Explain Sam to me?

[Novani]

I spam my aoe all the time. I'll agree Sam has one best aoe in pvp.
I just feel Sam lb doesn't do a lot without Chiten.

You'd be correct in guessing as much, Samurai is very much a surprise gimmick class with very little else to its name, note the toolkit itself is solid, however server tick will be the ultimate judge as to how effective any of that is. More so than the majority of other classes for whom there is a degree of leniency still available.

While it is intended for your LB to do damage regardless of whether empowered by an enemy's debuff (in the case they guard) or not, it's not unusual to see cases where it doesn't seem to do anything at all. Same goes for having to constantly recast your casting moves despite being right next to your opponent, or your AoE strikes missing completely despite the same situation on your screen, as the effective radius of the AoE is actually quite small.

So in a way, you can think of this class as a backup emergency tank when it's nearly at full charge. You don't want to be focus fired too early, as Samurai defense is actually pretty terrible, even with Chiten, generally it's something best done when you're already engaged and people aren't keeping an eye on your buffs, as the grace period between buff, debuff and LB is extremely slim and the source of much frustration to Samurai mains.

As has been suggested before: try to synergize with another DPS or Tank to get the most out of your melee uptime, your moves do decent damage outside of the LB phase but work best when assisting a kill as opposed to straight up DPS, as you may run into the previously mentioned issues when people move around. Also, be sure to take advantage of line of sight to avoid too much focus fire when you're not ready to team kill. Obviously less of an option for Frontline, but I hope that clears up what kind of DPS you're looking at with this kit. It needs some reworking to truly fit what FF14 is actually capable of I think, in a game with less issues over server tick rate, it'd actually be really good. Here, it's largely just average but effective when it does its job.