Astro Card Proposal

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Originally Posted by SweetPete

If they keep them as we have now then SE needs to rework the Astrologian quest line for the cards. They can be very confusing to new players thinking they are diverse and full of utility when they aren’t anymore.

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I didn't pick up AST until after 5.2, and didn't find the quests confusing.
Perhaps that means they were subtly rewritten already (did you do them again to compare?) or perhaps this isnt really an issue, though I can only speak for myself on this.

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Originally Posted by ItMe

I didn't pick up AST until after 5.2, and didn't find the quests confusing.
Perhaps that means they were subtly rewritten already (did you do them again to compare?) or perhaps this isnt really an issue, though I can only speak for myself on this.

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Does it still have the instances where you put the card on another NPC? Like I remember you put Bole on a NPC that was tanking mobs and afterwards you get cutscene where you're looking at the constellation in relation to the card and they are telling you more about it? If not then they possibly could have rewritten it.

Someone else posted this kind of topic 4 months ago with similar concepts: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...57#post5379157

Not sure what kind of effect these would have either now or in 6.0

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

This is recreating a lot of the same issues that the old card system had. I know many of us, myself included, mention how the old cards were much more fun, but they were stilled flawed. What we got was not the solution, but just going back to it isn't really either, and while there are definitive differences between this concept and the old cards, many of the same problems arise.

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While I don't know the exact impact of the old card system, it definitely led to a lot of decision-making on when to hold or when to Royal Road to be able to maximize that DPS increase from the balance card...

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Originally Posted by Seoulstar

Does it still have the instances where you put the card on another NPC? Like I remember you put Bole on a NPC that was tanking mobs and afterwards you get cutscene where you're looking at the constellation in relation to the card and they are telling you more about it? If not then they possibly could have rewritten it.

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No. You cast aspected benefic on them instead.
The info about the constellations got added to other cutscenes.

"The most important thing is the fun factor, and a lot of people loved the rng and flavour of the cards."
No they didn't. It may have for a few, but this "lot of people" just kept spamming/throwing away the cards until the magic one or two appeared, or just ignored the card system and got on with healing people.

Now we have posts complaining about changing from the old system, while at the same time we have posts (based on 6.0) complaining about changing from the current system. Go figure..

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Originally Posted by Teraluna

"The most important thing is the fun factor, and a lot of people loved the rng and flavour of the cards."
No they didn't. It may have for a few, but this "lot of people" just kept spamming/throwing away the cards until the magic one or two appeared, or just ignored the card system and got on with healing people.

Now we have posts complaining about changing from the old system, while at the same time we have posts (based on 6.0) complaining about changing from the current system. Go figure..

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Unless there has been update that has been missed..I don't recall seeing anything about changes to the card system. Only the fact that AST mains is losing the ability to decide if they want to do shield or pure healing. Those are like..two separate situations.

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Originally Posted by Teraluna

"The most important thing is the fun factor, and a lot of people loved the rng and flavour of the cards."
No they didn't. It may have for a few, but this "lot of people" just kept spamming/throwing away the cards [...]

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Both claims are pretty baseless lol.

The fact is. The old card system had its flaws but for 90% of players, RNG was not it. The only people really affected by the RNG aspect were highly optimized players that could use more consistency out of the system. The others who thought they were affected were non-optimized players who assumed that fetching for balance was all that mattered.
For all those in between, it was about using your card skills to decrease your chances of throwing cards away.
IIRC Throwing two draw CDs away (back to back) was a rdps loss compared to card states that were relatively easy to achieve (augmented single target). So you never fetched for too long if you were good. It was pretty easy to get a decent and consistent rdps baseline. Pushing that further was where the RNG could stab you in the back.
Now sure, I agree that even with the above, the system could really have benefited from a couple more good cards (and probably better scaling of the cards) but overall it wasn't half as bad as people make it out to be.

High-level parser and speed kill Astros needed more though, and the current iteration of cards addressed that. Sadly, I know many of these players who disliked the change regardless of it's efficacy.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

I strongly feel that we need to move DPS support into other actions and leave the cards as utility only, at least in their own unique effects. That's the only way that we can reasonably see the cards not all do the same thing, because when utility is no longer competing against DPS, you have more opportunities to use these effects, and a more justifiable reason to have them be randomized.

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I agree, no matter how strong they buff defensive cards, they will never equal to that of a DPS card. The idea of using an enhanced Bole was amazing in dungeons with massive mob pulls but that's where the usefulness ends. AoE balance will always be better than something you couldn't rely on for raidwides so past that, Balance can be used in any situation.

Removing DPS buffs off cards is where we can divisify the cards again with them being strictly utlity based. Although that can be useless considering that RNG utlity is tricky for timings.

So I would suggest a seperate CD timer for utilities.

Ex.

1. Solar/Lunar/Celestial procs Divination (120s)

2. Solar/Solar/Celestial procs an AoE regen oGCD

3. Lunar/Lunar/Celestial procs an AoE mitigation oGCD 10%~

4. Lunar/Lunar/Solar procs a shield oGCD

There's room for more card spenders but the idea is giving an RNG factor without being completely punished for it. The only issue with this the amount of cards needed to use them.

Placing offensive and non-offensive resources on the same cooldown will always result in offensive resources being favoured. This is an immutable consequence of this game's combat system.

Mitigation tools that cannot be relied upon are worthless. A decent healer will have planned how to complete a fight in advance, making extra RNG mitigation unnecessary. Unless the extra mitigation can save a healing GCD it confers no benefit, and even with a beefy -20% mitigation this is unlikely to happen outside of intense healing checks like J Waves or Terminal Relativity. This stems from how damage in this game tends towards infrequent spikes that must be mitigated to survive. If the game treated HP as a resource that is consistently drained and must be replenished using finite healing resources (like in most other games featuring healers) then RNG mitigation gains value in that it conserves resources. Utility, such as MP regeneration, falls into the same trap unless it can be converted into damage.

Unless you want to make a portion of cards entirely worthless there is no way to implement them as anything more than an offensive tool without either overhauling the entire combat system or splitting AST's cards into offensive and defensive decks that are accessed using two separate resources.

"RNG was not it, RNG could stab you in the back"

Let me say I agree that some people didn't mind the downside of the old system. They obviously enjoyed the challenge and it's fair to say, frustration of dealing with unwanted cards when they turned up.
I still believe, and from first hand conversations with players, that the hit and miss aspect was a major turn off.

Then it got changed.
SE don't change things on the feedback of one person, or even a few people. But they do listen to majorities.
We have just seen that with cutting Ultima in favour of majority content, in the changes to DR after significant feedback, with the increase in relic item drop rates for the same reason.
They will also look at their metrics, of player numbers, of class outputs.

They will have done this with Ast, and the results will have caused them to move away from the old system. That obviously wasn't to everyone's liking - class changes never are - it will however, have been done based on majority feedback & data.