Samurai just want their feedback to be aknowledged

[Reese_Clairdale]

Back in 3.0 I would have considered BLM my main DPS. While it has undeniably gotten easier since then, I would say the fundamental pillars of its gameplay design remain, namely: Low amount of actions but high potency, most DPS output when standing still, timer juggling, proc management, fire phase and ice phase. While they have implemented things like extra tools for movement, increased proc timers, and passive Enochian, it's always more beneficial to learn the strategy of each fight to stay as still as possible. All of these aspects have (so far) been preserved to some degree.

If I was going to design an update for BLM to corrupt it in a similar fashion as SAM:

Ley Lines has been removed since all you do is press it before casting spells and due to action bloat. We also feel this skill is holding back BLM's design in our plans for the 9.0 expansion, please look forward to it.
Scathe is now an oGCD with a 5 second cooldown, contradictory to my claim of action bloat. Whoops!
Astral Fire and Umbral Ice timers have been made infinite. We felt that players had too many neurons linking up simultaneously.
Fire 4 and Despair are now instant cast, guaranteed critical, and their base potency has been cut by by 1/3. Too much damage variance, and nobody cared how impactful they felt anyway.
Fire 2, Flare, Blizzard 2, and Freeze are now cone AoEs to enhance BLM's identity as a Melee DPS.

Try the changes and give us your feedback. What's that, you don't like the changes? Sorry, but the changes were due to player feedback.

[Kabooa]

I'm curious now...

TL/DR Yes, in my opinion the 5.0 - 6.0 Black Mage has changed more than the 6.0-6.1 Samurai. This is primarily due to me not considering Kaiten to be mechanically important, but I'm not disregarding that it was a "Fun" skill.

I've been at this a long time though. For you, the day YoshiP came and took away Kaiten was the most significant day of your life, but for me, it was patch Tuesday.

As always though, this is just one person's opinion. Take it with a grain of salt. I am not the demographic of player this game designs its job system around.

The TL for Black Mage

This is going to be hard to answer, because what we consider gameplay is a simple term we use to try and describe what are complex moving parts. Gameplay isn't just interacting with the pieces. Chess is played in both the board and the mind, and video games are no different.

To illustrate this, I think adding a charge to Sharpcast is equivalent in scope to the situation that Kaiten was in, and if you're skeptical to how that can be, I wouldn't blame you. The two fulfill different purposes, but to me, what matters is whether or not the ability in question can be argued to have multiple positive uses, with which to say: Whether or not the ability has choice.

"Choice" in game design isn't the binary of "you do/do not". Choice in game design is the idea that when a player comes to a fork in the road during the game, you can list positives to both selections.

This is primarily why I and others say that Kaiten doesn't have choice, because the Kenki bar is ultimately a potency gauge, and the use of Kenki is therefore determined by what gives you the most potency per Kenki. On the surface level, this means Kaiten serves an important role for resource management - But the reality of the matter is that the deeper you dig for it, the less truth that actually holds. There is no "choice" in Kaiten, there's only optimization. There is no positive argument to make to skip Kaiten on Iaijutsu or Ogi. The fork in the road has one path, and one pitfall.

You don't make choices, you make mistakes.

As far as Sharpcast is concerned, Sharpcast and kaiten are similar in that Sharpcast is an action enhancer. It specifically targets Thunder, Fire, and Paradox. You use Sharpcast to enhance one of those. The difference being is that the intent and the result of Sharpcast isn't the same as Kaiten.

Kaiten enhances Iaijutsu, and any time that you could kaiten and didn't, you fell into the pitfall. Sharpcast on the other hand, due to the enhancement it provided (Guaranteed Spell proc), means that the result of using Sharpcast is ensuring a tool you might otherwise randomize into - In other words, it wasn't necessarily a DPS increase - It was the guarantee of an otherwise random event, and that random event had further uses.

1 Charge Sharpcast had choice. You had positive arguments you can make for delaying Sharpcast use, the design of Black Mage also allows pre-emptive use, as well as which spell you were goin to benefit from - Firestarter easing your AF timer, which had arguments to be made depending on the fight, or guaranteeing your TCloud, for more raw damage.

However, adding charges to sharpcast (And changing thunder) removes that. The only answer is Sharpcast Tcloud for your basic Sharpcast usage, and you have an extra Sharpcast just in case. The nuance and the choice is removed. That subtle mini-game within Black Mage's rotation is now gone, and we're talking about the result of what many could, rightfully, argue is a positive change, but you end in what is effectively the same result - There is only one answer for Kaiten, and there is only one answer for Sharpcast.

This also applies to adding charges to Triple Cast.

Black Mages changes don't necessarily change your inputs. Your standard rotation and the byways players come up with still exist, but it's the process in the backend that changes over the years, and it has made the job easier, less complex, and more forgiving, completely ignoring the actual mechanical changes of the job that have done the same. There is no debating this.

It is likely something you will not notice if you start the job now, because you will not have spent the time at each level cap to note how each cap increase changes this. This is the crux of the issue I have - These are, almost inarguably, positive changes to Black Mage, and yet I dislike them. I already wanted to dial some of it back in Shadowbringers with the addition of Xenoglossy and Sharpcast's recast reduction, because while Black mage is seen as the "Turret caster", they are nearly as mobile, and sometimes more so, than two of the Ranged DPS, ignoring just running around because they can.

Some Sam stuff

Ask 10 different people what their job identity is and you'll get both 10 different answers.

To me, Samurai was a flexible melee attacker with only a few hardpoints in its rotation that you worked around, compared to, at the time, dragoon monk ninja who all had fairly strict rotations. The "Filler" rotation of Sticker generation was actually filler, because Hagakure was used to turn those stickers into Shinten. Kaiten and Midare were filler. Process that for a moment.

4.0 Kenki was the Shinten bar.

Perhaps that is where this apathy towards Shinten spam comes from. Just feels a little bit more like how it used to be.

[Hezhi]

snip

I feel like most people kinda hated 4.0 Shinten spam, there's a reason they reworked Hagakure the way they did. And now we're back to that... It's like they're contradicting themselves.

[Kabooa]

I feel like most people kinda hated 4.0 Shinten spam, there's a reason they reworked Hagakure the way they did. And now we're back to that... It's like they're contradicting themselves.

Can't say.

If nobody liked kaiten, that doesn't make the one person who does like it feel better about its removal, though. It's all fine and good until you're in the minority.

[Quor]

SAM in 4.0

Not entirely true. Higanbana had value, as did Midare when under raid buffs, and Haga with it's 40s CD meant you were throwing out *some* Midares here and there. But to say it wasn't as Midare-focused as it is now or was in ShB is accurate, and Shinten certainly had a preferred usage over Kaiten in more situations during 4.0 than it did in 5.0 and onwards.

I think the issue isn't hate against Shinten so much as it is that Kaiten+Shinten is so much more fun than simply one or the other. Imo 4.0 SAM went a bit too much towards the Shinten-style while 6.0 SAM went a bit too far away from it. 5.0 SAM was almost perfect imo, once they made Shoha worthwhile. But then again I also miss the 3-5 different openers you had as a 4.0 SAM depending on Sen usage, party comp and SkS tier. On their own, Shinten and Kaiten are simply an oGCD resource dump and a potency booster, but together they created a wonderful sense of satisfaction when balanced against each other under the limitations of your Kenki generation and Sen output.

[Kabooa]

I think the issue isn't hate against Shinten so much as it is that Kaiten+Shinten is so much more fun than simply one or the other. Imo 4.0 SAM went a bit too much towards the Shinten-style while 6.0 SAM went a bit too far away from it. 5.0 SAM was almost perfect imo, once they made Shoha worthwhile. But then again I also miss the 3-5 different openers you had as a 4.0 SAM depending on Sen usage, party comp and SkS tier. On their own, Shinten and Kaiten are simply an oGCD resource dump and a potency booster, but together they created a wonderful sense of satisfaction when balanced against each other under the limitations of your Kenki generation and Sen output.

I think at the end of the day it comes back to Kenki. The gradual changes reducing its importance in turn makes the rest of the kit feel less important, outside your designated fun chemical dispensers every 120s.

[4sishi]

its funny, I intend to main samurai, however I never got started on it yet, sounds like a serious nerf that could of been minimized to a reform. whatever, I still intend on trying samu.
sounds like we gatta start listening to Butterfly and evolve from a grub to a 'PRETTY LITTLE BUTTERFLY"(Bugs Life), as in learn a new trick? Im starting this with no idea how it used to be so, you guys have more exp with the class, Evolve, move past those once great limits.
P.S. you know they aren't actually reading this? they've already seen the dev bashing about this already on YT. their only concern was Warrior and one other magic class.

[Asiragan]

I have little more to add to what was already said on this thread, but I'd still like to contribute to that by adding my voice into the crowd, useless though it may be.

I haven't participated in these forums for years now, since Stormblood in fact, but the removal of Kaiten is ridiculous, no one asked for it and it makes no sense whatsoever. Especially the excuse of button bloat when they separate Mirage Dive from being tied to High Jump to the Dragoon, something DRG didn't even ask for since everyone was fine with how it was.

Since 6.1, I can't bring myself to play SAM anymore, despite being my main job since 4.0 and have now switched to Dragoon for now.

Heavensward class design, despite being clunky here and there, felt amazing, and I was fine with the change made by early Stormblood. But I really feel that FFXIV class design made a real nosedive since mid-SB/early-ShB as every decisions seems to just make the gameplay feels like an impoverishment of what it was.

[Flashy]

its funny, I intend to main samurai, however I never got started on it yet, sounds like a serious nerf that could of been minimized to a reform. whatever, I still intend on trying samu.
sounds like we gatta start listening to Butterfly and evolve from a grub to a 'PRETTY LITTLE BUTTERFLY"(Bugs Life), as in learn a new trick? Im starting this with no idea how it used to be so, you guys have more exp with the class, Evolve, move past those once great limits.
P.S. you know they aren't actually reading this? they've already seen the dev bashing about this already on YT. their only concern was Warrior and one other magic class.

We had some hope since we were asked to try the changes and post our feedback in the forums. But you're right, they're not reading anything.

Also SAM is fine to play, I dont see any reason for a new player to not try the job out

[Quyn]

its funny, I intend to main samurai, however I never got started on it yet, sounds like a serious nerf that could of been minimized to a reform. whatever, I still intend on trying samu.
sounds like we gatta start listening to Butterfly and evolve from a grub to a 'PRETTY LITTLE BUTTERFLY"(Bugs Life), as in learn a new trick? Im starting this with no idea how it used to be so, you guys have more exp with the class, Evolve, move past those once great limits.
P.S. you know they aren't actually reading this? they've already seen the dev bashing about this already on YT. their only concern was Warrior and one other magic class.

There was no nerf to Samurai efficiency. Burst has been reduced instead, damage redistributed among the skill kit.
What Forum samurai players are lamenting so vocally, is the change in playstyle and feel of the classes damage profile.

If you never played it before the changes, you likely wont mind the current iteration.