Give AST's Spear card 2 charges and a 1 min duration
The only card left in AST's toolkit with generally questionable usefulness is the Spear: it's just too situational. Aside from being useful if you can spread it to the party right as a fight starts, it's going to be useful only on a select few classes who always have short cooldowns (NIN, MNK, maybe SMN), and if you happen to not have those classes in your party, it'll nearly always be Royal road fodder.
So I suggest this:
The Spear
1 min duration
The next two abilities the target uses will have 20% reduced cooldown time.
(1 ability when expanded to the party)
(30% reduced CD when enhanced)
(4 charges and 2 minutes when extended)
Either this or make the Spear decrease the CD time of abilities that are already cooling down.
The Spear is just too situational otherwise, especially compared to all of the other cards that just offer so much more utility that can ALWAYS be useful.
Here were Ghishlain's findings on double Spear vs. Balance on a NIN, the class that gets the most mileage out of a haphazardly thrown Spear card on it:
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Ghishlain
Quote Originally Posted by Ghishlain View Post
Some food for thought since Richard brought it up and made me think about. Let's discuss Spear over the duration of one minute:
Ninja can Ninjutsu Raiton 3 times in a minute for a total of 1,080 Potency in that time frame.
Assuming you draw Spear twice in a row and do it just as their Ninjutsu goes on CD, they'll get Ninjutsu's going off every 16s seconds. Effectively they'll get four Ninjutsu's Raitons in 64s, giving them a 360 Potency Increase in that about one minute time frame.
Ninja's most damaging combo is their Aeolian Edge combo, which is a total potency of (150 + 200 + 320) = 670 Potency. Assuming no haste, no poisons, no slashing debuff, no buffs, absolutely nothing - Ninja can perform this 670 Potency combo every 7.5s for a total of 5,360 potency. Add 10% from double Balance (or Extended Balance) and you get an additional potency of 536 which is much better than what double Spear can give your Ninja DPS. This also doesn't include the fact that Raiton itself will be affected by Balance as well and you'll up with an additional 108 Potency over those 60s.
Just a bit more food for thought in terms of probability:
Drawing two Spears in a row is a 2.77% chance of occurring (Extended Spear is not the same as double Spear due to how the spacing of Ninjutsu - spear would wear off after the third Ninjutsu and push the 4th Ninjutsu to 68s)
Drawing two Balances in a row is a 2.77% chance of occurring. Drawing Spear and RRing it for Extend then drawing Balance is also 2.77% chance (you'll probably end up using Arrow unless TP is tight at the time) - this effectively makes drawing double Balance / Extended balance a 5.54% occurrence.
Neither of these probabilities take into account the usage of Shuffle.
Basically, even back to back Spears don't give short cooldown classes more benefit than RRing the Spear to extend a more useful buff.