SAM players are quitting

[Karious]

Well my thinking on that is similar to Enochan the meter builds while you have resources and they could put the animation back in as a tell that your next weaponskill has the Kaiten weaponskill potency buff

So it would become a Baked in passive kenki meter builder and at full your next weaponskill gets buffed

I'd rather have a choice in when I get to use Kaiten, rather than it auto applying when I don't want.

[Kabooa]

I'd rather have a choice in when I get to use Kaiten, rather than it auto applying when I don't want.

You don't have a choice in when you use Kaiten.

[YukiB]

You don't have a choice in when you use Kaiten.

Yes you do. You have to actively press the button. Yes, it's optimal to use it before iaijutsu, but that doesn't mean you have to.

That's like saying you don't have a choice on when to enter Life of the Dragon on DRG, just because it's optimal to delay it for raid buffs.

You got an illusion of choice. Diverging from an optimal rotation is choosing to do suboptimal dps.

While yes, this would enforce the optimal rotation, you were pretty much in that boat anyway if you do high end content so it would just be giving back what you lost and sticking to their "reduced button bloat" mantra.

Man, I'm getting so good at reading your modus operandi that I'm replying to you before I even see your post!

[Kabooa]

Yes you do. You have to actively press the button. Yes, it's optimal to use it before iaijutsu, but that doesn't mean you have to.

That's like saying you don't have a choice on when to enter Life of the Dragon on DRG, just because it's optimal to delay it for raid buffs.

There's a marked difference in "The dragoon delays it because of the party buff window" and "It's literally wrong to use Kaiten on anything but Iaijutsu and Ogi". When we speak of "Choice" in game design, it's not about whether the player is initiating an action, it's about whether there's a meaningful divergence of outcomes from those actions.

If your only outcome selections are Pass/Fail, it's not a choice, it's a formality.

Reapers have "The choice" of not alternating their powered up weapon skills.
Black mages have "The choice" of only using ice magic.
Healers have "The choice" of never using damage actions.

See how little that actually flies?

[YukiB]

There's a marked difference in "The dragoon delays it because of the party buff window" and "It's literally wrong to use Kaiten on anything but Iaijutsu and Ogi". When we speak of "Choice" in game design, it's not about whether the player is initiating an action, it's about whether there's a meaningful divergence of outcomes from those actions.

If your only outcome selections are Pass/Fail, it's not a choice, it's a formality.

Reapers have "The choice" of not alternating their powered up weapon skills.
Black mages have "The choice" of only using ice magic.
Healers have "The choice" of never using damage actions.

See how little that actually flies?

I see that those are all choices with varying degrees of impact on DPS.

I'm not arguing that players should ever NOT use Kaiten by the way, but it was a skill that required player agency to use, and thus provided some small amount of skill expression and gauge maintenance which is now lacking.

Imagine if they made it so RPR could ONLY alternate their gauge skills. The end result would be the same, but the job would be slightly easier to play and lose a little bit of flavor. Imagine if they removed Blizzard IV from BLM and made the umbral hearts passive. The end result would be the same (actually slightly more potency per GCD) but the job would be slightly easier to play and lose a little bit of flavor. That ability to make decisions, and mistakes, makes jobs more fun.

A few percent if you're not performing which if you're "doing what you want" freestyle dpsing is going to drop you into grey.

So the choice to not use Kaiten is not the sole factor in determining a grey parse, but execution of the whole rotation. Thank you for proving my point.

[FrogBiscuit]

There's a marked difference in "The dragoon delays it because of the party buff window" and "It's literally wrong to use Kaiten on anything but Iaijutsu and Ogi". When we speak of "Choice" in game design, it's not about whether the player is initiating an action, it's about whether there's a meaningful divergence of outcomes from those actions.

If your only outcome selections are Pass/Fail, it's not a choice, it's a formality.

Reapers have "The choice" of not alternating their powered up weapon skills.
Black mages have "The choice" of only using ice magic.
Healers have "The choice" of never using damage actions.

See how little that actually flies?

Its amusing that you are highlighting effectively exactly what YukiB is stating, yet are trying to prove the opposite.

Each of those classes all have "The choice" to improve on how they play and be better at optimizing their damage...

SAM had a chunk of 'that choice' removed.

This isn't stating that the use of kaiten was 'hard'. But it was a conscious choice, just one aspect of the SAM kit that kept the player engaged. It was removed. The pieces of the kit you needed to use effectively has been simplified.

Adding any color of the kaiten effect to Iaijutsu automatically... effectively makes the rotation less engaging.


Are you arguing from the perspective that SAM was just too hard for higher end raiders and needed to be simplified for them, because kaiten use was too demanding?

Hitting your differing moves IS a choice. Otherwise, Why don't we just hit one button that executes everything that needs to go off so the player can simply pay attention to the fight mechanics? Not to mention, outside of Ultimates... any SAM player could get pretty any content done without using kaiten and wouldn't be kicked by any but the most anal of groups. Not saying this would be good practice but simply that the content isn't hard enough to be that strict.

The point of having augment style moves like Kaiten is to add slight complexity to a class, and this does nothing to mention that kaiten importance was far more detailed in that it also connected Sen and Kenki build up, made kenki management actually a thing, visually connected our moves in a pleasing way, and was a direct engagement of the player in creating large hits with a immediate payoff which was a direct psychologically pleasing flow of actions.

[cjbeagle]

I don't think choice is really even the concern here - if it was just a bar that filled up and automatically buffed your next weaponskill, sure, you lose "choice", but more importantly, you lose control.

Kaiten was basically a non-choice if playing right, but that just means it was part of the rotation, and since it had a kenki cost, that made kenki relevant to the rotation - taking away control is arguably just as bad as taking away choice.

I was going to make a comparison to MCH if Reassemble just procced randomly instead of having control over it, but SAM would actually be way worse than that since the timing is dependent on sen, which you can't even build without using weaponskills. At least with MCH you could just wait for Drill to come off cooldown maybe - on SAM you'd just end up buffing Hakaze or something if you didn't already have 3 sen, or maybe if you did have 3 sen but the gauge wasn't quite full, it'd be worth it to literally just stand there not using any weaponskills so you can use it on Iaijutsu. Much rather just have Kaiten back, especially since button bloat was apparently a mistranslation for action bloat, which is to say APM, which removing Kaiten had basically no impact on.

[RArchet]

I don't think choice is really even the concern here - if it was just a bar that filled up and automatically buffed your next weaponskill, sure, you lose "choice", but more importantly, you lose control.

Kaiten was basically a non-choice if playing right, but that just means it was part of the rotation, and since it had a kenki cost, that made kenki relevant to the rotation - taking away control is arguably just as bad as taking away choice.

I was going to make a comparison to MCH if Reassemble just procced randomly instead of having control over it, but SAM would actually be way worse than that since the timing is dependent on sen, which you can't even build without using weaponskills. At least with MCH you could just wait for Drill to come off cooldown maybe - on SAM you'd just end up buffing Hakaze or something if you didn't already have 3 sen, or maybe if you did have 3 sen but the gauge wasn't quite full, it'd be worth it to literally just stand there not using any weaponskills so you can use it on Iaijutsu. Much rather just have Kaiten back, especially since button bloat was apparently a mistranslation for action bloat, which is to say APM, which removing Kaiten had basically no impact on.

I feel a better comparison between SAM and NIN would be if Drill, Saw, and Anchor all were automatic crits, received massive potency cuts, with all that potency put on something like Gauss Shot or their 123 combo in an approximation of how many times they would be used between each of the three aforementioned abilities.

[JanVanding]

I'd rather have a choice in when I get to use Kaiten, rather than it auto applying when I don't want.

You got an illusion of choice. Diverging from an optimal rotation is choosing to do suboptimal dps.

While yes, this would enforce the optimal rotation, you were pretty much in that boat anyway if you do high end content so it would just be giving back what you lost and sticking to their "reduced button bloat" mantra.

[JanVanding]

Yes you do. You have to actively press the button. Yes, it's optimal to use it before iaijutsu, but that doesn't mean you have to.

That's like saying you don't have a choice on when to enter Life of the Dragon on DRG, just because it's optimal to delay it for raid buffs.



Man, I'm getting so good at reading your modus operandi that I'm replying to you before I even see your post!

Know what happens to people that Grey dps constantly?

The group disbands and reforms without them. So yes it's very much an illusion of choice.

In a High end environment, if you're not beating Enrage (and let's be honest it does happen) the dps will be checked, if they see the SAM or the DRG right down the list next to the WHM

That group 100% will disband and reform without them.

They don't call them out, they don't kick up a fuss, they just remove the problem quietly.