Compiled SAM threads against 6.1 changes / Kaiten removal

[cjbeagle]

Was Kaiten Important?

Yes, and since you're apparently too lazy to read the threads, I'll summarize it for you in this one:

- Without Kaiten, kenki management is no longer necessary at all, which dumbs-down the gameplay.
- Without Kaiten, the choice of how to spend kenki no longer exists, which dumbs-down the gameplay.
- Without Kaiten, the choice of when to spend kenki no longer matters, which dumbs-down the gameplay.
- Without Kaiten, Iaijutsu and Ogi Namikiri hit for drastically less than they used to, which makes the job's entire kit feel flat and unsatisfying, and also makes burst windows far less important, which dumbs-down the gameplay.

Also, many players care about the animation and/or audio flourish that Kaiten provided to herald an incoming massive hit - more of a nuanced point, but worth noting.
Also, though many players would probably not notice it consciously, the RDM style action-action-wait- that Kaiten + Iaijutsu [cast] is/was important to feel - again, more of a nuanced point, but worth noting.

I disbelieve you, because NO ONE was talking about how integral it was to the samurai feel until the change was announced.

People don't tend to start threads about things that are working perfectly fine as-is. Are there discussions about how important Dualcast is for RDM? Or do people take it for granted? But if they decided to remove it, you can be certain there would be outrage.

You clearly don't appreciate how important Kaiten was, yet continue to weigh in on various threads as if you're going to change the minds of samurai mains.

I'm saying Kaiten isn't what you're really having a problem with.

You obviously have no idea what people have a problem with - the nuances of our complaints escape you - how about you stop trying to tell people what they think.

[KurenXIV]

Was Kaiten Important? I disbelieve you, because NO ONE was talking about how integral it was to the samurai feel until the change was announced. NO ONE was saying that in the 4 years before Endwalker, they were saying that it existed as a mandatory button press before Iaijutsu and that's it. Because that IS what it was. It wasn't anything more.

This take is so ridiculous I have to assume it's a troll, but I'll indulge you for a moment.

Do you, as a Red Mage Main, post on the forums about all the aspects of the job that work right on a consistent basis?

No one brought up Kaiten in 4 years because SAM was seen AS PERFECTLY FINE as evident by the iterations we got for each expac and from the lack of outcry of SAM players at large. That's not to say there wasn't room for improvement but at its core players were happy.

The developers fucked up, full stop. SAMs gameplay was largely lauded as being as close to perfect as you can get (in terms of job flow and feel).

IF SE really knew about this issue they should have changed Samurai in a meaningful way AT THE LAUNCH OF ENDWALKER.

Additionally why did they give us a lvl 90 ability which is literally the most extreme version of the abilities they now say they have a problem with? (long cool down, super hard hitting abilities that vary wildly based on crit).

SE either had no idea this was a problem until just now or it was along standing issue they chose not to bring up ever . . . both of which aren't good looks for them.

And really, what's at issue here? SAMs never ever had issues clearing content or pulling in good DPS. Is it that Ultimates were causing issues? Well good news, NO GROUP IS RUNNING SAM TO CLEAR ULTIMATES.

Having a job that's built around big hits isn't an issue. If variance is an issue then give kaiten a buff to crit change. If crits are an issue . . . well maybe there's a fundamental issue in how encounters are designed.

Lastly, you bring up the burst as if its a bad thing or was something the devs were targeting. Samurai isn't the issue they are trying to stop. They wanted more consistent damage to make their balancing easier which is just another way of saying they want to be lazy about it.

If they DON'T want to have bursting, hard hitting jobs then they need to replace SAMs kit with something fun and meaningful. The whole kit was designed around the concept of build up + big hits to give a very rewarding gameplay loop. If you just rip out parts of it you get what we have now: pissed off players.

It isn't our job to provide feedback on how to fix changes they just dropped on us, it's THEIR job to figure out how to make jobs fun and engaging.

It's simple: bring Samurai back to how it was in 6.08, then for 7.0 do a full revamp to fit the needs of SE.

[Quor]

If they brought Kaiten back, they'd set the potency at under 400 for Midare Setsugekka because they're NOT going to revert the degenerate burst. Because it's degenerate, in the same ways and same reasons old Disembowl was. Just as no dragoon is reasonable in asking for the piercing debuff back, no samurai is going to be reasonable in expecting the 1000+ potency crit midares back. It's not going to happen, and wanting it back won't make it so, because it's necessary for the balance of the roles around Samurai.

Much simpler and easier for them to reduce the potency granted by Kaiten than to gut the moves AND remove Kaiten. They chose class destruction over something more refined because Kaiten was "restricting" them. Which is BS reasoning if I've ever heard it.

Now you can make the argument that Samurai doesn't do enough damage to justify its selfishness, and if that's the case, make that your argument, and look for ways to accomplish this without the burst.

We've been doing this. Where have you been? Have you just ignored all of the discussion that's occurred about that in the past 3+weeks?

But they're not gonna bring the old MSG back. They'll adjust potencies a bit, they'll tweak it, but you're not getting 1000+ potency MSG back. So, is Kaiten that important to you that you'd be willing to take the gutting of MSG potency to get it back?

I would really like to see how and why you're so confident that changes won't be reverted. Are you privy to some sort of internal discussions at SE? No? Then your baseless speculation is more worthless than any suggestion SAM's have made about rolling changes back, because there is at least some historical proof to suggest that SE can and will roll back changes.

Was Kaiten Important? I disbelieve you, because NO ONE was talking about how integral it was to the samurai feel until the change was announced. NO ONE was saying that in the 4 years before Endwalker, they were saying that it existed as a mandatory button press before Iaijutsu and that's it. Because that IS what it was. It wasn't anything more.

This is just a terrible take, and again reeks of rank ignorance. Kaiten was absolutely talked about; any time a new SAM asked "so how do I SAM good?" we always said the same thing; Kaiten is your most powerful ppK Kenki spender but ONLY when used on Iaijutsu, so make sure you always have enough in the tank to use Kaiten. It was the entire reason behind why we had to manage Kenki. It was literally the basics of the basics, and anyone who played SAM even semi-seriously understood how important and core it was. That's why it was the first new ability a SAM would gain at 52. It tied the entire kit together. Just because it wasn't talked about constantly outside of when SAM was first released or when teaching a newbie doesn't mean that it wasn't important. By your argument, because DRG's don't talk about how important Jump is all the time then it should be fine to remove it, and that's a stupid argument to make. But after all, Jump is "just a button you push for damage" so why not just roll that damage into the GCD's to make the job "more accessible?"

Because if you did that it would kill the fun and thematics of the job and by extension the job itself. Like what has happened with SAM.

I'm not saying your feelings aren't valid. I'm saying Kaiten isn't what you're really having a problem with. I'm saying that you're not quite being honest with yourselves, because you know if they brought Kaiten back, your Iajutsu potencies would be gutted to do so. You know they're not going to put your old burst back. You know they had problems with it, and when they have problems like that, they don't go back on that.

I don't know a single SAM who wasn't at least open to the idea of Kaiten being removed provided we received something at least as engaging in compensation. They point behind Kaiten was a concrete actualization of the design direction that Yoshi P. and his team spoke of in the post-HW/pre-SB direction. Notably, they talked about how they liked the idea of "mini limit breaks" that a job would build towards. You see this idea ALL OVER Stormblood and Shadowbringers; RDM with their melee combo build-up; SAM with it's Iaijutsu; DRG with it's LotD phase; DNC with it's resource pooling and dump during TF; BRD with it's Pitch Perfect build-up; GNB with it's cartridge build-up and dump during NM. I could go on.

So what did SE do? They chose to release a part of a planned overarching job balance change, but the only part released was SAM and it also happened to remove the key thing SAM had that tied its resources together and required thought and planning to utilize correctly. As if this wasn't enough, they also gutted the "mini limit break" style they had talked about, and we've currently seen NOTHING to tell us what the new job design direction is supposed to be outside of "we'll remove abilities if we find them too restrictive to design around."

Had we received something at least as engaging as Kaiten in response then no, the loss of Kaiten wouldn't have been a big deal. But we got NOTHING. The class was dumbed down in an irreparable manner and the reasons given were spurious at best, constantly changing in such a way that it felt like the goal posts were being moved right before our eyes. Barring any kind of access to internal job design plans, no one could conceivably come up with anything to suggest as far as replacing Kaiten goes because Kaiten was simply such a core part that it cannot be replicated without simply restoring it. You could have a button that does the same thing that Kaiten does and call it Boop-a-Doop for all we care, but the point is there needs to be something that allows the player to engage with the job. Right now SAM is braindead because SE has made it braindead and it is 100% because of them removing Kaiten.

So, rather than try to complain and revert to that which is degenerate, instead, why not try to look at ways to improve things for you such that they are not?

Please do yourself and everyone who has to read your drivel a favor and explore any of the many threads that have discussed SAM issues since the LL first revealed that we would be losing Kaiten. We have been suggesting alternate things to do that would both preserve the job gameplay and flavor/theme of SAM while also allowing for Kaiten to remain, damage spike variance to be smoothed out, and button bloat to be reduced. We have received zero (0) feedback from the devs in any way except to say that Kaiten was "restricting" their ability to continue to design new stuff for the job and that part of the change was as a result of them gradually rolling out some planned changes that are in the works. Putting aside the rank idiocy of releasing something that is clearly unfinished and doesn't belong/have support in the game as it stands now, the fact is that their decisions have destroyed the fun in the job and replaced it with exactly nothing.

Here, I'll even do you a solid and provide the link to the post wherein Yoshi P. discusses the upcoming plans that they have been working on:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...-anymore/page5

post 47 and 48 by Quyn, reading as such:

If you read the latest Yoshi P translations, it paints a different picture :

"Of course there are times where I thought of just flip the table and not change anything...but still...yeah on SAM's guaranteed critical, having that will make SAM's performance jump really high but there are also parts where SAM doesn't see drastic jump as they should...and on Kaiten getting removed we did that because we want to do away having to be restricted by that move, and as for its sub stats, the influence of those stats as the patch moves on will become bigger and bigger and it'll jump the job's performance really high, more so than expected and in reverse the numbers on lesser patch will see the job not jumping as high as the job should....hmmmm...Indeed, it is true that the job's strength and weakness will depend on whether the job's amount of critical dealt and I agree the job relied on that aspect too much, and as for the strength and weakness...yeah that's what it is. I of course do understand that this is part of the fun for the job....and, as for this time, we saw specific actions determined the the composition of DPS and perhaps it leaned way too much so we let some of the weapon skill value loose and we know that if we just increase the potency of weapon skill it'll result in those skills at lower level being too strong, so we adjusted on those values as well by... please refer to the new traits added to SAM located below. So...yeah, this is the adjustments for the job we made for this patch.

And then, I am also well aware of how the critical synergy works well with jobs...and I'm definitely aware, but this is also the overall problem of FFXIV itself, and there are discussions where we should have change that itself to begin with. But we can't be doing everything simultaneously at once so please understand that we want to tackle on that gradually. We do experience cases where it's hard to adjust when a skill with and without critical can cause such a huge disparity...and so we performed this adjustment precisely we care about that so I apologize but I'd like you to please give it a try first."

Part 2


"However, as for opinions, Of course we do and indeed read those properly, including those that think it's not right to over standardise jobs or comments like "you overdo yourself when it comes to our only trait or the optimization elements we have". We do indeed want to push it for as much as we could, and we are very well aware of people who understand this, as well as people who are already used to what they have now and people who told us not to do anything unnecessary. We really get that but in order for the expansion to continue and for each jobs to continue getting new actions, and whenever we think of trying to maintain the individual characteristics of each job, we found out that this "optimization" is quite tied and connected to the irregular element that was created in the past, and if we don't work to address this we can no longer build upon the existing elements and improve things further, and it'll land us in a situation where we can no longer steer ourselves forward. (edited)

Still, I of course do acknowledge that there are parts where people did not ask for, like Ninja or Samurai..and regarding Samurai's guaranteed Critical, we indeed struggled a lot on the balance adjustments due to the strong ratio fluctuation here, and we really attempted to close the variance gap for as much as we could, and we know this is done for the sake of job balance so I really appreciate if you can understand what we're trying to achieve here. You can send us feedback from there and if the voices of how a job's identity has been taken away too much then these comments will act as a reference to the direction of job balance and improvements we'll be performing in the future. So please, if you do think it matters to you, do send us a feedback regarding the matter.

Well, of course I am very well aware and understand that players will feel lonely and their displeasure will get really big when certain elements of the job they played and got used to for quite a long while now gets changed or removed, so it's not like we're purposely looking away these comments with disapproval or something, but it'll definitely be much appreciated if you can tell us which part you want us to retain or tell us more on which aspects are more favorable to you after touching on the adjustments so that we can take your comment as reference, and from there we'll know where to draw the line. I'll repeat myself that we really did all these adjustments for the sake of player's enjoyment here so I'll be thankful if you all can understand this. (The rest omitted) "

Translations taken from https://discord.gg/ffxiv

[CelestiCer]

So, rather than try to complain and revert to that which is degenerate, instead, why not try to look at ways to improve things for you such that they are not?

Oh goodie another troll :O (cracks knuckles again) <3

1st, might I humbly thank you for responding to many SAM threads, while you missed over a 100 more SAM threads, I fully support your endeavor to bump every single one of them. We're very appreciative. NOW

Newsflash Not every Samurai or player are complaining solely about the following

• Potencies
• Performances
• Meta
• Numbers

I know shocker... there's like an entire other audience that enjoys Samurai for its

• Rotation
• Execution
• Aesthetics
• Kenki-Management
• Fantasy

Which Kaiten was a big part of regardless of it's potencies.

HOWEVER
Many value the fantasy of Samurai being a hard hitting Melee caster of which can definitely be achieved without Kaiten. It just so happened that Kaiten made that extremely fun, and you won't convince any of us that Kaiten is what stands in the way of balancing anything else outside of Samurai. Numbers can always be tweaked, gameplay changes a bit harder.

I am wondering... are you Salty? that, your job whilst completely viable Pre6.1 and Post6.1 to clear any content... you somehow aren't clearing something? Is that why you are venting on the Samurai threads? May I kindly ask after you called part of what we loved about our class design " Degenerate ", do you have trouble clearing anything? mayhap the current tier? I'll give you a hint, Kaiten removal and Samurai class design does not stand in the way of that. It won't burden you.

PS: I never actually thought of calling it MSG that way in just letters, but your posts have been quite " HaiYah!!! "

[FrogBiscuit]

If they brought Kaiten back....

Its like you are taking part in this discussion by simply speaking at people, rather then actually respond to what they are posting.

Not only have you continued to ignore points people are making about kaiten, but you are also coming from a inflexible but impossible to prove, position that SE is incapable of designing the game to take into account the SAM playstyle and that SE's original vision for the class is just a impossibility to achieve. (Not to even mention considering the idea that a middle ground can be achieved where 1000+ potency arn't necessarily a thing, but the SAM job is still able to maintain finishers that hit like someone would expect a 'finisher' to hit...

[FrogBiscuit]

Was Kaiten Important? I disbelieve you, because NO ONE was talking about how integral it was to the samurai feel until the change was announced. NO ONE was saying that in the 4 years before Endwalker, they were saying that it existed as a mandatory button press before Iaijutsu and that's it. Because that IS what it was. It wasn't anything more.

And to add... Why would they? Why would anyone raise a fuss about how important Kaiten was when there was no question in any of our minds that it was going to be removed?? How would that make any sense at all?

More accurately stated would be: How many people were complaining about Kaiten? Which would be effectively no one.


We didn't need to stress the importance of kaiten because there were no reason for its' removal in the first place and was a core part of the class game play, and the change hit us from left field...

Does it make any sense at all that SAM players would just endlessly lavish praise over the move when it was never in question in the first place? You are making conclusions based off of entirely unrelated/illogical factors...

We have a problem with BOTH kaiten being removed, and our high potency finishers. It isn't a problem of one thing or another. No one is getting mixed up, being dishonest with themselves, or otherwise here regarding kaiten, but you.

Kaiten's removal had a set of negative factors that many of us arn't happy about.
Potency removed from our finishers have another set of negative factors that many of us arn't happy about.

Its dishonest to try and conflate both issues (while certainly connected) with one another and suggest that people don't know what they are talking about, simply because you are straight up disregarding one full half of the discussion.

Two things can be true at the same time...

[Misa-Miko]

I Never find nothing wrong on samurai, I play it over the gamepad of xbox, On pc, I Always did my best, I always concern my % in dmg. All what i know it was flow, Pure And Angelic perfection, Which i love.
The removal of Kaiten hit me hard like a truck on the street after taking something to eat before going to school.

What i know now, is only a spammable Shinten, My hands just end up crying over it becoming numb of it.

Removing Kaiten really delete a part of the samurai, They find it obsolete? They find it bad, What i know they has better ways to deal with it and not remove Kaiten. This is the most Stupid mistake FF DEV And Yoshi, Did, I really am against being toxic or angry over the Dev, They are beutiful peoples, But this, is unacceptable.

I really wanna yell, Or insult the Dev to make them understand how much bad, Spoking for all peoples that have my same feeling towards Kaiten, My people, OUR Peoples, Us.

I really won't explain everyreason, Which everyone already did.
But know something dev, You did something that is over the most IDIOTIC UNBEARABLE INCONSISTENT OUTRAGEOUS And FOOLISH Decision you could ever made!

[SleeeeeeepySleeeeeeep]

Samurai burst was causing dancer and bard to become degenerate with respect to Machinist and that made balancing the ranged role very difficult for them. They explained that part of the reason for Samurai's rebalancing of power was because it was too much in terms of the raid-wide burst windows and that they wanted to take power outside the raidwide burst window.

So with that in mind, imagine if they brought Kaiten back the way it was.

That would mean to maintain their stated goal of rebalancing power outside job burst, the base potency for MSQ would have to be reduced to 427 w/ autocrit.

Now just think about that. Do you really love Kaiten? Is Kaiten the button you really want to fight to keep?

Or is it the 1000+ potency MSGs you really care about?

Legitimate question, and it'd be interesting to see your answers. But please understand--Kaiten back or not, MSG power is NOT coming back, and they need it that way for other roles to be balanced well.

I'm sorry, can we drop smoking bullshit SE is spinning?

First is button bloat. Then it's about "players' enjoyment" then about "job design being restrictive".

Now it's about "burst window".

Fuck off with excuses (at SE, not you). Seriously. It's literal garbage. Who was it that shoved 2 min raid wide buff align down everyone's throat? Oh. And now it's a problem for their balance. This whole "balance outside of burst window" is a complete nonargument which I'm not even going to bother getting into. Just critically think over that.

SE/YoshiP. Fuck off with your bullshit spinning. It's fucking pathetic.

Edit- Couldn't give less of a shit what potency midare setsugekka is (personally). If it's a power balance / nerf, I could not. give. less. shit.

[RushBee]

Was Kaiten Important? I disbelieve you, because NO ONE was talking about how integral it was to the samurai feel until the change was announced. NO ONE was saying that in the 4 years before Endwalker, they were saying that it existed as a mandatory button press before Iaijutsu and that's it. Because that IS what it was. It wasn't anything more.

I don't talk about how my legs are integral for my life because like Kaiten was, it has always been there and they were always enjoyable to use. However if you remove my legs just like you remove Kaiten, I'm going to notice how much worse my experience is.

[SleeeeeeepySleeeeeeep]

But know something dev, You did something that is over the most IDIOTIC UNBEARABLE INCONSISTENT OUTRAGEOUS And FOOLISH Decision you could ever made!

Oh and don't forget all the pathetic excuses they are spewing.

"Hurrrr button bloat"
"Hurrrr restrictive"
"Hurrrr burst window"

I think at this point, it's pretty obvious some dipshit high in management shove this in and is now doubling down so they don't lose face.