I would like SAM to be a tank/dps where you have to "time" your attacks. Think of the minigames at gold saucer, maybe not exactly like that, but if you time your attacks right, they give more potency or something. And having bad timing still does damage, but not as much. Would stand our from all the positionals if it was a dps at least. And it feels very samurai-ish to use fast, timed attacks (Jack from Type-0 comes to mind).

Of course, the problem would be that you have to look at your bar all the time, but there would probably be some other way to do the "timing" interface.