Yet Another AST Card Redesign Concept

[Brandedblade]

Since trying to redesign AST cards are all the rage nowadays on the forums. I decided to post mine out of boredom. While I personally enjoy the current card system. This is what my fantasy was for the card system to function like prior to shb.

In this concept. Draw would be divided into two, Astral Draw and Umbral Draw. Both are on separate 30 second cooldowns.

Astral Draw would draw an Astrally Aspected arcanum from the divining deck, allowing you to grant an ally a Fortune effect. A player can only have one Fortune at a time and the most recently applied effect would overwrite the past effect.

The Balance: Increase Det by 10%.
The Spire: Increase Crit by 10%
The Arrow: Increase DH by 10%
These effects would last for 15 seconds.

The change from Spear to Spire was purely an aesthetic decision since the Spire is the Lightning card, which is an Astral element, whereas the Spear is the Ice card, which is an Umbral element.

Umbral Draw would draw an Umbrally Aspected arcanum from the divining deck, allowing you to grant the enemy a Misfortune effect. An enemy can only have one Misfortune at a time and the most recently applied effect would overwrite the past effect.

The Bole: 1% Physical Damage Vulnerability
The Ewer: 1% Magical Damage Vulnerability
The Spear: .5% General Damage Vulnerability

These effects are intentionally incredibly weak due to how other old card mechanics would interact with them.

Royal Road: Would only affect and be generated by Astral Draws, it would've been the same otherwise
Balance: 150% Potency
Spire: 50% Potency + AoE
Arrow: 200% Duration

Spread: Would only affect Astral Draws

Redraw: Affects the last draw preformed.Action Would Change to Astral Redraw after an Astral Draw and Umbral Redraw after an Umbral Draw.

Minor Arcana: Affects the last draw preformed. Astral Draws would become Lady of Crowns. Which at the time of last brainstorm was still going to be a heal.

Umbral draws would become Lord of Crowns. Which would've had an additional effect of refreshing the duration of the current Misfortune regardless of whomever applied it.

Time Dilation: It ofc has no effect on Umbral Draws due to being targeted on a party member only.

Celestial Opposition would also increase the duration of Misfortunes applied to enemies hit by the effect.


The final part of the concept was a cooldown designed specifically to interact with Misfortunes.

Twist of Fate: 180 sec recast. Increases the effect of the currently applied Misfortune on the target enemy to 10% for the Bole and Ewer and to 6% for the Spear.
Additional effect: All enemies within 10 yalms of the target would receive half of currently applied Twist of Fate damage vulnerability. This effect ends when Twist of Fate ends.
Duration: 12 seconds
When Twist of Fate ends, the target will be afflicted with "Uncertain Fate" preventing the reapplication of Twist of Fate for 120 seconds.

Essentially this would grant the AST an ability that was effectively a trick attack, and additionally provide the AST a way to AoE the debuff under controlled instances. The Uncertain Fate mechanic was an intentional measure to prevent multiple ASTs from chaining the effect for a higher uptime.

The idea of the system would've been that Astral Draw performs the role filled by the old card system, while still providing damage to the group. And in emergencies you could've ofc converted the cards into a heal with Lady of Crowns with complete reliability.

Whereas with Umbral Draws, the concept would've been that the ast would try to redraw for the appropriate debuff for their group, and once it was applied to the enemy, the AST would then spend all subsequent Umbral Draws on Lord of Crowns to deal damage and maintain the debuff. The one effect per target limitation was completely intentional to keep multiple asts from compounding their power. However, all ASTs in a group could've still maintained the debuff with their Lord of Crowns.

[KDSilver]

Any rework that doesn't include old bole and ewer and is purely damage centered has no interest than the current system.

[Brandedblade]

Any rework that doesn't include old bole and ewer and is purely damage centered has no interest than the current system.

Thank you for the feedback. I made this concept up during the days of "Draw Balance or bust" so it was built with that issue in mind.

[YusiKha]

Any rework that doesn't include old bole and ewer and is purely damage centered has no interest than the current system.

Any rework that includes old Ewer has completely ignored the changes to MP regeneration.

[KDSilver]

How ?
This was a refresh potency of 50 during 15s.
If that's about potency you just reduce it.

[YusiKha]

How ?
This was a refresh potency of 50 during 15s.
If that's about potency you just reduce it.

All outside sources of MP regeneration (ranged’s refresh, caster’s mana shift, Ewer) were all either removed or changed to something else. MP Management is now entirely self-only.

[Sebazy]

It's a pretty safe rework, but it's perhaps too conservative IMHO?

I'm firmly of the opinion that SE should suck it up and go full yolo on a card rework.

Remove Malefic entirely (This will make more sense in a moment), Put draw on the GCD with an instant cast and little (Maybe 2 or 3 GCDs to slow things down if it's too hectic) to no cooldown but only usable when in combat. Give us a a variety of buffs akin to 3.x-4.x AST in a much more watered down but stackable form. It's critical that these buffs have a clear visible and audible cue to distinguish them from one another. Make it so with a card drawn, we can either apply the buff to a teammate OR throw the card as a nuke ala Malefic on a mob target with the same hotkey.

Give us a medium length cooldown to spread our buffs from one player to the rest akin to Deploy. Perhaps CO could be resorted back to it's former glory via this and the re-addition of it's stun effect.

This gives us a healer that can get legitimate value out of buffing at the expense of it's own personal DPS making things massively easier to balance and refine. I'd also hope this would go a long way towards appeasing those that dislike the current meta of healers being bland DPS with some support abilities to throw between Rocks.

At this stage I honestly don't think SE have anything to lose.

[Brandedblade]

It's a pretty safe rework, but it's perhaps too conservative IMHO?

I'm firmly of the opinion that SE should suck it up and go full yolo on a card rework.

Remove Malefic entirely (This will make more sense in a moment), Put draw on the GCD with an instant cast and little (Maybe 2 or 3 GCDs to slow things down if it's too hectic) to no cooldown but only usable when in combat. Give us a a variety of buffs akin to 3.x-4.x AST in a much more watered down but stackable form. It's critical that these buffs have a clear visible and audible cue to distinguish them from one another. Make it so with a card drawn, we can either apply the buff to a teammate OR throw the card as a nuke ala Malefic on a mob target with the same hotkey.

Give us a medium length cooldown to spread our buffs from one player to the rest akin to Deploy. Perhaps CO could be resorted back to it's former glory via this and the re-addition of it's stun effect.

This gives us a healer that can get legitimate value out of buffing at the expense of it's own personal DPS making things massively easier to balance and refine. I'd also hope this would go a long way towards appeasing those that dislike the current meta of healers being bland DPS with some support abilities to throw between Rocks.

At this stage I honestly don't think SE have anything to lose.

I agree. The complete conservatism was intentional since I didnt want it to be too incredibly powerful, especially considering the potential to permanently debuff a raid boss with a damage vulnerability. I wouldnt personally be comfortable making the Umbral draw vulnerability bigger then 2% for that reason. Which is about in line with other permanent group buffs such as bard songs.

[Risvertasashi]

Thank you for the feedback. I made this concept up during the days of "Draw Balance or bust" so it was built with that issue in mind.

I can't help but suspect maybe this is why SE didn't touch AST in 5.2. There's a lot of dissatisfaction with the current system, but there's also definitely a divide in the community on what's wanted. It will be interesting to see what changes they make before 6.0, if any.

It's a pretty safe rework, but it's perhaps too conservative IMHO?

I'm firmly of the opinion that SE should suck it up and go full yolo on a card rework.

Remove Malefic entirely (This will make more sense in a moment), Put draw on the GCD with an instant cast and little (Maybe 2 or 3 GCDs to slow things down if it's too hectic) to no cooldown but only usable when in combat. Give us a a variety of buffs akin to 3.x-4.x AST in a much more watered down but stackable form. It's critical that these buffs have a clear visible and audible cue to distinguish them from one another. Make it so with a card drawn, we can either apply the buff to a teammate OR throw the card as a nuke ala Malefic on a mob target with the same hotkey.

Give us a medium length cooldown to spread our buffs from one player to the rest akin to Deploy. Perhaps CO could be resorted back to it's former glory via this and the re-addition of it's stun effect.

This gives us a healer that can get legitimate value out of buffing at the expense of it's own personal DPS making things massively easier to balance and refine. I'd also hope this would go a long way towards appeasing those that dislike the current meta of healers being bland DPS with some support abilities to throw between Rocks.

At this stage I honestly don't think SE have anything to lose.

The downside is this kind of rework is almost certainly a "next expac" kind of thing, while more conservative changes at least have a chance of coming to fruition before then. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be done.

That out of the way - I like your idea. With WHM SE already tied its gimmick to the GCD and this did make me nervous at first, but it seems to have worked out pretty well. Adding a GCD buff system to make things more interesting than bland nuke spamming sounds... well, interesting. It would probably make me pick up AST more often.

[Sighearth]

IMO the best card rework without all the cards being damage would be: have an UI where you can set up deck and save a deck before the fight. All cards are aoe, we can have only balance given % damage and other cards doing what they used to do ( with some adjustments) but we can only have 3 (maybe 4?) repeated cards in our deck. You can organize the draw order and save it to use it in any duty. All ast cards frequency would be the same, the order that will be different, have the UI show the card you have now and the next card you will draw. Have an aoe in about 2min into the fight? Have your 4th in draw be a bole, the reopener in this fight due to downtime gonna be 7min? have a balance rdy for that. Fight knowledge would be rewarded, we could have a number of slots to save/share decks to use in different duties/comps.