Thread: 6.1 SAM Changes: A Discussion/Response

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.

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!