Stormblood

It’s late and I found myself watching Stormblood Astrologian videos on YouTube. Just broke my heart. Seeing those lovely Aoe balances being tossed around and hearing that lovely sound from time dilation. I miss it so much. I really can’t stand the streamlining and homogenization of the jobs. Why do we have to wait until 8.0 for job redesigns? I also don’t even have much faith in that either. They admitted they took it all too far but still. Trust is gone and they truly need to make it up to the player-base.

I feel like 8.0 the devs gotta come strong or this game is gonna be beyond done.

-Royal Road
-Unique Cards (Cards we have now suck. Just basically all tank cards except balance and spear)
-Time Dilation
-Old Celstial Opposition

I really don't get this hype. When I look at old Astro I just keep thinking "Yeah, this is how old MMOs used to work, before devs learned that this is bad". It wasn't even very novel, it was just unfun design, even though it looks nice when looking at someone else play it.

* The cards weren't unique, rather you had 1 ~ 1.5 "Wins" and a bunch of duds which are all factually the same. Or rather, they were no more unique than the current cards. Does it matter whether you toss 4 on the tank right now or you tossed 4 straight into the bin back then?
* Royal Road was just a measure to reduce the impact of drawing duds so frequently.
* Time Dilation is just... busywork? Why not have +15s duration in the effect to begin with, split over the usage amount vs recast time of Dilation? It had no meaning or purpose. Again, it's something that looks cool when reading the tooltip, but serves no gameplay purpose and in fact creates actively negative gameplay (1 extra button press to get back where you ought to be as the baseline).
* CO was the same thing.

What was the benefit here? As in, nothing about that was more than button-press busywork to play a "Draw the right card for actual party gain or not"-gamble. Couldn't you at least reduce that to a single button that says either "Nice!" or "Better luck next time" to reduce RSI? Why have sooooo many abilities just to play a minigame that serves so little actual purpose in the game?

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Originally Posted by SweetPete

It’s late and I found myself watching Stormblood Astrologian videos on YouTube. Just broke my heart. Seeing those lovely Aoe balances being tossed around and hearing that lovely sound from time dilation. I miss it so much. I really can’t stand the streamlining and homogenization of the jobs. Why do we have to wait until 8.0 for job redesigns? I also don’t even have much faith in that either. They admitted they took it all too far but still. Trust is gone and they truly need to make it up to the player-base[...]

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"Please understand the cost..." - devs, probably. /s

Jokes aside...

I feel like old card system had a fantastic concept in it. The job basically sold to you as "you need to deal with more RNG here" in form of the 6 cards. Ok cool... is it a simple coin flip? No! There were bad luck protections! Royal Road, Spread, MA (I think I'm missing a few but CMIIW). Let's now imagine that the number of potential outcomes in a sliding scale of 1 to 100. With that many layers of bad luck protections, the chances to score very low in that scale seems to be astronomically low. There exists folks who enjoys such randomness. If I want "1 or 100 only" outcomes, I'd not play old AST for that. The 'balance' excuse could've been mitigated by preventing spreading the effect to begin with. With only STs, it would be easier to balance their potencies.

Time Dilation and old CO were intrinsically linked to buff durations in past iterations. If I recall correctly, HoTs pre-ShB used to be 30s long. Bringing that over to ShB+ era certainly would require some tuning as a lot of our HoTs nowadays has been condensed. They are ofc IMHO far more interesting than "oops another medica III but oGCD!".

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Originally Posted by Carighan

I really don't get this hype. When I look at old Astro I just keep thinking "Yeah, this is how old MMOs used to work, before devs learned that this is bad". It wasn't even very novel, it was just unfun design, even though it looks nice when looking at someone else play it.

* The cards weren't unique, rather you had 1 ~ 1.5 "Wins" and a bunch of duds which are all factually the same. Or rather, they were no more unique than the current cards. Does it matter whether you toss 4 on the tank right now or you tossed 4 straight into the bin back then?
* Royal Road was just a measure to reduce the impact of drawing duds so frequently.
* Time Dilation is just... busywork? Why not have +15s duration in the effect to begin with, split over the usage amount vs recast time of Dilation? It had no meaning or purpose. Again, it's something that looks cool when reading the tooltip, but serves no gameplay purpose and in fact creates actively negative gameplay (1 extra button press to get back where you ought to be as the baseline).
* CO was the same thing.

What was the benefit here? As in, nothing about that was more than button-press busywork to play a "Draw the right card for actual party gain or not"-gamble. Couldn't you at least reduce that to a single button that says either "Nice!" or "Better luck next time" to reduce RSI? Why have sooooo many abilities just to play a minigame that serves so little actual purpose in the game?

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The problem lied in the battle system and encounter design, the former that was already seriously weakened with the release of SB, and encounters that were already starting to turn into the damage focused DDR with one boss on a platform model that we would come to know today.
There was a reason that in HW we used shit like manasong. A lot of the cards from AST could have had more meaning if they were inclined to, as for the remainder, SE in their infinite wisdom couldn't be arsed to see how a 20% damage card would become instantly meta when the 2 other damage cards couldn't even compete.

Old AST was definitely rooted in the opportunity/cost/resource scarcity model of early XIV. In concept it was sound, it's the execution that was flawed.

Also let's be honest, there were other cards that were used in content other than savage/trial/raid bosses. Bole was great on tanks during dungeons, etc.

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Originally Posted by Valence

Also let's be honest, there were other cards that were used in content other than savage/trial/raid bosses. Bole was great on tanks during dungeons, etc.

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Yeah but that's the same now, no?

I get that AST was a ranged mess and some people hated it. It was most frustrating to the hardcore savage players. I get why they streamlined but doesn’t make it any less painful to those who actually loved the job so much before all of it went away and Astro losing its identity. Losing what made it truly Astro. The unique and versatile cards, royal road, their time manipulation just all gone and their sects.

Shadowbringers though a great story was the beginning of the end for jobs like Astro and Sch.

That's kinda my point, the cards weren't really versatile though, no? And don't get me wrong, I love the idea of randomness in MMORPG classes, in fact I think it's an absolutely requirement to have a healthy combat system and class setup to have the majority of your classes have medium~strong roots in RNG.

But what Astro was was basically... the bad stuff early MMOs did? Before everyone figured out how to do RNG well? Before Blizzard first experimented with PPM for procs in WoW in a big way (it had been done before, but nobody had ever had enough players to quantitatively analyse whether players liked it or not), and then further did "fudged" PPMs as an evolution of that.

To translate this back into Astro cards, imagine if each time you attack with a GCD there's a chance to draw an extra card into a "deck", and these you can pretty rapidly draw from and use, but you can also save up to X of them to rapid-fire them out. They can't be the damage cards, but can be any other one. In modern design, this might say, a 20% chance on a GCD attack, but it'd be PPM actually (say you get on average 5 cards a minute) and also be a fudged PPM to ensure that the chance of you not getting any cards for extended lengths is very very very tiny, and also the chance to get 10-15 cards in a row exists but is astronomically (pun intended) low.

That's how RNG works in modern design. You no longer let randomness screw the player, despite comparatively low proc chances. Low proc chances make the procs feel meaningful (they allow the effect to be big) but PPMs + fudging ensures this is functionally not much different from a short CD skill, the CD is just... unstable.

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Originally Posted by Carighan

Yeah but that's the same now, no?

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What's the same?