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.