how much skill speed a sam shoulkd have ?

That's awesome that my guide could help you! 😄 I'm glad it sounds like you enjoy samurai more with this information! 😊 Thank you!

It takes a lot of practice to learn and memorize long fixed rotations, but understanding the general ideas of rotations may help you to do your best even if you can't remember the "perfect rotation" 😊 of course you don't have to be perfect either but I commend you for trying as hard as you can!

Write it down before you practice ur brain will do the rest

It's not that complicated. Just learn 1 aspect at a time and add new abilities in once you feel comfortable.

Thats awesome! I am glad to hear that! If you want to learn a bit extra about it, I have explained the filler details more in depth in some of the comments on the video! Otherwise, I hope you enjoy playing Samurai as you progress! 😄

@@CaetsuChaijiCh , oh I'll for sure enjoy it. Set up 2 glam plates(ronin look and armor look). Also, I previously read your detailed comments about skill speed tiers for each filler combo. Cheers.

I'm glad you found it helpful! Thank you! 😄

That is actually a really good point! This detail can easily be forgotten if you try to use all your burst together, but Ogi Namikiri specifically has a 30 second grace period which can be super helpful! :D

Thank you so much! 😁

Thank you so much! :D

I am glad you found them helpful! And Good Luck with mastering SAM, whether its Savage or something else! I do hope you enjoy! :D

If you are below level 80 then spamming your ranged attack enpi is always better than meditate as enpi actually builds enpi faster than meditate (lvl 62+) and also does damage. At level 80+ because of shoha, if you don't have the speed buff from shifu up, then meditate is slightly better value per second than enpi *until* you have 3 meditation stacks to use shoha with in which case enpi is better again 😊 If you do have shifus speed buff up then enpi is better than meditate also

There's a lot to learn, but fortunately you don't have to learn it all in one go 😁 I'm sure you can do it 😄

I'm glad you found it helpful! When unexpected things come up, the best you can do is try to do what you can. If you know when the raid buffs are coming (for example hissatsu senei is still on cooldown), then you can, for example, have a very large filler section if there isn't time for the full downtime. Overall, when something unexpected comes up, you may need to get creative to get back on track. If you fall so far off track that your burst cooldowns like Senei are outside raid cooldowns, it is generally better to use your cooldowns when you have them, rather than sit on them for a long time, as it will cost you uses of the action if you delay it too much! A very good question! I hope some of this advice helps! 😄

@@CaetsuChaijiCh This is all very useful thank you very much. I get the idea of what you’re saying but it will all probably get a lot easier with experience. I like the idea of looking at hissatsu senei and Ikishoten as indicators as how I can prepare for burst. I think the difficulty comes from knowing how much time I have between the current point and the burst windows and how therefore I adjust from the standard rotation

Yeah, it probably helps a ton with experience, since a lot of it needs to come intuitively to you to be able to easily adjust on the fly! Something that might help you a bit is to remember that it takes 8 GCDs to ready Midare Setsugekka, and depending on your GCD, this takes between 16 and 17 seconds or so. Learning to meter out how long the different kinds of fillers take can be complicated though, and in some cases, it might be better to just let your rotation drift: Over the course of a fight, skipping the fillers in each downtime could catch up your rotation down the line as well depending on how far off it is! But as you said, it probably helps the most with experience!

@@CaetsuChaijiCh that does help a bunch, all useful info, thanks again!

If you are following the looping rotation it is important to know exactly how many filler GCDs you need. Downtime can often require you to think on your feet on how to fall back into the rotation depending on when the downtime happens. One way you could go about this is to add or subtract filler GCDs depending on the fight and see what works 🤔 Heres also some other more adjacent information I also wrote: If the reason is that something gets in your way, then the way to deal with it is to try and keep track of how many gcds you "lost" as a result. For example, if your skill speed suggests you should use 2 filler GCDs but a boss mechanic forces you away for 1 gcd, then you have to do only one filler gcd instead of 2. One thing that is worth bringing up in this context is that there is an error in the video and you actually do the filler GCDs stated after the odd minute bursts, but after the even minute bursts you do 2 fillers less, as ogi namikiri and kaeshi namikiri takes up those 2 gcds to loop right.

I don't know if I can ELI5 it but I can certainly try to add some extra detail 😅 The purpose of the filler GCDs is to align your burst with raid cooldowns. Let's assume you have the lowest skill speed recommended and have a GCD of 2.15 with the speed buff. In the opener, raid buffs will typically come out around after Yukikaze or during the Midare Setsugekka cast. As such, we want to make sure that we are ready to burst again two minutes from that. The initial burst after that is 12 GCDs which take around 26 seconds to complete. As you are samurai, you can expect single player buffs like astrologian cards to go on you, so it is extra important to plan your odd minute bursts as well. To do that, you want to have Midare Setsugekka ready in around 34 seconds from now. That is 17 GCDs approximately. This is why you skip the fillers in the opener, because the downtime sequence is 17 GCDs. So we add those 17 GCDs, and the 9 from the odd minute burst itself to the total and that's 38, which equals around 82 seconds. Now we already know that the downtime sequence takes up around 34 seconds but 82+34=116 so we are missing 4 seconds. So we add 2 filler GCDs which add around 4 seconds to make it 120 so that we can start the even minute raid buff burst window with Midare Setsugekka right on time Naturally all of these numbers still tend to result in you starting your burst within one or two seconds of buffs coming out, it isn't always perfect. This is also why the steps between recommended skill speeds are quite large, because you need one extra filler every minute to be just right to make this entire math equation work. After the first two minutes, you add fillers after every burst. The odd burst is 9 GCDs, the even is 11, so adding two fillers to each, and adding the two downtime sequences of 17 GCDs together gives us a total of 58 GCDs which equates to around 125 seconds, so if a fight drags on with zero interruptions, you might need to do no filler or single GCD filler every now and then to make sure you don't drift away from the raid buffs. Most often, bosses that are difficult for stuff like this to be crucially important have forced down times though, and in those cases you will need to free-form it a bit to find your way back to timing with raid buffs 😊 I know this got very complex, but I hope it makes sense!

@@CaetsuChaijiCh i think i got the gist of it, thanks. I think this is a concept better understood through practice and experience. In a party finder setting when raid buff timings aren't called out, what should be my general mindset during downtime? Also, whats the most "noob friendly" skill speed bracket in your opinion? Took a long ass break and im relearning the game through progging Rubicante. This is also my first time playing melee, used to play rdps and healers.

In party finder the best you can do is assume everyone else is doing their openers as suggested in guides. Guides tend to recommend using raid cooldowns around 7-8 seconds in (or sooner for longer lasting buffs), which is what the samurai opener here assumes. After that everyone typically should use cooldowns when they come up. So the best you can do is blindly hope everyone else is doing it right. Besides, making your odd and even minute bursts close to precisely one minute also helps with timing your higanbana casts so you get that benefit too 😊 I believe a slower skill speed is the most friendly when learning since it gives you the most time to think between GCDs. 😊 During downtime where you cannot hit anything you should aim to find a safe spot to use meditate on if you can - if you know downtime is coming, make sure to make space for the Kenki and be fast to spend your meditation stacks if you have three! Downtime is the scariest part of fixed rotations like this one because you will kind of have to count the GCDs you have to skip in the sequence because of the downtime. Remember, the important part of your sequence between bursts is one full 8 GCD sequence to prepare Midare Setsugekka, so if, say boss downtime has lost you so many GCDs that you only have like 12 GCDs till the next minute burst, you may need to DO 4 filler GCDs (for example, a 1-2-3 combo, hagakure, yaten-enpi) and then prep Midare Setsugekka. Naturally, the optimal rotations like these tend to be in a bit of a vacuum and once a real fight comes up, the best you can do is try to find your way back most efficiently to the fixed rotation, and that is always more difficult than the rotation itself!

I assume you mean before they have two charges 😊 The best you can do is use tsubame gaeshi when you can. If you really want to optimize, remember that you can start a new combo just fine and then circle back to Midare later, for example, so if tsubame is ready in 3 gcds when you have readied Midare, then you can do hakaze, jinpu, Midare - tsubame gaeshi. You could also go even further and adjust the exact timing of your Midare with hagakure, but I think while you are still leveling the best is probably to focus on making the most of what you get! I hope this helps! 😊

I gave a very detailed explanation of the filler phase as a response to NebulaGray further down in the comments if you want to long full story. But to answer your question in particular: Depending on your skill speed, you will (according to the recommended rotation of course) need to fill a certain number of GCDs for some reason. This means you can fill 2 GCDs by doing the Yukikaze combo and then Hagakure, dumping the Sen. For 3 GCDs, you can use either the Gekko or Kasha combo and dump in the same fashion. In most cases, this is enough, so you will use one of the sen builders and then Hagakure. This can vary though depending on the fight, but let's focus on the strict optimal example first. The reason we do this is Threefold: 1) Doing this allows us to produce a perfectly looping 2 minute long rotation, consisting of the Odd minute burst - Filler - Downtime - Even minute burst - Filler - Downtime - Repeat. For some players, this is far easier to work with than a more free form rotation. 2) The looping rotation is designed to be almost precisely 1 minute between each burst. This means that when you reach the part in the burst where Higanbana is refreshed, it is typically close to 1 second before it runs out. If you free form your rotation, meaning you don't do the filler, you will likely have the burst Midare Setsugekka ready around 5-10 seconds early, and Higanbana will either be awkward to refresh, be refreshed weirdly early, or go down for a bit. 3) Planning your bursts as close to EXACTLY on the minute makes it easier to plan your big damage around raid cooldowns. On odd minutes, this typically amounts to nothing more than an Astrologian Card (If even that), but on the even minute, a coordinated raid will stack all of their cooldowns within rather close proximity. I have a video on the subject, but the general gist of it is that the difference between using your burst outside of cooldowns and during cooldowns as a Samurai can be worth over 20% extra damage. I also recommend if you want even more information on the subject, to check the comment i left for NebulaGray. And, additionally, if you still have further questions, I would love to answer those too! I hope this helps!

So I just Hakaze->Yukikaze>Hagakure once after my cooldown phase?

That's the idea yeah. Whether you need a 2 or 3 GCD filler, or more even, depends on your skill speed, which I explain a bit more about in the stat priority section 😊

This does seem to be true yes! This is partly because all of the iaijutsus take up one of the weaving windows with their cast time. Naturally the other part is that as you gradually spend resources you are in no hurry, due to the pace at which you can spend everything! 😁 There may be times in the two minute burst where you can doubleweave, but it might not be needed at all!

Meikyo shisuis cooldown is 55 seconds versus tsubame gaeshis 60 seconds. If you attempt to use them both on cooldown (which is good!) then meikyo is bound to slowly drift away from tsubame gaeshi. Depending on how close tsubame gaeshi is to being ready, you can do two steps of a 3 step combo to spend some time, and then Midare Setsugekka is a GCD of its own, so that combines for around 6-7 seconds you can "delay" for tsubame gaeshi. It is going to be extremely difficult to make the things line up perfectly, and at level 84 tsubame gaeshi gets an extra charge which makes this far easier to work with! So I would say just try your best for now, your observation tells me you have the right idea and approach! 😊 I hope some of this helps!

@@CaetsuChaijiCh Hmmm, so basically until 84, if i understood correctly i should hold Meikyo Shisui to facilitate the use of Tsubame Gaeshi on CD, right?

Not necessarily. If you aim to use meikyo when it lines up such that you can get 3 three step sens out of it, it might be just as good to use it for that, than to sit on it for tsubame gaeshi. But given the length of fights in dungeons and such, you could choose to hold meikyo for tsubame, but ultimately, there are multiple ways to go about it! Tsubame being delayed by a few seconds might not lose you any significant amount of uses throughout a dungeon for example, so deciding on the fly based on the situation might be great too! 😊

The guide assumes that you know the level 50 Opener and Rotation from the Samurai Starter Guide, so as there are no significant changes to the opener and rotation, the main thing worth mentioning is the addition of Kenki. The starter guide is here: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/atuIld2U26-xd6M.html I recommend watching the opener/rotation described in the starter guide. Additionally, the Level 70 Opener/Rotation can actually be applied wholesale, if you simply ignore the parts about Ikishoten and Hissatsu: Guren. However, for level 50-60 specifically, here is the short version: Use Meikyo Shisui, then use Gekko (For the damage buff), then Higanbana (Iaijutsu) to get the DoT up. Then use Kasha, Gekko, Hakaze, Yukikaze, Midare Setsugekka. Then you simply cycle through the three combos, preferably starting with the Yukikaze combo, and then prioritizing the 1-2-3 combo with less duration left on their buff. Meikyo Shisui is best spent on Gekko/Kasha, so having Yukikaze Sen prepped beforehand is most effective, but making use of Meikyo Shisui on time is also valuable. Kenki, as mentioned in the level 60 summary, should pretty much just be used as you get it, its not a bad idea to save 10 Kenki for a dash in when you need it. I hope this makes sense!

It depends on your skill speed, and partly the situation. In a real fight, it can get more complex too, so if you find it hard to learn the savage bosses because you need to focus too hard on getting the rotation just right, then try your best with the rotation a bit more free form until you feel more comfortable with the fight itself. For example, in a real fight, you might lose 1 or more gcds simply because the boss forces you away. If your skill speed means you need 2 filler GCDs per minute, then if you lose 2 GCDs due to boss mechanics, you can of course skip the fillers to make up for lost time. If your gcd while the buff from Shifu is up, is between 2.15 and 2.14, then it leads to two filler GCDs. If between 2.08 and 2.06, then it's 3 GCDs. If it's between 2.01 and 1.99, then it's 4 GCDs. I am pretty confident that you will need 2 fillers unless you actively have gone out of your way to stack skill speed. But that is up to you 😊

@@CaetsuChaijiCh yo thanks for the fast response! I think I am just more confused about where to fit in these fillers in the rotation and what exactly to even use them for

@@CaetsuChaijiCh btw thanks for ur vids, they helped me get a grasp an a bunch of different classes way faster

At 16:25 i show and explain briefly about it. You do your odd or even minute burst, then you perform any fillers you need to, then your down time is a full set of gekko combo, kasha combo and Yukikaze combo, followed by Midare Setsugekka. Then another 8 gcds to prepare another Midare Setsugekka, which, if you performed the correct filler and nothing got in the way, should lead to your next burst beginning in that very moment. Performing 8 gcds and then Midare and then 8 gcds, plus any burst you do does not take a full minute, so the filler is added to make it so that your rotation somewhat loops every minute (sort of). This also causes the timing of reapplying higanbana to be almost perfect, without needing to think about it as another benefit. However, the key reason for this is to make sure all your big damage cooldowns land during raid buffs, as well as Midare Setsugekka. So if your raid isn't good at coordinating raid buffs, or are, you know, more focused on learning the fight than damage output, then focusing on this kind of optimized rotation isn't as important. In fact, while very small, the filler sets are technically a damage loss that you take because it pays itself back by aligning attacks for raid buffs. In other words, you don't have to think too hard on the filler stuff while you are still learning a boss fight, but it can be helpful as you improve at the job! 😁

@@CaetsuChaijiCh ah sooo essentially it’s a technique that allows you time your strongest bursts during raid buffs better - I noticed a lot of the time when playing that around the time raid buffs went out and my ogi and hissstsu senei go off cooldown - I’m still at a point where I’m trying to collect 2 more sen and end up only doing the burst 10 seconds or so after buffs go out

As you can see in the stat priorities section near the end, there are a few options. All of them are viable, so it is mostly down to a preference thing or a gear options thing. For example, if there isn't much gear with both crit and speed on it, it can be tough to reach the fastest amounts without sacrifices elsewhere. 😊 If you aren't doing the looping rotation or any particularly optimized rotation, and aren't doing savage raiding or similar, then samurai can work with most any skill speed amount, and it again boils down to just your preference 😊 I hope this helps!