Sleeve Draw feels horrible now

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Originally Posted by Brandedblade

Sleeve draw is a perfect example of the tendency for players to turn clunky and awful game design into points of pride and displays of skills. Why yes, I too judge my skill in a game over my ability to overcome awful game design that a decent chunk of the players could not handle.

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To be fair, this community also turns the ability to press 1, 2 and 3 in order into an amazing skill too.

Broadly speaking, The old Sleeve Draw opener was awkward as heck. Even accomplishing it flawlessly never left me feeling a sense of pride, just relief that it was over. And dread that I'd need to do it again next wipe.

Honestly, Sleeve Draw would be a more interesting mechanic if burning cards into Lord/Lady granted a stack of Sleeve Draw to a max of 3.
Then give us a 10 minute recast buff that can only be used outside of combat that grants all 3 Seals. Allows us to ensure an opening Divination at full strength while disallowing it's use during combat, where Draw Seals are needed.

Disconnects Sleeve Draw from being a requirement for our opening Divination to align with everyone else's openers (I dislike raid buff stacking as a concept, But that's not what this thread is about) and allows it to be used organically during a fight.
Draw for Seals, Lord/Lady to turn duplicate Seals into Sleeve Draw stacks while buffing allies. Sleeve Draw would probably need to lose its smart Seal acquisition though.

Would it be possible to fix jobs without completely tearing out huge chunks of them and making dumbed down changes to patch existing problems? I don't expect this to happen in the near future if it was possible but it could maybe be a better fix? Like, if you want simple gameplay, make it a option. I don't really think that we all should be generalized based on a vocal minority of people who demand things to suit them only. I can deal with the loss of card pulls in favor for faster draws, but where does the line end for ast? When can whm and sch get there reworks to make them more efficient and inviting?

I hate it when jobs get worse because they need to dumb them down to work on controllers, they turned a really cool skill that gave you 3 cards back to back into a skill that gives you 1, with the same 180s cooldown. All this rework did was make AST slower and less fun to play.

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Originally Posted by Tizzy_Tormentor

I hate it when jobs get worse because they need to dumb them down to work on controllers, they turned a really cool skill that gave you 3 cards back to back into a skill that gives you 1, with the same 180s cooldown. All this rework did was make AST slower and less fun to play.

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As a controller player, the job got better, and a skill that used to be an utter shitshow is now functional.

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Originally Posted by Jirah

I know Divination isn’t a required opener but what genius game design that you have to actively wait to use it effectively.

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Everyone: "we hate Monk's anatman opener"

SE: "i heard you like waiting, we'll make you wait on Astro's opener too."

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Originally Posted by Seraphor

As a controller player, the job got better, and a skill that used to be an utter shitshow is now functional.

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Also as a controller player, AST got dumed down again and i was perfectly fine in 4.0 and a skill that used to give everyone a buff and make the opener more fluid is now halted to a crawl to cater to people that dont even like the job. need a easy healer go to WHM dont make every job remedial to cater to the most impaired. this isnt a kids game we dont need this type of grinding down. 6.0 will just have 1 button prompts because pressing 2 is hard

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Originally Posted by Seraphor

As a controller player, the job got better, and a skill that used to be an utter shitshow is now functional.

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That's quite the opinion there. It was a "shitshow" indeed

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Originally Posted by Jirah

Also as a controller player, AST got dumed down again and i was perfectly fine in 4.0 and a skill that used to give everyone a buff and make the opener more fluid is now halted to a crawl to cater to people that dont even like the job. need a easy healer go to WHM dont make every job remedial to cater to the most impaired. this isnt a kids game we dont need this type of grinding down. 6.0 will just have 1 button prompts because pressing 2 is hard

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Well said.

Don't worry, 5.4 will remove minor arcana.

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Originally Posted by Jirah

Also as a controller player, AST got dumed down again and i was perfectly fine in 4.0 and a skill that used to give everyone a buff and make the opener more fluid is now halted to a crawl to cater to people that dont even like the job. need a easy healer go to WHM dont make every job remedial to cater to the most impaired. this isnt a kids game we dont need this type of grinding down. 6.0 will just have 1 button prompts because pressing 2 is hard

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Because 4.0 AST had an entirely different card system that frankly worked much better with Sleeve Draw since you weren't targeting specific players most of the time but spreading cards to everyone. Making the job function better for controller players isn't "dumbing it down." It's fixing a clunky design. You might have been okay with it but many people weren't. In fact, plenty of those complaining were PC players to boot. A good portion of complaints—I dare even say most—had little to do with Sleeve Draw being difficult but rather annoying since no other job in the game requires you to target individual party members that frequently. Now you can certainly argue where they landed wasn't ideal but lets drop the whole "they're dumbing it down!!!" nonsense. If people wanted to play White Mage. They would. Astro has a lot of tools which make it appealing to many players even without the cards. Sleeve Draw simply irritated them.

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

Because 4.0 AST had an entirely different card system that frankly worked much better with Sleeve Draw since you weren't targeting specific players most of the time but spreading cards to everyone. Making the job function better for controller players isn't "dumbing it down." It's fixing a clunky design. You might have been okay with it but many people weren't. In fact, plenty of those complaining were PC players to boot. A good portion of complaints—I dare even say most—had little to do with Sleeve Draw being difficult but rather annoying since no other job in the game requires you to target individual party members that frequently. Now you can certainly argue where they landed wasn't ideal but lets drop the whole "they're dumbing it down!!!" nonsense. If people wanted to play White Mage. They would. Astro has a lot of tools which make it appealing to many players even without the cards. Sleeve Draw simply irritated them.

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If it was just targeting party members, Sleeve Draw wouldn't have been as much of an issue.

To do it optimally, You needed to switch from boss to ally back to boss casting Malefics and Cards as you go. It was just plain annoying. I don't even use a controller, and it still annoyed the hell out of me.

Honestly, old sleeve draw was a pain, it was powerful, but a pain. All it needs is a cooldown reduction and it's fine. I like it now. Also if you ended up getting paired with another AST it was really easy to screw eachother over with your openers without express communication. It's easier to non-verbally work things out between eachother now.

Also the MP/Draw changes? Who is MP? I don't know her.

old sleeve draw was a pain but only thing wrong with new sleeve draw is its CD
90-120 seconds it would be fine

The thing that bugs me the most about this version of Sleeve Draw is how punishing a death is. Not in terms of MP, 'cause I can be back to half MP within, like, 4 seconds... But the most effective way to play AST is to use your buffs in the same window as everyone else, and dying even once means that goes out the window completely for the rest of the fight and can't really be recovered.


If Divination were usable without 3 seals, this problem would be solved. Obviously, "empty" seals wouldn't count... but, basically, we all want this entire system to go back to the drawing board, so I'd really prefer just bandaid fixes to make the half-baked current system tolerable until the next expansion. Past experiences have convinced me expecting more will just make me disappointed.

For God's sake SE, put those damn cards on the GCD!

I partially jest. I have no idea how to fix this thing, and neither do they.

I don't get why you guys are complaining about target switching as a problem. Just use macros for those abilities. I use mouse over macro or macros that target different party members for those kinds of abilities, and never had any target switching problems. Everything felt smooth.

Macros are a double-edged sword. I think they are just fine when not tied to abilities, as is the case with the target switching. However, creating macros for solely this purpose can be cumbersome for controller users as it will take up a slot on their crossbar.

In the case of abilities, macros prevent being able to queue them up. You would think this wouldn't be much of an issue, but when you go ham on a dummy you should immediately feel the drawback and tell yourself no way, no how will I deal with that in combat. I don't even see how this can be a preference, it is seriously clunky not being able to queue up abilities.

In short, there really isn't an easy way around the previous sleeve draw when it came to targeting. All issues with Sleeve Draw and its kin are all rooted in the AST card mechanic. There honestly is no point in making adjustments to any abilities tied to the cards until they can truly address it. It can be fixed; but it has to change entirely.

Theorycraft away. We've been doing it for years mate.

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Originally Posted by Realism_Snide

I don't get why you guys are complaining about target switching as a problem. Just use macros for those abilities. I use mouse over macro or macros that target different party members for those kinds of abilities, and never had any target switching problems. Everything felt smooth.

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Those AST card macros for each player are nifty, but you can't do that on controller.