I've been raiding since Eden's Verse, where I started as Red Mage. When Eden's Promise came out I was asked to switch to a Melee DPS due to the static gaining/losing people, as we got a new red mage in and they were better geared. That's when I picked up Samurai and my friend began to mentor me in the class. I soon grew to love it more than I already did (it was my main melee class I'd play whenever I didn't feel like casting) and mained it ever since. When Pandaemonium Savage came out I was thrilled to jump in when I was told P1S essentially had 100% uptime. I pretty much got to never worry and just do the sole utility Samurai had: DAMAGE. I was having fun chasing a 50k Midare/Ogi Namaki, since I'm not BIS, seeing that floating number go up.

That's where 6.1 comes in, and my feedback.

Hearing I was losing kaiten, I was not doom and gloom. Losing Kaiten was something I knew I could get past eventually. The stutter in my rotation I'd fix and such. The issue became the class fantasy of winding up for this huge massive hit was absolutely taken away, not by Kaiten's removal, but by the frankly overzealous nerfing of Midare and Ogi's potencies. The loss of Kaiten did hit the flow and fantasy of Samurai, but it was the nerfing of Midare and Ogi and putting that damage on Gekko, Kasha, and Yukikaze that led me to start gearing up Dancer for my static.

I was doing 30-35k midares a go, seeing those huge numbers floating gave me a lot of joy. Stuttering my rotation, delaying something to make trick attack, chasing that 50k as we got better at P1S (we raid once a week so our prog is very slow) and trying to smooth myself out and be better gave me a sense of accomplishment. Sure, my parses were green, but they kept getting higher and higher greens. That's progress and I enjoyed it.

6.1 rolled around. I did the new dungeon and that's where my worries came to pass. Auto-Crit was what I hoped would balance the numbers so I'd do the same, as the Chief Napkin Mathers said it would. And sure, the numbers MIGHT say we're barely doing less damage.

Every midare hit for 20k. Every ogi namakiri hit for 20k. I hit maybe one 23k Midare. I once hit a 19.4k Ogi Namakiri. I went into Aglaia as Samurai and hit a 35k Midare thanks to dance partner during Byregot. Fantastic. None of my Ogi's got that close. I barely did close to 30k with Ogi Namakiri and Midare now.

When I hit a 34k Technical Step at level 88, as Dancer, in Kitesis. that solidified how bad my main felt. That's my midare numbers. My ogis. I couldn't even hit that as a level 90 Samurai.

The anecdotal type feedback above is meant to illustrate how I feel about the job now, and how it's fun as been ruined for me by not feeling like my big wind up casting attacks do literally anything.

Automatic Critical Hits mean absolutely nothing if the attack itself does not have the potency to back it up.

Midare and Ogi hit like soggy spaghetti. The automatic critical hits do not bring those abilities back up. The damage that was spread out to our base combos of Gekko, Kasha, and Yukikaze might bring us up towards our old numbers but that's compounding the issue: Hitting a 10k Gekko, seeing that floating crit go up, and then my midare crits for 20k? That just feels so bad. Our big hits, that we have to build up for, that have a cast time, barely do more than my base combo in the end? Even if it's always been somewhat balanced towards that, it never FELT like that.

The job doesn't feel fun. It might not be nerfed numbers wise, but it has been nerfed fantasy wise. By nerfing Midare and Ogi's potencies so drastically, the job does not feel like it does damage even if it does. Those attacks always felt like I'm ending a mob's entire existence.

Please, revert the changes. Hell, just give our hits way more potency. We lost Kaiten, and instead of gaining that damage elsewhere we outright lost it and even more with the nerfs to Midare and Ogi. Visually, looking at the patch notes, it was a nerf. In practice, playing Samurai in the new content, it was a nerf. To our morale, it was a huge nerf. Numbers can say we do the same damage over the fight, but to me, the numbers on spreadsheets don't matter.

I can move on from Kaiten. I can't move on from my auto-crits doing less than my uncrited base attacks pre-patch.

Don't really care if people respond. I just wanted to add my voice to the chorus, in hopes they do something sooner, rather than 4 months down the line in 6.2, where all us Samurai mains are just in PVP because, somehow, PVP Samurai is more fun than PVE samurai.