SAM players are quitting

[CelestiCer]

You have enough general play experience to look at a skill, how it's intended to be used, and make an assumption on it.
This is because the difference between the various jobs are not so steep that it prevents experience from one can quite easily translate to another.

Then you also know that by reading skills purely alone, it doesn't do justice as to what you can or cannot do in every single given situation on every single job in every single fight.

While jobs might not vary in steepness, I don't see the logic in advocating making it even more stale by removing any ounce of depth that many hold dear. The benefits or the enjoyment loss you suffer? from Kaiten Removal is so "Non-Existing", that defending it's removal? means so little, what is the argument point at that point for us not having it back when it means so much to Samurai mains.

This... notion of " Choice-less " to invalidate Kenki-management? The only way I can understand this if players view FFXIV's job rotations to be pre-destined, played like a perfectly scripted accordion for every fight. You cast Kaiten exactly at x time at x fight at x situation regardless of what happens? I mean I guess? but at that point doesn't that invalidate every bar, every gauge, every resource and even every cast anyone casts? If players perfectly adhere to a scripted list of skills they cast? <- Cause this is about the only way I can see that argument of there being no management of practically anything, then I agree yes.

But not everyone casts everything the same, not everyone performs the same... and that makes Kenki or any resource from any job fluctuate -> creating " Choice ". That choice to press different buttons that costs kenki? yes that's your choice to " Manage ". To knowingly cast Gekko and Kasha to generate enough for Kaiten + Midare and not trigger finger the Kenki away with Shinten yes that's a choice. To cast Kaiten and Ogi Namikiri and knowing you have enough cast time to do it as you move out of harms way or knowing you don't to delay it and not overcap your Kenki and use Shinten to manage it, that's a choice.

I don't even feel like I need to explain this... I genuinely believe I don't, not with you... but with plenty apparently I do... cause the only meme argument point they have is to invalidate all of these experiences that has become muscle memory for plenty of us into just " It's a button you press everytime "

[KanuKano]

It's been nearly a month since the recent changes and I've only touched it about 3 times total in PvE content. If they're still taking in feedback, I'd at least like for all the changes to be reverted.

Seeing the big numbers from guaranteed crit isn't as impressive as I thought it'd be. Tenka Goken being point blank AoE now doesn't feel good to me. Tenka being conal AoE was more intuitive, flashy, and made dungeon mob pulls more engaging.

I was sad to see Kaiten go, but I thought I'd be okay with the changes. It didn't really live up to my standards.

[Quor]

So, starting with Kenki - I think it'd actually be quite difficult to bottom out on Kenki that you can't use Kaiten and thus create meaningful management. It's a scenario that would take some active effort to do so, but I'll also admit that perhaps I think too highly of players in the game. Samurai is very close to having Paladin's "MP management", which is to say, they are given so much Kenki that not having the bare amounts to perform Kaiten requires quite a few conditionals that both the playerbase and the Developer team provide discouragement from achieving.

So an oft-overlooked aspect of the Kaiten argument, particularly here, is that Kasha and Gekko combos now generate a flat 20 Kenki regardless of positional. This was a small change that snuck in with the EW release and it didn't accrue much in the way of fanfare; after all, if you did things "correctly" then you would always have the maximum amount of Kenki available, yes?

Except this was simply another brick in the wall, although we didn't know it to be such at the time. Back when there was a variable amount of Kenki generated (50, 55 or 60 per full 8 GCD combo cycle) you had to factor this into the equation of your gameplay. You no longer were going to be guaranteed 60 Kenki per cycle. Yes, True North helped, and yes hitting the positionals themselves wasn't hard for the most part, but there were still fights that pushed you into bad spots occasionally where you would be forced to either eat 5-10 less Kenki gain or else alter your GCD flow (such as by using a Yuki+Haga GCD shift at an earlier time than you normally would).

At the time that the positional requirements got shifted from increased Kenki gain to the current state of boosted potency and a flat 10 Kenki, well, it didn't make much of a difference. Because, again, it was easy enough to rationalize "well you should always be hitting your positionals" as an excuse. Now, with the removal of Kaiten - and with the context of the apparent future of job design in this game - it's clear that the Kasha/Gekko changes weren't simply a pure "accessibility" change, but rather were the first step to the ultimate destruction of Kenki as a resource to be managed. You've no doubt seen the many comments now about how Kenki is functionally useless. Many people have rightly referred to Kenki as the Shinten Gauge now, while weaving Gyoten into the opener and sometimes even the burst window is now considered optimal due to the loss of Kaiten and the ppK nerfs Shinten received.

All of this ties into the "PLD" MP management comparison you made. But that isn't a justification for removing Kaiten or otherwise keeping the current changes; it's a justification for reverting the changes and bringing back Kenki management as a real aspect of the job, up to and including the reversion of Kasha and Gekko Kenki positional gains and the cost reduction on Senei/Guren. As it stands now, yes, Kaiten was much more braindead than it was in ShB and SB, but it still did at least require at least one brain cell to use correctly. The reason why it was so braindead was because SE changed things to make it more braindead. Whereas before you had to always keep one eye on your Kenki gauge and make on-the-fly decisions based on how a fight went (icicles in E12s, Emerald Weapon/Ruby Weapon EX's, SoS EX 5 elements, Light Rampant in E8s, to name a few) SE removed a big chunk of that with the 6.0 change. Then they removed what was left of it with 6.1.

Sure, a new player can probably pick up SAM 6.1 and play it and notice any problems, but you can make a comparison there about a lot of things. I can go to McDonald's and get a Big Mac, and while it'll satisfy my hunger it's nowhere near as good as a nice AAA grade Angus burger cooked over an open flame. SAM could be so much better. It WAS so much better. Making excuses for the current state of SAM isn't the way to go; this needs to be a moment of sea change. This needs to be the point where the players say to the devs that "easy" design for them shouldn't be the governing principle. Of course as time goes by there will be problems with iterating on jobs but that's not a reason to gut something that was fun, engaging and performed perfectly fine! Laziness is never an excuse, and I call out as much in a post I made here:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ZY.-Here-s-why

Point being there are so many people, new posters to the forums, who have never posted here before, and they are pissed about the changes. JP has had more feedback and forum activity in the past month regarding this change (and many 6.1 changes in general) than they had in the entirety of 4.0 to 6.0. This can be a turning point where we, as the players, tell the devs that not only were the 6.1 changes bad but that the general direction of job balance needs to be changed too. Not just for SAM, not just for NIN, but for MCH and SMN and tanks and healers too. I have no delusions about some kind of magical Heavensward revival or something, but the solution for a player who wants engaging gameplay should not be "go play ultimate." Perhaps that quote was taken out of context but the core gist of what underlies it still remains; jobs need to be engaging in-and-of themselves regardless of the difficulty behind any content you're doing. A player shouldn't need to seek out harder fights to feel engaged by their job as the jobs should be engaging enough at a core level.

[AsiTsurugi]

It's been nearly a month since the recent changes and I've only touched it about 3 times total in PvE content. If they're still taking in feedback, I'd at least like for all the changes to be reverted.

Seeing the big numbers from guaranteed crit isn't as impressive as I thought it'd be. Tenka Goken being point blank AoE now doesn't feel good to me. Tenka being conal AoE was more intuitive, flashy, and made dungeon mob pulls more engaging.

I was sad to see Kaiten go, but I thought I'd be okay with the changes. It didn't really live up to my standards.

On the topic of guaranteed crits, setting aside for a minute the obviously enormous anti-synergy it brings to a buff-utilizing job like SAM, our current Midare guaranteed crits are as low as what they hit for pre-6.1 with no crit or direct hit. A post-6.1 CDH Midare hits for 10-12k less than a pre-6.1 CDH Midare. And combo finishers hit for minutely less than this "big skill we build towards". There is no "big skill" at the end of the loop, it's just another insipid nothing. Not to mention the rewarding feedback loop in the form of kaiten weaving, and the conal Tenka Goken that was a ton of fun to play around with are both missing.

None of us care that SAM does the same or slightly more "overall dps" as before. The feel of the job has been gutted intentionally, surgically and without any explanation, and I think the lack of explanation is what irks a lot of us.

EDIT: Like Quor above pointed, we need the "kenki generation from positionals" back as well. I had actually forgotten that happened during 6.0, so thank you for the reminder.

[butchersblock]

Snip

Excellently put, couldn't have said it better. Fully agreed on everything you detailed in your reply.

[Quor]

On the topic of guaranteed crits, setting aside for a minute the obviously enormous anti-synergy it brings to a buff-utilizing job like SAM, our current Midare guaranteed crits are as low as what they hit for pre-6.1 with no crit or direct hit. A post-6.1 CDH Midare hits for 10-12k less than a pre-6.1 CDH Midare. And combo finishers hit for minutely less than this "big skill we build towards". There is no "big skill" at the end of the loop, it's just another insipid nothing. Not to mention the rewarding feedback loop in the form of kaiten weaving, and the conal Tenka Goken that was a ton of fun to play around with are both missing.

None of us care that SAM does the same or slightly more "overall dps" as before. The feel of the job has been gutted intentionally, surgically and without any explanation, and I think the lack of explanation is what irks a lot of us.

Given Yoshi P.'s surprise during the patch notes reading, I have to believe there is a disconnect between him, the feedback teams and the players. I.e. the feedback teams aren't being completely honest about the state of things and this is influencing his ability to make executive decisions.

Then again, that requires me to believe that feedback was collected in the first place. The TA and Kaiten changes being two big examples that neither NIN nor SAM players were engaged about the upcoming changes. But Yoshi's surprise was so evident and clear that it really looked like he got cold-cocked by chat's reactions. My hope, naive and overly optimistic though it may be, is that Yoshi is undertaking a nice, thorough audit of his feedback team and where/why the disconnect occurred, with eventual plans to fix things so that this doesn't happen again.

But then again the ex-wife always did say I was overly optimistic about humans. Please don't make the ex-wife right Yoshi.

[Kabooa]

Then you also know that by reading skills purely alone, it doesn't do justice as to what you can or cannot do in every single given situation on every single job in every single fight.

Yes. I know this because I play a variety of jobs in end game content, but I have time limits and energy constraints, let alone desires to play games other than FF14. Most of the examples you provide have less to do with Kaiten, isntead centered on whether or not you're using Iaijutsu, in which case, the use of Kaiten is a foregone conclusion.

Do you understand why that is different?

There is a valid argument for Sword Draw against a standard GCD for safety vs calculation. <=== This is the choice.

If you chose Sword Draw, you're using Kaiten. <==== This is not a choice.

It's also important to note I am not saying it's easy doing it. I am not diminishing your accomplishments. Imagine a Machinist telling someone else their job is easy. I also don't think I'd paint myself as an advocate for its removal. I'm very much against removing things without receiving anything for them, but I also think it's important to look at what the absence reveals to us, and use that to direct what we should ask for.

To me, the removal of Kaiten confirmed what Tsubame Gaeshi started for me, in that Samurai is actually uninteresting in its current path. Kaiten coming back will not change that for me.

But hey, you're right. I'm far less affected than others. So for what it's worth, I hope you can look forward to 6.2 for its potential return. Just beware that I doubt you'll get it back in its original form.

A whole lotta good stuff

See, it's people like you that keep me coming back here.

This whole wall is full of good stuff, and my only regret is that it'll soon be buried.

[Rakobi]

I didn't unsubscribe but I did quit samurai and am pretty bitter about it, especially because I had spent a good bit of time gearing it this tier. I played samurai for around 5-6 raid tiers and I think 2? ultimates despite how good or bad it was. It was a gameplay thing for me. The game is still fun but I feel pretty lost, nothing is really clicking as a "main" right now. It's difficult to gauge how many people truly favor the changes. Most of the people defending them here do so by arguing that they are minor and that the discontent is exaggerated, rarely or never arguing that the changes are actually "good". I don't have data, but if most people don't care either way or disfavor them then it seems like the changes really should be reverted.

[CelestiCer]

Most of the examples you provide have less to do with Kaiten, isntead centered on whether or not you're using Iaijutsu, in which case, the use of Kaiten is a foregone conclusion.

Do you understand why that is different?.

It means at the end of the day its still " Decision Making ".

The only time it's not? is when we're not humans and perfect robots without free will -> playing perfectly to a pre-scripted timeline of skills casted at exactly x time and x situations. We for better or worse we aren't perfect, we make errors through our Decision Making.

I personally don't use it, but through " XIVAnalysis", it shows Samurai's " Missed Kaiten Casts ". By applying your logic and that of many others who preach " No Choice, since you cast it before every Iaijutsu... " it doesn't exactly explain why many Samurai's miss-execute not casting Kaiten does it? So why? by your logic that is.

• Forgot Kaiten? nope we had " -> No Choice "
• Fat fingered Shinten? nope we had -> " No Choice "
• Miss Managed Kenki? nope we had -> " No Choice "
• Mistake? I thought we had -> " No Choice "

Remember your logic was " No Choice " we had no decision other then casting Kaiten right before every Iaijutsu... Lets forget you missed mentioning casting Kaiten before every Ogi Namikiri that wasn't even your " Choice " to do so... cause " No Choices " correct? see the flaw in the logic?

The Answer = Choice, we did had the Decision Making, and still end up miss casting Kaiten. The reward and the joy is doing this perfectly, the punishment is missing or messing this up. You're right, it is difficult to perfectly do this 24/7 on every fight and every situation. Was it rocket science? no. But it was very enjoying to try and keep doing it perfectly. And ultimately still the Samurai users " Choice " to do so.

To me, the removal of Kaiten confirmed what Tsubame Gaeshi started for me, in that Samurai is actually uninteresting in its current path. Kaiten coming back will not change that for me.

Here we differ in opinion. Kaiten removal just showed that Kenki Management to many of us it had depth no matter how shallow others try to convince us it was of which many who don't even play our job voiced that opinion. There's a reason why there's an uproar for this.

And I do hope to see it return and if not? With something of equal or more depth or satisfaction to cast in its place. Though replacing Kaiten? is a tall task.

[ShanaShirayuki]

To me, the removal of Kaiten confirmed what Tsubame Gaeshi started for me, in that Samurai is actually uninteresting in its current path. Kaiten coming back will not change that for me.

For many of us, the crux of the matter is that if SAM and Crit as a whole were going to be reworked in future expansions, why now and not then? Why right before new endgame content where SAM players and their statics spent months preparing for? Why only one class and not others? I will echo what others have mentioned and say that I'd be less upset over these changes if they were slated to be a part of an overhaul in say 7.0. The changes were rushed; one can see this with the recent 'buffs' SAM received in 6.11. They were to combat the meme rotation in Yukikaze > Hagakure > Shinten spam doing similar numbers to the devs' projected numbers in 6.1.

Due to the 6.1 'fixes', SAM has lost synergy with 4 classes that augment Crit rate. Their DPS suffers if a SAM is brought along in a composition. Not to mention, Shinten spamming with awkward pauses in the opener / rotation is not my idea of fun. There was a reason Hagakure was restored, albeit in a nerfed form; that reason was to discourage the dull SB playstyle that was brought back with 6.1.

Tldr; if their intention was to dig themselves out of the Kaiten / Tsubame Gaeshi loop, they should've done it in a new expansion, and not shoehorned right before new raid content.