SAM buffs warranted? Genuine question

[Shurrikhan]

So, first of all, Soulsow is legitimately a garbage ability.

I'd agree if and only we likewise removed downtime potency generation from everyone else. Otherwise, we return to the dilemma mentioned before, wherein encounters cannot support as many different means because each is also devoted to different capacities, meaning that a fight cannot support all jobs (despite this being a game that's pretty darn unfriendly to progressing across multiple gear classes simultaneously).

This is the third time this garbage piece of crap has been added to the game. The first time was Chakra in Heavensward.

No. Chakra filled three purposes:
1. potency recovery, complementing TK, for having to wind up for 7 GCDs each brief fight (since PB was, at the time, on a 3-minute cooldown),
2. a half-GCD modular tool, and
3. Monk's version of a ranged [or, not-range-limited] GCD that could be used in more situations (and initially at far greater ppgcd) than any other melee's ranged GCD.

None of those things apply to Soulsow, which is far more alike to SAM's Meditate -- likewise an explicitly downtime tool -- or MNK's Anatman (except that that one's not worth crap).

Yes, exactly, every button should be important. When you can go entire fights without using a button, or barely using it, that button better slay god or the devs should consider outright removing it. A perfect example is something like Huraijin or Soulsow, which may as well not exist if a fight has no downtime.

But that's the thing: fights do frequently have enough downtime that lacking those tools would then widen fight-specific imbalances (either by balancing more uptime-dependent jobs around high-uptime fights and having them suffer outside of those ideal situations or overtuning them to compensate for the less ideal) or would further constrain the balance of their potencies towards CDs despite being flavored as more continuous fighters.

Now, if you wanted to make that somehow passive (each half-GCD's time that a Monk is not under the global recast time = +1 Chakra; standing still for 2s grants a RPR buff that causes his next Soul Slice / Soul Scythe to hit for triple damage after standing still for another 3s), etc.... sure, whatever -- prune the unnecessary buttons. But I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with an explicit downtime skill so long as we're unwilling to constrain fight design around highly varied damage profiles. I'm cool with either one; you just can't have Job A noticeably suffer in Savage/Ultimate Encounter X (especially, as a result of those removals) and then pretend that people will nonetheless regularly take Job A.

[Ninja] Personally, I think Heavensward ninja was the best Ninja ever was, and everything after it is a step backwards.

I would largely agree, outside of Armor Crush, which axed a mechanic of previously greater depth. The only thing that made it even a net-neutral addition (ignoring the added button cost) was its positional element, which synergized well with the flexibility of a buff of long maximum duration.
(Those longer durations, however, are not usually in themselves a good thing. Storm's Eye was made worse/duller, imo, for having been changed to the up-to-60s Surging Tempest.)

Personally, I would have much rather seen almost any other use for Armor Crush, though, and left Huton as a 70s Ninjutsu alone, with some accordant QoL/regularity buffs to Ninjutsu's cooling that eased TA timing without overly devaluing Fuma. Naturally, fixing the game's queuing and removing its round-trip-ping punishment upon uptime would be essential, though, since we'd be keeping oGCD Ninjutsu.

fuma shuriken itself

And there's the other funny thing: before they deemphasized NIN's combo ppgcd and dropped the more modular/mobile Mutilate, Fuma actually had an occasional purpose under SkS thresholds depending on one's Shadowfang/Ninjutsu sync: it was the option that cost zero uptime from clipping and could thereby help perfect Shadowfang uptime (wasting neither ticks nor opportunities for ticks).

Your 1-2-3 melee combo had no positionals

Aeolian Edge already gained a positional back in ARR. Dancing Edge, which was far from being a filler spam, was the one without it.

So if we no longer make TCJ give you a suiton, we can remove Meisui, a button that may as well press itself after you cast TCJ. So what is this button doing? We could do a 4-step mudra combo. It was teased all the way back in stormblood. At level 72 or so, give a trait to upgrade TCJ, and make it so that your 3-2-1 combo makes your next mudra used do an empowered effect. 3-2-1-3 would be some slaying god tier single target attack, 3-2-1-2 would be a doton that looks like an exploding volcano or something. 3-2-1-1 gives you mega-bunny, which is a DPS loss disaster recovery option where your bunny whacks the boss, in case you mess up, to make sure it's not a critical damage loss. If the fourth step did 2000 potency, the megabunny would do 1500.

...???

Seriously, what? Why would you want any of that. We use our 1-2-3 combo often enough that every Ninjutsu would be buffed, meaning, effectively, that none of them are; we don't even make use of all the Ninjutsu we have now, so we certainly don't need a 4-step mudra just to summon a mega-bunny, let alone as recovery option for if we overshoot the 3-step we actually wanted(???). And why the hell would we want a 2000 base potency Ninjutsu? That potency has to come from somewhere else, which then just means we're all the more at the mercy of those individually huge hits.

[Dragoon] BotD is more one of those things where in Stormblood, you could, and did, lose stacks due to boss downtime.

BotD doesn't have stacks... If you mean Eyes, then that's what Sonic Thrust was for on the likes of Neo Exdeath (serving two purposes at once, just fine). Since you weren't directly spending BotD by Stormblood, there were incredibly few cases short of lengthy cutscenes where you'd be forced to drop it.

Also it was nuanced even in Stormblood, where you had to reapply BotD before using LotD as the timer was directly tied to how much time you had left before bursting.

Not by comparison to how BotD worked in HW, no. By Stormblood, you simply hit BotD just before your 3rd-combo-step as not to waste duration, since most raid buffs were 4th GCD or later anyways back then, and then you popped LotD cyclically following your first. It wasn't even worth considering deeper SkS thresholds for additional Geirskoguls per BotD cast, nor to let HT or PB drop in favor of an extra Full Thrust+WT/F&C in banking for another round of cleave. You didn't have to be aware of upcoming downtime. It turned a risk-reward mechanic into just an uptime bonus gating an otherwise plain burst cycle.

Which again is... fine...? But if nuance from a mechanic that need not apologize itself is what you're looking for... the original approach was already there.

Honestly, Bard's DoTs have never been fine. Or rather, more precisely, DoTs are a bad game mechanic outright.

There's nothing wrong with DoTs. It's literally just one step's more complexity than a GCD-granted buff. If the latter is fine, DoTs cannot help but also be fine.

Both GCD-granted buffs and DoTs are essentially soft-CDs. The difference is that DoTs essentially have as many simultaneously-cooling charges as there are enemies worth DoTing.

Replace an instant-cast DoT that has some direct damage with an instant-cast potency buff to further GCDs and some direct damage in itself, and both can become your healer's soft-CD mobility tool. The difference is simply that one scales with target count up to the point that it's eclipsed by raw AoE, while the other does not.

The best-designed DoTs are Warrior's Storm's Eye and Reaper's Of Death.

GCD-granted DoTs are just GCD-granted Buffs+1, complexity-wise. There is nothing wrong with them, and even the likes of Dia at least supports more contextual complexity than Death's Design or Surging Tempest.

I'm all for doing more with DoTs, just as we could with buffs, CDR, or pretty much anything else. But there is no fundamental issue here.

Now, if you want to get rid of Iron Jaws (or at least pigeon-hole it behind a situational CD) and return Bard's DoTs to, say, most a 21-second duration so we could stop just keyswipe spamming Refulgent->Burst... I'm right there with you. But 45s seconds being stupidly long is not a DoT issue; it's an issue of an overly stretched-out duration.

[Monk] If you follow the 'natural,' rotation, that is you use the class and push buttons on cooldown without saving things, ideally in the highest to lowest potency order, then if you try using perfect balance on a purple combo after you did a bootshine-true strike-anything, you will go into perfect balance, and during your burst, Disciplined Fist will fall off before you can fire off your purple combo for elixir field.

Are you... playing at zero skill speed? This literally does not happen to me. Per minute, I clip roughly half my Disciplined Fists at ~3 seconds left and the other half at about a quarter-second left.

Moreover, the fact that your buff may fall off is not even an issue in itself; on the contrary, that being occasionally/situationally optimal increases the variety of rotational strings available to a job, alongside its overall skill ceiling.

For instance, back to ARR, it was very normal to let Dragon Kick fall off just after Snap Punch and Twin Snakes just after Dragon Kick to trade the total of 28 bonus potency in exchange for getting out an extra True Strike (50 potency over Twin) and Bootshine (some 65 relative potency over Dragon), so long as there was less than potency in non-GCD damage to be dealt over the time those buffs had dropped than a 10th that bonus (which, was frankly, almost always the case, minus Steel Peak, 2 AAs, and Howling Fist all somehow occurring in those brief gaps). This gave us more to track (both upcoming AAs and oGCDs) and more rotational variance and ultimately a higher skill ceiling for the job. That's a good thing, not some massive "problem" just because your buff icon briefly faded from view.

All the better, imo, was when it was even more situational via the likes of old RoF and timing TK-recoveries to minimize DK/Twin duration clipping and opportunity costs (of using them over BS/True).

Things do not need to be as simple as basic checklists like "Maintain Buff X (regardless of what actual bonus potency it'd generate or the opportunity costs it'd occur over the precise given span of time)". Bending those expectations in favor of more precise engagement/interaction is a good thing.

So, on the topic of abilities like that, I look at it another way. If you use X oGCD, and immediately follow up with Y oGCD, there's a problem.

I agree, so long as that is the only realistic outcome and it produces no noticeable gameplay impact in preparing for that outcome. I've referred to those often as "bundles" and have not shied away from hating on them... constantly. That's why I mentioned Barrel Stabilizer (but also, notably, not 5.x Ikishouten).

For SAM, I'd take Guren and Senei, upgrade Guren into Senei but make them both hybrid ST/AoE skills.

I'd be fine with that, but only because I don't find "Is the number of enemies greater than 1?" to be a compelling mechanic to solve. Insofar as button bloat goes, just having Ogi Namikiri replace Ikishouten while Namikiri Ready is active would be enough. SAM isn't particularly button-bloated as is.

Or even, just have Guren automatically convert to Senei if it detects no other enemy would-be in the line of attack. Voila; unless we somehow favored focus damage over total damage, you'd only need the one button. Do the same for Foul -> Xeno, (and perhaps Enlightenment -> TFC), etc. Doesn't ultimately change balance any, because everyone's doing the same anyhow, but hey -- the new animations look nice.

Then take Ikishoten, upgrade it into Guren, upgrade it into Senei... raising the skill ceiling, because you can actually store more kenki going into your 2m burst

...???

That's... not raising the skill ceiling. Less often caring about upcoming abilities or the threat of overcap (since, having removed the 50 Kenki from Ikishouten, you needn't be as conscious of the marginal cap)... is a reduction of the skill ceiling. The action, after all, is in the deliberate spending, not in just letting your Kenki bank higher and higher from having fewer reasons to be mindful of it or to optimize priority conflicts.

And you already hit 90-95 Kenki every 2 minute cycle. That's not new. You can already double-Shinten at the start of buffs, Ikishouten with just that single GCD's delay on the second use per fight (obviously, continued thereafter) to recap without having wasted the Kenki, and ultimately spend nearly 200 Kenki under raid buffs, precisely because Ikishouten grants that extra Kenki.