, if your Iaijustus did not crit it was just the name of the game, but now that one always will it makes the other two feel like lesser buttons even if their output performance-wise is on par.

(Note: One thing I did not mention in my above comments on the Auto-crit Midare and Ogi section was the statement in the Live Letter "To resolve issues with widely fluctuating DPS with Critical hits." That is because although important, this conversation goes beyond the scope of just SAM. Any Job with large Potency pay off buttons or burst is going to suffer from this. Off the top of my head, WAR with Inner Chaos and Primal Rend. GNB with Double Down and WHM new Afflatus: Misery pot upgrade will feel this. To adress this problem they may have to rework Crit as a substat, or make all similar abilities auto crit as the trend continues, or change the crit chance buffs to crit damage buffs. But these would also add their own headaches. I honestly do not have the answers to this)

[NohimeOda]

Button Bloat:

It was noted that the removal of Kaiten was to address SAM button bloat so I wanted to discuss this issue for a moment as well. With the structure of SAM having 3 different combo strings to build their individual Sens SAM has always felt like it just had more buttons to press, even if that was not necessarily the case compared to some other jobs, NIN, in my opinion, has felt way more bloated than SAM. Although I personally felt fine with the 6.0 kit, Kaiten included if the dev team wants to cut down I feel there were better options than Kaiten that would not interuppt or diminish the flow of the job. I will list my own examples that many of you have no doubt already heard of or thought about.

Shoha/Shoha II
- Shoha II exists almost solely for dungeon trash pulls and simply upgrading shoha into shoha II at lvl 82 would cut down on a button. You would just have to either increase the potency to compensate or make it do extra pot against single targets (which has been seen in the recent pvp update with the pvp version of Ogi Namikiri doing extra pot against single targets)

Ikishoten/Ogi Namikiri
- Ikishoten servers at level 90 to grant kenki and also make you Ogi Namikiri ready for 30 seconds. However the CD on Ikishoten is 120 seconds. Instead of it being a grayed-out button for 120 seconds why not change it to Ogi Namikiri and then Kaeshi Namikiri as it they will long be finished by the time Ikishoten comes off of CD.

Hissatsu: Senei/Hissatsu: Guren
- Senei and Guren are similar to Shoha and Shoha II . Gurren is AOE whilst Senei is single target. Guren after EW also is only a gain on 3+ targets over Senei which makes it largely unused outside of dungeon mobs or niche boss encounter add phases. I would personally combine the two mayhaps giving Senei a cleave combining the two animations.

Hissatsu: Shinten/Hissatsu: Kyuten
- Kyuten serves as the dungeon mob pack equivalent of Shinten, a low-cost, spammable kenki spender, and although I personally think these two should remain seperate as they are easily usable spenders and not major CDs like the above. I felt it should be at least mentioned as its another case of overlapping single target and multi-target buttons.

[NohimeOda]

Conclusions:

It has been less than a week since 6.1 launch and some may say what I am experiencing now are the growing pains of change and that perhaps in a couple of months time I will feel perfectly content with these changes. But as someone who has loved SAM from moment one of touching it, the new changes confuse me as the flow and feel of SAM has been changed significantly with the removal of Kaiten. And although Midare and Ogi now always crit, the job just feels... worse to play on a fundamental level. Both in solo and in group gameplay settings. And I personally doubt these feelings will just go away with time. At the moment Shinten spam for me does not fill the hole left by Kaiten's removal and I hope to see it brought back in the future. I also hope they revert the auto crits on midare and ogi (and for that matter take it off WAR too), so I won't feel bad joining groups with a DRG, SCH, or DNC. I fully understand the well intentions of the dev team with these changes to make SAM more accessible and more consistent but ultimately I strongly disagree with them and hope to see SAM restored in the future.

Thank you all for taking the time to read my thoughts and opinions I hope you have a wonderful day!

[Theodric_Thorne]

I think it's important to note that "BIG NUMBER" is not necessarily a positive in the face of the potency nerfs. Midare/Namikiri used to feel like huge abilities because they were, they had significantly higher potencies than the combos that set them up to be used. Since they've flattened out the damage spikes in the rotation, the "finishing moves" (Midare/Namikiri/Shoha/Guren/Senei) no longer feel meaningful or give you something to look forward to at the apex of your rotation, aside from flashy animations. If the flashiest attack animations in your kit aren't putting up the biggest spikes of damage, they feel superfluous. I've had my ST combos end on a direct crit that did roughly equal or greater damage than the guaranteed crit on a single Midare.

[YukiB]

I think it's important to note that "BIG NUMBER" is not necessarily a positive in the face of the potency nerfs. Midare/Namikiri used to feel like huge abilities because they were, they had significantly higher potencies than the combos that set them up to be used. Since they've flattened out the damage spikes in the rotation, the "finishing moves" (Midare/Namikiri/Shoha/Guren/Senei) no longer feel meaningful or give you something to look forward to at the apex of your rotation, aside from flashy animations. If the flashiest attack animations in your kit aren't putting up the biggest spikes of damage, they feel superfluous. I've had my ST combos end on a direct crit that did roughly equal or greater damage than the guaranteed crit on a single Midare.

Yes, this is important to remember. The BIG NUMBER is smaller than the old number, even when the old number didn't crit. It's misleading to say there's a big number every time, or the big attacks always hit hard now. They don't hit as hard as they used to, even in a worst case scenario. The only damage that went up is the combo, and we get to use more Shinten (yay...)

Other than that I agree with most of the OP. My only other suggestion would be regarding Senei and Guren. While I'm in favor of combining the buttons, my preferred solution would be to have Ikishoten also turn Shinten/Kyuten into Senei/Guren for one use. That saves two buttons instead of one, prevents cooldown drift, and we get to keep both skills intact. Edweena has a great thread with a visual aid: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...uren-and-Senei

[NohimeOda]

Just to clarify slightly and I agree with you! By "BIG NUMBER" I was referring to the feeling of getting a nice crit on your midare. The actual number being bigger/smaller than it used to be is not necessarily relevant to that feeling of crit-ing a midare.

[CelestiCer]

I do not buy the excuse of " Action/Button Bloat " warranting 6.1 changes.

IDK anyone who complained SAM being busy/unplayable/unbearably complex to validate these 6.1 changes. We're mocked often as " an easy class ". The only way to cope with how I view current 6.1-SAM? is that we're somehow atm setup for more changes.

That is the 2nd excuse I do not buy, because we're left with an unfinished Class. Half a Product, due to them breaking something that didn't require fixing and giving it to us during new Expansion content.

Kaiten was meaningful, and probably the last thing on the chopping block because it was so core to our class. They could have removed/fused so many other buttons and skills before Kaiten. They could have made Kaiten provide guaranteed crits on Iaijatusu Skills an OgiNamikiri (yes Tenka Goken inlcuded) instead of what they did now.

Anyone who even wants to argue that any of this fixes action bloat? well it does not. We feel it doesn't because we fill it with Gyoten and Shinten but if anyone is into numbers? -> https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...oat-on-Samurai <- read this link to go in-depth on why it doesn't because TLDR: there is no Action Bloat issue. There only is one? if you do agree that our current weaving skills need to be replaced with something new or removed entirely.

There are soo many questionable decisions... that it is beyond any reasonable logic. But hey? at least they responded to the Housing Fiasco asap cause that's of course A LOT more important then even addressing any of our voiced concerns on our classes.

[Faulko]

The actual number being bigger/smaller than it used to be is not necessarily relevant to that feeling of crit-ing a midare.

Hard disagree on this, the actual number is very relevant, in fact it’s probably the biggest problem people have with the changes.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a guaranteed crit, when you go from doing 50-60k midare crits to barely breaking 20k, and even worse, seeing your gekko and kasha crit for the same or even more damage than midare, no amount of guaranteed crits will make that number feel big. What’s the point of even having midare as an iaijutsu? You spend 8gcds for your STAPLE ability to barely be stronger than your 3 gcd basic combo?
It’s beyond stupid, and I would argue indefensible.

[NohimeOda]

I agree with you in general. In my original post, I was only referring to the feeling of crit-ing in an admittedly obscure way.