SAM is dead

[Eorzean_username]

Going back to " Shadowbringers " and Third Eye was still linked to Hissatsu: Seigan at Level 66 giving the fantasy feel of blocking damage and counterattacking with damage. They essentially removed Seigan from PvE SAM and shoved it onto PVP SAM, renaming it Hissatsu: Chiten as it reduces damage like Third Eye and reflects damage which mirrors the concept of Seigan's counterattack, only in a auto-playing manner.

Alright, I understand what you're saying now.

I personally think that's stretching the logic a bit, but I can see where you're coming from conceptually.

Hissatsu: Guren back in " Stormblood " was not a shared skill, until the introduction of Hissatsu: Senei which didn't improve anything.

Oooooh okay, now I understand what you mean.

I was wracking my brain trying to figure out if I'd had a stroke or something, because I couldn't remember a time that Senei and Guren didn't share a CD.

But now I get what you're saying — Senei was just Guren but split into 2 buttons depending on target count, so it actually added ~nothing to the rotation other than some keybloat disguised as a cool new gift. And then everyone gobbled it up because, admittedly, it looked really cool.

Then later on reducing its Kenki cost by half.

Yeah I still don't understand this one.

I've tried to figure out their goal here and it feels like the Pepe Silvia meme.

Like I cannot honestly think of ever having a conversation with any Samurai player, of any skill level, who expressed difficulty pooling the 50 Kenki for Senei/Guren, especially after Hagakure got morphed into Ikishoten.

Combine that with Kaiten removal? and our resource management truly becomes... negative braincell activity with brainless Shinten spamming.

Yeah I get what you're saying now — you're constructing a map of how cascading changes slowly trivialised Kenki as a resource consideration more and more, culminating in the current nadir that it's reached.

Makes sense, I don't really disagree with any of it. My only major point of divergence is that I don't think Kenki was ever very well-designed and needed serious help as a resource from Day Zero, but I agree that its current state is atrocious by comparison.