Everything wrong with 5.3 AST sleeve draw [Translated JP duplicate thread]

Disclaimer: This is a duplicate thread from the JP forums, translated in the hope to open discussion in the English community. With permission, I have integrated a few posts from the original thread for completeness. LINK TO ORIGINAL POST
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I predict that the changes to Sleeve Draw in 5.3 is mainly a response to:
A. Voices about how the difficulty/complexity of 5.x~5.2 sleeve draw had “bad QoL”
B. Voices about the stress around obtaining Divination Seals

Assuming the intent of these adjustments was QoL improvement catered to these voices, the real issues I have with new Sleeve can be broken down into two main points:

1. By reducing the total number of cards obtained, you destroyed a major optimization fun factor;
2. This implementation is flawed as a QoL improvement in the first place


Here are my thoughts about these points in detail.

[1. By reducing the total number of cards obtained, you destroyed a major optimization fun factor.].

While certainly outside the volume zone of the game’s population, there are a certain number of core players who love to do fights, and do them well. For those players, the process of being inventive, optimizing, and discovering how to do things better than the general public are fun factors.
The merits of optimizing AST cards are huge, and there are people that enjoy this immense advantage gained by optimizing cards correctly. However, this implementation of Sleeve Draw takes away a great deal from this enjoyment.

I felt this was well summed up by this response I saw in the Astrologer's Thread: LINK
Quoted below:

“There are many possible ways to play Shadowbringers AST cards as they are single target and can be played to any party member anytime during a 30 second window. Optimizing cardplay thus requires knowledge of your party’s jobs in addition to your own, which makes it very interesting and rewarding to do.
Sleeve Draw in particular allowed you to play an additional three cards in a burst window, so by spreading timelines of each job involved in this burst and doing simple math, I was able to come up with priorities on the most optimal action for every oGCD window. There was material return in doing this work, which made optimizing and playing this job worthwhile.”


What I want to request is, please do NOT deny us the pleasure of such optimization in the name of QoL improvements.

Continues to post 2...

In general, every job post HW continually suffers from the simplification/elimination of many fun optimizable complexities. It is of course reasonable and understandable that you want the gap between top gamers and casual players to not be grossly wide (as Yoshi P once mentioned live), but I feel the means you employ are not serving this purpose well.

Making less than mid-scale adjustments to oGCDs and job mechanics may narrow the gap between top and second-tier gamers, but will impact volume zone players with far less magnitude in both positive and negative directions, because as a fact many casual players do not use oGCDs on cooldown (if at all) in the first place.

For the purpose of closing gaps between casual and top players, it seems more reasonable and effective to increase the portion of damage dealt by Autos and basic GCD skills instead of simplifying/removing oGCD or mechanic complexities. While at least most users can deal Auto (and usually basic GCD) damages given they are alive, simplifying and removing job complexities will hurt the optimization experience AND not materially affect causal players.

[2. This implementation is flawed as a QoL improvement in the first place]

Yes, it is true that with new Sleeve it is now easier to use 6% divination on opener. That's it.

The cooldowns of Divination and Sleeve Draw are 120s and 180s respectively, so for 1 in 2 Divinations it is physically impossible to utilize Sleeve’s new search effect, and we are simply required to obtain Seals with less cards. In fact, we are now forced as a result to spam Redraw with cards we were previously able to play, and have far less options regarding Minor Arcana. We also now need to wait prepull for Draw recast in order to use Divination for opener, which feels bad in PF context.

While this was presumably a QoL change, the only real QoL change achieved by this is that you now need to press less buttons (which by the way is boring for some), and QoL regarding Seals has become worse in many aspects.

Continues to post 3...

So, what should be done?

A quick dirty fix could look like:
- Simply reverting to 5.2
- Bring back 5.2 Sleeve as a separate skill with a shared cooldown, and multiply the effect of 5.3 Sleeve by 2~2.5x (*1).

A more fundamental change could look like reverting to 5.2 Sleeve and:
- Allow players to randomly distribute three cards by hitting Sleeve Draw again
- Allow players to toggle an auto random-cardplay mode synonymous to old Arcanist Sic

The basic idea here is to maintain the number of cards available and allow the player to choose how many decisions they want to make. Changes like these will be a major QoL improvement for players that find cardplay difficult while preserving the optimization experience for higher level players.

I gave just a few example potential solutions, but the point I want to stress most through this thread is that there are many possible methods to improve QoL without hurting the optimization experience. It is my hope that for future adjustments you pay more attention to views of players that enjoy optimizing battle, and to not treat QoL and complexity like a tradeoff but rather concepts that can coexist.


(*1) My personal take is, simply reverting to 5.2 is best. I suggested shared cooldowns here to keep both versions because I understand that this revamp came from a decision that QoL improvement was needed. Effect multiplication for 5.3 Sleeve is there to alleviate the difference of DPS contribution between the two versions, as such a large difference may pressure players that prefer the new version to unwillingly use the other.

P.S. If nerfing AST DPS contribution was part of the decision-making process for this revamp, then to me simply nerfing Malefic 4 seems to be most appropriate for reasons already given.

Or, give current Sleeve Draw 3 charges.

This actually can be said about every job . every job post HW continually suffers from the simplification/elimination of many fun optimizable complexities.
I really hope SE hears this. it is in all honesty for me what hurts shadowbringers as an expansion the most. i may enjoy the story , the hard fights but when my job turned to worst it took out not all but some of my enjoyment of the game.
To put an example, In stormblood i loved doing dungeons as smn , it felt fun and cathartic .
Now though it just doesnt feel the same way , sure our dps is top notch and our utility really good but thats not the problem with the job, the problem is that the changes they put in 5.0 that have persisted since now. Pets no longer feel like they "exist" , without aetherflow our roots are detouched and hang like rotten limbs and we didnt gain anything from its removal.
Trance is not nearly as good of a clock as aetherflow ,bahamut became slower now that it doesnt interact with ogcds , trance joined with pheonix its a button that can be a massive dps loss depending the fight and it doesnt feel as rewarding as stormblood bahamut.
In stormblood the play style was extremely punishing , since a death meant you would go back to the start but it rewarded you with higher highs, free movement and it gave you a rotation that was so fluid you basicly wrote the fight ,which was fitting for a the tactician job.
Shadowbringer summoner retains a lot of it but to put it better, in stormblood you wrote the rotation to see how you would get the most out of it, while in shadowbringers you write it to see how you will lose the least out of it.

While I'm at it, I'll also translate what I posted on the JP counterpart
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Thanks for quoting me in your post. I am in total agreement.


There are few thoughts I want to give regarding Divination Seals, a stress factor you raised as partially responsible for this problematic Sleeve Draw revamp.

It is true that prior 5.3, Seals in my eyes had the following issues:

1. With the old skill set, namely Draw, Redraw and Sleeve Draw, there was an unavoidable luck factor of varying degree (depending on party timeline) involved during opener in whether or not you were able to hit 6% divination at optimal timing.
2. There were times mid-fight when you could never get the Seal you wanted no matter how many times you spammed Redraw. In particular, it felt terrible when by spamming Redraw you started looping between the same cards.

The concept of a skill that restricts the Seal of your subsequent (re)draw, like the one SE implemented with 5.3 Sleeve Draw, actually is a viable solution these stress factors. Of course, as you have described in detail, revamping Sleeve Draw for this purpose was problematic in many ways but had this been a Redraw revamp I feel this would have been much more popular.


Concrete implementations could look like:

1. Transfer new Sleeve Draw’s Seal search effect to Redraw, and revert Sleeve Draw to 5.2 (this is an oversimplification of the job imo)
2. Add skills like Redraw II: Redraw a card with your missing Seal(s), Redraw III: Redraw a card with opposite Melee/Ranged properties with 180s~ cooldowns
3. Allow to redraw cards with your missing Seal(s) after spamming Redraw n times without Play.

The point is giving the player an option to obtain a desired Seal when in absolute need without changing the number of cards available to the player, and the above are only a few possible specifications of an idea that could take many forms. I feel a Redraw revamp in this direction will improve QoL and give players a wider range of options for optimizing cardplay at the same time.

SE Devs, if you are going to reconsider 5.3 Sleeve Draw in the near future, it would be great if you think about reworking Redraw as well.


P.S. This is not directly about Seals and I am sure I would be the billionth person to say this since launch of Shadowbringers, but Devs while you’re at it please disallow looping between the same cards when spamming Redraw? It feels terrible.

Healer job design in general has been completely abysmal from 4.0 onwards. The 5.3 AST changes should come as no surprise to anyone who has played healer in this game for a long time.

The message from the developers is clear: Healers should not concern themselves with optimization.

As a result, I now simply do 8 weekly clears with my static and then log out and play a different game instead. Pressing one button a hundred times and hoping for better Crit/DH luck is not an expression of player skill in the slightest. Sadly, the current job design philosophy shows no signs of changing.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ayesafaile

Healer job design in general has been completely abysmal from 4.0 onwards. The 5.3 AST changes should come as no surprise to anyone who has played healer in this game for a long time.

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Post HW job design and adjustments are bad in optimization context for pretty much every job in the game, and I've disliked it all along.

At least pre 5.3 cards were worth playing in my opinion (more so than 4.x cards for reasons written in the first post, which may be contrary to the opinions of some), and while I'm not surprised that they ruined this too, the devs ways of taking anything remotely complicated/interesting in the game and nullyfying it disheartened me enough to get myself posting (and translating!) in the forums for the first time in my life, fully aware of history showing I am most probably wasting my time.

I am dearly hoping for that 0.0001% chance they may hear us for once though... how great if such a world existed.

More cards = more fun. AST's main gimmick is giving away cards after all.

This is a kind of interesting contrast to the many complaints of AST having too much to do/too much micromanagement, which have been vocalized pretty often on these forums. Seems SE is going to make some people unhappy one way or another...