Thread: 6.11 SAM is still no good

Back again for the third time to calmly state that SAM is bad. At this point I HAVE stopped playing it while I move on to RPR for 90s content.

Kaiten is not optional. The job gauge has been gutted and serves no purpose. I press shinten when it lights up. If I'm feeling fancy, maybe I put the gauge on my screen for an EX for backstep and gapcloser greed. That's the only other use for it, and it's situational at best.

So let's simplify this down a bit:

Kaiten is mandatory. For job complexity, for individuality, for satisfaction; every button in the game is pointless. They exist exclusively to make you happy when you press them. If they did not, we would have 0 buttons and be blocks slapping a cardboard cutout of an FF villain for content. Buttons only exist to make the player happy. This is the point of the game. Kaiten makes people happy. It's removed. People are unhappy.

APM is not a thing. Mind-blowing factoid, here: I just press shinten instead of kaiten. I'm still pressing the same amount of buttons. In fact I'm pressing more in smaller windows, because now I have no reason to save-to-45 for kaiten usage. I mash shinten on light-up. Button presses are frontloaded into every burst window. Mashing shinten is not enjoyable. The animation for it sucks besides.

Make kaiten only affect select skills. The developers say it's hard to design future skills with kaiten. Sure; then just make kaiten only apply to, for example, iaijutsu and oga namikiri, currently. Then if you've got another you want to kaiten-buff, add that to the list. If not, don't. You control what buttons kaiten can effect.

For god's sake, squish our aoe and single target variants together. Shinten-kyuten, iai-tsubame, shoha-shoha2, guren-senei. Put iki and ogi together too. If tsubame having charges you need to keep track of is the issue, then have a ui element for tsubame timer; or just don't squish them. There's four other buttons here we don't need. This isn't even, like, a "reduce button bloat" issue I just actually want you people to drop these buttons. Maybe it'll give us a kenki-spender animation I actually like. Where's our cool aoe-higanbana style attack where we slice all around us in the blink of an eye?

Mandatory section about job damage. You've thoroughly gutted Samurai in raid comp. My static will yell at me for bringing it anyway. If you wanted to change crit buffs, the least you could have done is saved these changes to samurai for when they are in the game instead of bodying my DPS for no return and a vague promise for 6.2 changing crit buffs or something. The only promise I want for 6.2 is a reversion to 6.08. The varying, high damage is what makes the job fun for people. For me, just pressing kaiten was enough; but the nat crit ogi was pretty good too.

Personally I don’t believe their given reason that it was for button bloat. I simply can’t because there are other classes who have it far worse with that (like Dragoon).

The damage is the biggest issue with me. They nerfed it SO MUCH that its finishers are close to half its normal power. They didn’t even reduce the cooldowns in Namikiri!

If they are too stubborn and keep some of the changes, such as removing Kaiten, these are some of the things they must do to make it reliable again.

1 increase the potency to over a 1000 for finishers.
-the finishers are barely worth doing now, especially Namikiri, which still has the increased cooldown it got when Endwalker came out. They do about half of what they normally do for me. For example, Namikiri could have done a total of 120k if both slashes crit and the first had Kaiten on it. That makes it very viable and worth the two minute long cooldown. Now it barely does 60k, sometimes more depending. The tiny increase to the potency in the last patch doesn’t really help. So if its potency is at least 1000 (at least Namikiri, I don’t remember the original potency of the first finisher that uses the three symbols. I think it was over 800?), and always crit, then it would make up for Kaiten being gone.

- the tiny increase to most of the attacks in 6.1 don’t mean anything in the long run. It adds maybe 2% more damage? A little more? Some did get decreased as well by more than 20 though.

2 If the devs refuse to increase the power by that much, then DECREASE THE COOLDOWN of Namikiri.

-It’s power does not warrant the huge cooldown on it. It already increased from 60 seconds to 120 in Endwalker, but that was because the ability used before it to trigger it would give players 50 points in their gauges as well as the slashes.

3 If the devs are worried about players gaining too much gauge over time, REMOVE THE REQUIREMENT TO USE IT before Namikiri.

-That way, players won’t gain 50 points in their gauges every 60 seconds and they can more easily use the ability. And then the cooldown can be more easily added to it.


At least one of those three has to be done to make Samurai more viable again. That’s not even going into the changes needed for the original finisher and the double slash after it (god, it feels so unsatisfying to use now!).

Because all in all, other classes can outperform it. I’ve seen the numbers myself when I use the two classes. Such as Reaper doing more than 25% more damage with each slash (yes I know it’s slower to make up for it, but it’s only about 10% slower. With the difference in power that slower attack didn’t subtract much), and it’s transformation FAR outperforms Namikiri in every way, with how often it can be used and how much damage it does. I can easily use it about five times in two minutes in a boss battle, give or take depending if it’s a dungeon and I could charge up my gauges before reaching the boss. If not then easily three times in two minutes.

I just realized my comment has smilies after the numbers and I can’t edit it to remove them. XD

Originally Posted by Ryaz

Button bloat is definitely the most minor reason. It was done to help even out the unpredictable burst windows and help make stats other than crit be more viable (ie, like. Speed Sam). Yoshi-P mentioned he's aware of the critical meta being an issue, but they need to make some fundamental changes to fix it.

Though I'm still wondering why they moved the burst potency to the basic combos... I can only think its to make things more forgiving if you miss your burst somehow.

I agree it wasn't about button bloat and they made midare and such a guaranteed crit+dh to "help" the crit meta. But i can't help but feel they removed kaiten from SAM either because either they thought id be too difficult to adjust midare base potency to account for the crit+dh change with kaiten or because they continue to dumb down jobs and lower the skill floor again. Apparently it was too hard to make sure to have enough gauge to use kaiten properly.

Originally Posted by Kniteroad

[...]But i can't help but feel they removed kaiten from SAM either because either they thought id be too difficult[...]

Same feeling here.
Button bloat?
Take "Kaeshi: Higanbana"

Originally Posted by Ryion

Same feeling here.
Button bloat?
Take "Kaeshi: Higanbana"

Honestly there were several better ways to reduce button bloat than removing Kaiten. Roll the Kaeshi abilities onto the same button as Iajutsu as it can only be used after another Iajutsu anyway. That's one button gone there. Make Shoha 2 an upgrade that adds an AoE component with a 50% drop off after the first target. That's another.

I would have preferred for them to add the crit to the abilities and maybe nerf Kaiten's damage bonus instead, keeping the feel of the class without making it completely overpowered.

Originally Posted by Kniteroad

I agree it wasn't about button bloat and they made midare and such a guaranteed crit+dh to "help" the crit meta. But i can't help but feel they removed kaiten from SAM either because either they thought id be too difficult to adjust midare base potency to account for the crit+dh change with kaiten or because they continue to dumb down jobs and lower the skill floor again. Apparently it was too hard to make sure to have enough gauge to use kaiten properly.

It is not a direct hit. It is only crit. SAM is not WAR. If it was a direct crit, I don't think the majority of players would've called their finishers a wet noodle the instant they got their hands on the altered job.

Originally Posted by xAFROx

It is not a direct hit. It is only crit. SAM is not WAR. If it was a direct crit, I don't think the majority of players would've called their finishers a wet noodle the instant they got their hands on the altered job.

Ok i may have misspoke but that's kind of beside the point. They're still dumbing down jobs and SAM is just the latest in the line of jobs that feel like a shell of what they were.

I too also stopped playing Sam and moved onto Reaper , sometimes dragoon and Monk (just got it to 90 last night and loving it lol) . Im surprised there’s still some Sam players i’ve ran into during roulettes.
Rip Kaiten 2022