Samurai needs love

[KickRox]

The value of SAM LB at higher tiers is in holding it. @ crystal tier, it's a safe bet that most of the enemy team is experienced enough to be aware your LB is up.

If a sam has LB up on enemy team when I'm playing, and I see Chiten Icon next to their name, I am actively avoiding attacking them unless they are CC'd and below 50%

This practically gives you autonomy to apply pressure behind enemy lines. It also ties the person up for a second or two for them to check party list. And if they don't and start attacking you, pop chiten. They'll stop. If they dont, kill them.

But test it out. There's a reason you can see enemies LB bar. Part of the reasoning behind SAM LB is directly tied to this.

"I have a grenade in my pocket. Touch me and it explodes, but only you die. Don't touch me and you still probably die; just slower."

If you can't make that work for you, then sam isn't for you.

[Dimitrii]

The nerve of people to say Sam LB needs buff when DRG LB exists lol.....

[Sawamura]

Guess you didn't know NIN LB exists then.

[KickRox]

The nerve of people to say Sam LB needs buff when DRG LB exists lol.....

It does need a buff. At higher tiers it's success rate is garbage. Any job with a barrier or additional purify mechanism can easily drop Kuzushi or pop barrier within 3 seconds. This means to be effective, they have to be executed one after the other, limitiing the number of targets that it can land on practically. Furthermore, its efficacy in an instance of counter-offensive, which is the purpose of most LBs, enemy team will most likely be at full hp / mp and with any barrier they'll live, and then pump their MP back to full health. not to mention Unless the map is could 9, the cooldown is the longest of any LB. I don't particularly enjoy SAM nor do I use it in ranked matches, so I don't have any bias towards it, for reference sake.

It should be like Ninja's LB with instant incapacitation

[Dimitrii]

It does need a buff. At higher tiers it's success rate is garbage. Any job with a barrier or additional purify mechanism can easily drop Kuzushi or pop barrier within 3 seconds. This means to be effective, they have to be executed one after the other, limitiing the number of targets that it can land on practically. Furthermore, its efficacy in an instance of counter-offensive, which is the purpose of most LBs, enemy team will most likely be at full hp / mp and with any barrier they'll live, and then pump their MP back to full health. not to mention Unless the map is could 9, the cooldown is the longest of any LB. I don't particularly enjoy SAM nor do I use it in ranked matches, so I don't have any bias towards it, for reference sake.

It should be like Ninja's LB with instant incapacitation

No it doesnt. The instant KO gimmicks of Zantetsuken, Seiton Tenchu, and Chain Saw should not have even been a thing in the first place. It takes no skill to cheese or get lucky with such abilities and they should have no place in competitive PVP. And on top of having this ridiculous gimmick, Zantetsuken still has a higher potency than DRG LB (24k compared to 20k) and has the added effect of ignoring guard. Dragoons limit break is just as telegraphed if not more than Sam as well. Its near worthless save to save yourself when you feel close to dying and even then the latency issues of the game prevent even that aspect from being reliable. As a damage dealing ability, it will only kill people if you save it for when you burst the enemy into low hp and force them into guard. At that point you can pop the lb and kill them once the guard drops. This is highly predictable and countered. Sam and NIN still have the two best melee limit breaks. There are definitely jobs way worse off than both of those.

[KickRox]

No it doesnt. The instant KO gimmicks of Zantetsuken, Seiton Tenchu, and Chain Saw should not have even been a thing in the first place. It takes no skill to cheese or get lucky with such abilities and they should have no place in competitive PVP. And on top of having this ridiculous gimmick, Zantetsuken still has a higher potency than DRG LB (24k compared to 20k) and has the added effect of ignoring guard. Dragoons limit break is just as telegraphed if not more than Sam as well. Its near worthless save to save yourself when you feel close to dying and even then the latency issues of the game prevent even that aspect from being reliable. As a damage dealing ability, it will only kill people if you save it for when you burst the enemy into low hp and force them into guard. At that point you can pop the lb and kill them once the guard drops. This is highly predictable and countered. Sam and NIN still have the two best melee limit breaks. There are definitely jobs way worse off than both of those.

Chainsaw I agree with. Chance has no place in a skills competition. Not sure what luck/chance has to do with either NIN or SAM LB. There's no RNG involved in either. NIN LB also has essentially 0 impact on a match other than to lock the NIN in animation for 2 seconds if it misses.. That's the point: High risk, High reward. Medium Cooldown. If your hp is 49.99% or below at the moment the NIN LB input reaches SE server, you die, even if your med kit's input hit the server the moment after. If you're calling that "luck" then so is anything to do with server ticks. SAM LB also has no element of RNG involved. So not sure what makes either of them a gimmick. TBH, it sounds like you have trouble identifying when Kuzushi lands on you. I'd recommend enlarging "Status info: enfeeblements" in HUD settings, along with "target info: status", and the size of the enemy party list in the Duty section of HUD layout when you're @ Wolves' Den Pier. You can also focus the SAM and use that to identify when they have Chiten up.

[Dimitrii]

Chainsaw I agree with. Chance has no place in a skills competition. Not sure what luck/chance has to do with either NIN or SAM LB. There's no RNG involved in either. NIN LB also has essentially 0 impact on a match other than to lock the NIN in animation for 2 seconds if it misses.. That's the point: High risk, High reward. Medium Cooldown. If your hp is 49.99% or below at the moment the NIN LB input reaches SE server, you die, even if your med kit's input hit the server the moment after. If you're calling that "luck" then so is anything to do with server ticks. SAM LB also has no element of RNG involved. So not sure what makes either of them a gimmick. TBH, it sounds like you have trouble identifying when Kuzushi lands on you. I'd recommend enlarging "Status info: enfeeblements" in HUD settings, along with "target info: status", and the size of the enemy party list in the Duty section of HUD layout when you're @ Wolves' Den Pier. You can also focus the SAM and use that to identify when they have Chiten up.

I appreciate the advice on avoiding the SAM LB but its not necessary. I am fully capable of avoiding it unless they get lucky with a stray AOE on my part. I am also not trying to argue semantics here either. I called them cheesy or lucky. Chainsaw is obviously the latter while Zantetsuken and Seiton Tenchu are the former. Its basically a free noob killer move that takes no special skill in pulling off but when it pays off it pays off tremendously when going up against inexperienced or otherwise distracted enemies. When going up against more experienced players it becomes an ordinary LB thats still better than most of the other melee LBs. My point was never that it was unavoidable as it very much is. My point is insta kill abilities shouldnt be a thing in PVP in ANY form. It diminishes and lowers the skill level in competitive matches. If you wanna buff Sam LB fine but buffing it does not require keeping the insta kill gimmick intact. The LB not being an insta kill when you pop it is not justification for it needing to be buffed. Literally no other LB save one other even works that way.

[Naphtha]

My point is insta kill abilities shouldnt be a thing in PVP in ANY form. It diminishes and lowers the skill level in competitive matches.

Gonna just sit here and wait for the eventual NIN/SAM player to try and justify having an execute.

I've played dozens of PvP games in my life and I can't for the life of me think of any good ones that had instakill abilities similar to SAM's, or executes that had a threshold as high as NIN's. Hopefully the dev team realizes that these abilities are trash since they just poison casual/lower competitive matches, and become an annoyance at higher ones, but who am I kidding, that'll never happen.

[NightHour]

Samurai needs something to help with them living. They are the least likely to survive out of all the melees at the moment since sams unlike the others have no way back out of fights. I would rather chiten go back to 50% or at least make it last longer at the current percentage

Uhm no. /10char

[Saucy_Jack]

Idk why people are saying instakills or executes don’t/shouldn’t exist in PvP, you see them in a fair number of genres of PvP. The problem in FF14 isn’t having executes at all, it’s them being implemented really badly. They shouldn’t be chance based, powerful instakills should require high skill level to use, and viable counterplay with mechanical depth that can interact with other mechanics should exist.

For example almost all FPS games have had full hp instakill executes as a core mechanic for decades (headshots), and PvP games with similar game modes to CC like LoL also have fairly high threshold executes. Not to mention that bog standard burst acts as an execute but better in almost all PvP games anyway, if the player using it has any idea what they’re doing.

If you look at the examples of successful implementations of high HP executes or instakill mechanics I mentioned above, you’ll see those are the differences compared to how they’re implemented in this game. No one thinks headshots being full-health any-range on-demand no-CD instakills are an issue when the basic skill requirement and skill cap is so high. Executes in LoL aren’t the end of the world because they’re not chance based and have counterplay options like LoS behind teammates, being range/mobility limited, slow dodgeable projectiles that can miss, etc…

If FF14 is going to keep them, they to be a lot better designed than they are now, and also fix the netcode which is a problem that exacerbates a pretty wide range of issues in PvP right now including executes. If thats too hard, then obv just toss them out for mechanics that are less frustrating to deal with, but it’s not as if executes themselves are some cardinal sin against PvP game design.