Thread: Compiled SAM threads against 6.1 changes / Kaiten removal

Kaiten had a weird animation that didn't suit the job fantasy and didn't feel good enough in use. Hot take sure, but I think people just love to complain.

If anything we should have less kenki generation to compensate for the lack of kaiten. Should only have to use kenki spenders after iaijutsu. Feels weird to have to weave them in mid-rotation at arbitrary moments. Way too easy to pool too much kenki, especially with ikishoten.

They should buff kenki spender damage to make the buttons feel more meaningful, and reduce kenki generation in my opinion. This would make hitting positionals feel more rewarding too because it could actually take effort to build kenki if they tuned it right.

The animation of guren is also outdated and should be replaced with a flashy heavy radial. It both looks and feels janky to have a linear aoe on samurai. Always has, always will.

I hope they never change ogi namikiri from being conal because it feels perfect, and I hope they never remove positionals. I wouldn't mind ogi namikiri being added to ikishoten at all though. Button bloat is becoming very real and if we're getting more abilities in 7.0, it's going to be even worse. It's important for us to let square enix trim the fat so that we can get more meaningful abilities added. Kaiten is a perfect example of that, and there are at least a few more things they could and should do.

edit: After playing more since taking a long break, I feel that these changes should happen to remove bloat from the job:

1: Remove ikishoten and just make ogi namikiri a 120 second cooldown with no prerequisite action. We get too much kenki for ikishoten to feel anything but clunky. It also shares the same problem kaiten did with having a weird animation that doesn't suit the job fantasy. Flashy flourish animations are not part of the samurai mentality. Samurai should be more purposeful and zen-like.

2: Reduce kenki generation and increase potency of shinten so it feels like a significant ability instead of a chore to keep on top of.

3: Remove hissatsu guren and turn senai into a conal aoe. As I already said, the linear aoe animation of guren looks and feels clunky to use. There's no reason to have that button in the toolkit anymore. It is not a satisfying expression of skill. It is just an over the top anime trope ability. Samurai does not need that energy.

4: Remove shoha 2 and make shoha behave the same as senai would after my proposed merging, only radial instead as the current animation suggests.

5: Tie tsubame-gaeshi into the iaijutsu button. This will add expression of skill to a very minor and satisfying degree that suits the job fantasy perfectly. If you are mashing iaijutsu for higanbana, it will waste a charge of tsubame. If you press it deliberately for higanbana you will avoid wasting the charge, and then for tsubame midare it will make the iaijutsu button feel extremely weighty and impactful to mash.

Those changes would make the job essentially perfect in my opinion. It would open up enough button real estate to add the aoe version of yukikaze that was featured in the endwalker job actions preview, with a conal aoe bleed iaijutsu on top of it. That could be our addition for dawntrail and then the job would actually need nothing else ever again.

Hissatsu: Kaiten was probably the only thing that kept it balanced in case there were no party members with party wide crit buffs, and there is a lot of jobs that do not have party wide crit buffs, something the devs CLEARLY forgot about when the removed it... yes Samurai DPS feels VERY bad without Hissatsu: Kaiten, and Hissatsu: Shinten spam is not putting out the damage, because Kaiten boosted potency of 1 skill by 50% which is a LOT depending on the skill, more so with Higanbana because it's a DoT, though I don't actually remember if Hissatsu: Kaiten also affected DoT damage, so that could have been a placebo effect...

Edit: I remembered correctly on Higanbana DoT damage.