Quote Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth View Post
Yeah, and everything you mentioned is a gcd. Kaiten is not.

It was also only ever used to modify the iaijutsu. It was a pointless skill that had zero depth. Kenki guage wasn't ruined because of that, it was the drop of guren and senai from 50 to 25 that made Kenki brainless.
Every OGCD exists to hide the slow GCD from you in the moment, so tbf they're all equally pointless. You could just bake any OGCD that does damage's potency into the rotation. But fine, my examples were all GCD's, but partially so because with DT a lot of the OGCD examples are also being cut (Like DRK summon being free so it's now the bloodspiller gauge, or gauge builders being made free so you can't accidentally overcap).

If I had to try and give OGCD's though some can be a bit awkward, specifically if that OGCD provides a buff you murder EVERYONE'S opener if you use it incorrectly, which is arguably worse (and much more common).

And either way, my examples despite being GCD still are relevent, specially NIN's since one of the brought up points is about APM happening at the start, while NIN suffers from the highest APM in the game even before SAM changes. It feels, to me at least, Kaiten was a specific target because Square realized having Shoha 1 available for only 2 levels was incredibly awkward and would likely confuse players leveling the job, vs removing an entire ability that was deemed irrelevant because you "only press it before Iaijutsu" despite, well, that actually being something unique about an OGCD for once, instead of just being a separate number for the sake of it.

Certainly for me shot down my dopamine when playing it, which caused the same result you note yourself, I started playing it worse, because it stopped being fun.