AST cards ramble

Quick writeup of what I'd do to cards for a different thread. Numbers probably not balanced, but I needed something to do while waiting for a big fish

Major Arcana: now autodraws one every 60s. If you have one already, the timer ticks in the background, but if it hits a full 60s again, then it resets the timer and you lose out on a use (similar to Enochian/Polyglot generation). Only one Major Arcana effect can be active at a time, so no 'hold both charges for the 2min'

Minor Arcana: now draws a Minor Arcana every 15s. Unlike Majors, you can stock an additional Minor Arcana. When a second one is held in reserve, the timer continues to tick, as with Major Arcana, and like Major, letting the timer hit max without clearing room for a new card to be drawn will 'waste' the draw. Again, this is not meant to be 'dump everything in 2min window', but instead a more 'evenly distributed through the rotation' kind of design.

Playing Major Arcana is still OGCD, but Minor Arcana are GCD.

Additionally, Sleeve Draw would return, becoming a 2charge, 60s charge time action. When you use it, your currently drawn Minor Arcana becomes a Lady of it's suit. Just to make sure it's got some juice for the burst window

Now for Card effects (im not good with names):

Balance: 10% damage, 15s

Bole: 20% damage mitigation, 15s. Additionally, grants 3 stacks of Bole's Bulwark, causing the enemy that strikes the bearer of this buff to take 10% of that ally's Max HP as damage and consuming one stack.

Arrow: Grants 10 stacks of 'Arrow's Assault' (12 if the target is PhysRanged), increasing Autoattack rate by 400%. One stack is consumed for each Autoattack dealt under it's effect, and upon consuming all stacks, the Autoattack rate returns to normal.
Additionally, if the target of this card is the AST, grants 5 stacks of Arrow's Assault, speeding up the recast time of the AST to 1.5s for the next 5 GCD attacks, and making cast times of those spells instant.

Ewer: Grants 1000mp over 15s. Additionally, Grants 3 stacks of Ewer Overflowing, causing the next 3 attacks dealt by a healer to strike a second time for 100% of the spell's potency. Additional effects are not applied. This second strike cannot crit or DHit

Spear: 10% Physical damage, 15s. If the target of this card is the AST, their attacks are all considered Physical for the duration of the card.

Spire: 10% Magic damage, 15s

So ideally for the sake of damage, Bole to Tanks, Ewer to Healers, Arrow to Ranged, Spear to Phys (preferably Melee), Spire to Casters, and Balance to any DPS that has good gear, but things could be moved about depending on the state of the battle (ie, if a caster just died, Ewer them instead of a healer, so they have MP to work with)

A Note on Minor Arcana: Knaves, Lords, Ladies are 7 8 and 9 respectively. Due to not having a duration, these effects will last on the target until they are overwritten by another card, or KO removes them.

X of Staves: Increases the next 5 attacks dealt by the target ally by 60p. Additionally, increases the damage of the first attack dealt by target ally after this effect is applied, by 5 potency, multiplied by the face value of the arcana.

X of Rings: Deals 100p in counterattack damage each time the target ally is struck, up to 3 times. Additionally, deals an additional 5 potency, multiplied by the face value of the arcana, for the first counterattack only.

X of Knives: Causes the next 6 Autoattacks to deal a second strike for 50p. Additionally, a bonus potency equal to the arcana face value is applied to each of these bonus strikes.
if the concept of 'potency value not divisible by 5' is too much for the engine, make it 'first autoattack has bonus damage of '5 x face value'' like the rest

X of Cups: Causes the next 3 healer damage spells to cost half MP, and to strike a second time for 100p. Additional effects are not applied twice. Additionally, the first of these spells deals bonus damage equal to 5 potency, multiplied by the face value of the arcana

X of Crowns: Increases the next 5 instances of Magic damage dealt by 60p. Additionally, a bonus potency equal to the arcana face value is applied to each of these bonus strikes.
see arrow if game can't handle non-5 values

X of Irons: Increases the next 5 instances of Physical damage dealt by 60p. Additionally, a bonus potency equal to the arcana face value is applied to each of these bonus strikes. Additionally, if the target of this card is the AST, the next 5 instances of magic damage are instead considered physical, allowing them to benefit from this effect

Oh yeh, lastly, Astrodyne would be condensed so that rather than being three buffs with one effect each, the reward for getting more seals is still one buff, but it consolidates all previous 'reward buffs' into itself. Buff cap is already straining at the thought of these extra Minor Arcana effects. Additionally, Astrodyne's effects are lowered in potency (in my mind) because they'd be up more often. This is because I'd have Minor Arcana give seals too, leading to much higher uptime on Astrodyne

Sounds nice.
By the way- good luck with the fishing

Thanks for the gl, I got it, done till 6.5 now

funny thought while I'm trying to get something done in runescape, I was thinking about this idea again, and while I don't have the motivation to put more effort into balancing it and stuff, I did think: Minor Arcana is a 15s CD, and playing it is on the GCD. Presumably, that GCD would be affected by Spellspeed, but that means that rather than every 6 GCDs, it's every 'a little less than 6'. This means that Spellspeed is actually kinda not great, as you'd have to either commit another GCD, or wait a fraction fof a second to make sure you get the card play GCD out. It's the same reason Manafication and Reassemble have weird looking timers (110 and 55 respectively), so that Speed doesn't mess with the rotation. So then I was thinking...

What if the Minor Arcana CD (ie, the 15s time till you draw another card onto the gauge) was affected by Spellspeed too?

What if we could choose to have an AST where you go full Crit, as we do now, or another option, you go full Spellspeed, and while your own personal damage is lower, you get more Minor Arcana uses into the fight? No doubt some people would go 'its not worth it because misaligned from raidbuffs' but if the maths is done right, surely it's possible to make 'gained extra uses of the buffs' a bigger gain than 'kept the buffs aligned with 2min window', right? And if it's not, then I'd argue that it shows that the 2min window is too dominant in it's effect on the damage profile of a raidgroup and that's an issue of it's own

Interesting concept with the auto-draw cards, I think it fits more with the class concept of "the stars gave you a fate, now manipulate it into something favourable".

On your point about stacking spell speed instead of crit being viable, you'd have to reduce your GCD timer to 1.2s to have perfect alignment again, that's a lot of spell speed, I don't even know if that's possible to achieve. It kind of reminds me of that GNB set that goes so fast and misaligns so hard that it eventually realigns.

1.5 is the hard limit the engine can do (you can test it in Bozja pretty easily using haste gear/the 'dodge enemy 3 times' banner), but I was thinking, yeh again, that if the Minor Arcana has 2 charges to avoid overcapping, then surely the issue kinda resolves itself? If you need to hold a charge for a second to keep it aligned to the 1min mark, you just... do that? I see it more likely that you would hit 14s instead of 15, if you had 'fair amount of Spellspeed' on gear, which wouldn't be like, unplayable levels of speed. Then again, having only 1s of CDR might be kinda lame as the 'reward' for going heavily into Spellspeed. Although, Astrodyne would gain in use too, if you have more Spellspeed, since it also increases your speed, although not by increasing your Spellspeed stat

Oh, I said the wrong thing, I meant 1.2s cast on Fall Malefic, which would make your Draw CD 12s, that requires a GCD of 2s, which would be impossible to achieve as it turns out.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...9834/image.png

This is the minimum GCD we can achieve on this tier, a 1.37s cast on Fall Malefic. So the "go so fast that you loop around and align perfectly" strategy wouldn't work. I would say giving it charges would probably work, something like "Every 15s, you gain 1 card, if the held card slot is full on recharge, the next card goes into your spread and will be moved into your held card slot after you play the currently held card."

Yeh I imagine something like this for the gauge (forgive the bad art):

https://i.gyazo.com/02de54db46ac85bb...b63fe300ac.png

So the second Minor Arcana card (in this case, the 4 of Crowns) would show 'X sec' as it's info while it's on recharge, and the main display would have a countdown if the first card is also spent, like this:

https://i.gyazo.com/f746205e54d9ac1c...612a571330.png

If need be, I there could also be a third card held for Minor Arcana, which would appear behind the second. I wanted to avoid stacking them too far though, to try and dissuade from 'hold for raidbuffs' a little bit. I like the idea of them being less bound to the 2min window. The Major Arcana are there for that. I wonder if there's a way to have a 'proc' of sorts that accelerates the Minor Arcana CD in some way. Maybe under Astrodyne, each cast of Malefic reduces the CD on the next Minor Arcana by 1s or something? And since Astrodyne can be generated from Minor Arcana too, it'd feed into itself. I wonder if Astrodyne would feel better or worse if it became more like a maintenance buff that you aim to keep up 100% of the time, I think it has potential. Every 6 GCDs you play a Minor Arcana, but if you're playing Astrodyne well then you can get that down to every 5th GCD being a buff. I don't think getting to every 4th being a buff would be so good though for RSI reasons, we'd still have to refresh Combust too which would get annoying

Sorry for doublepost, just adding a line to Arrow to make it actually useable in solo gameplay. It now has an additional effect of:

'Additionally, if the target of this card is the AST, grants 5 stacks of Arrow's Assault, speeding up the recast time of the AST to 1.5s for the next 5 GCD attacks, and making cast times of those spells instant.'

Essentially, Malefic-Hypercharge. By my maths, you'd normally get 3 GCDs in 7.5sec, with this effect on you would get 5 GCDs in those same 7.5s, a gain of 2 GCDs. Each of my Malefics is around 9-10k in current gear, so it'd gain me 20k, let's say 24k cos I don't have the raid weapon yet. Since I'm aiming for 30k as the damage value to balance the cards around, that'd mean this effect would be useful in solo content, but not 'optimal' in raiding (you'd rather throw it on a melee for the autoattack buff side of the card)

Edit: Was considering rewriting Ewer's 'healer spells strike twice' effect, because the passing thought of 'what if WHM/AST in Duty Finder, AST uses Ewer on WHM, Misery hits twice?' but y'know what, I'll leave it cos that sounds hilarious, and you're not likely to see WHM/AST in harder content until it's vastly outgeared anyway. I assume Phlegma-Dumping SGE would be the go-to partner as a target for the card in a 1pure 1barrier comp but hey maybe this would give people a small reason not to go AST/SCH for once

Don't think you need to apologise for doubleposting in your own idea thread (within reason :P).

Speaking of, your suggestion certainly fits the class fantasy better than the current card mechanic. Much as I like the mechanic, the homogenised effects feel completely out of place on AST in particular. I particularly like the bit where you don't have the ability to stack up a bunch of major arcana -- always thought it was super weird that the stars/fate/whatever would decide "actually all 3/4 of these people are the ones destined to stand out right now!".

Thanks, the main idea I had was twofold: obviously, the main thing is to make the cards feel different, while also trying to avoid making one 'the best'. As mentioned above, I aimed to have them balanced around boosting 'current BIS geared team' by 30k total damage per card so that's the balancing calculations I was aiming for. The other point though, was to reduce the APM of the burst window, while also keeping the APM of the class overall, by redistributing those button presses throughout the 'downtime' between the burst windows, and by making Minor Arcana a 15s CD system, I'd like to think it helps sell the idea that 'this is the class that buffs allies'. Every 6th GCD on average would be a buff being applied to an ally, there's leniency to delay for a burst window/you know an ally's 1min burst is coming in a sec/downtime changing things around, etc. So there would be plenty to optimize on the class, while also keeping the effect of the RNG (the Face Value effect) quite minimal. For example, the difference between drawing 2's constantly, and Lady's (highest possible card) on every draw, is like 60% of a Malefic per minute, roughly (40p difference per card).

It'd also be nice to have for the lore of the class. Everyone who plays the class knows the 6 cards. Most know the cards each have an element attached, ie Arrow = wind. Some know they're from a deck of sixty cards, and fewer still know the names of the suits of those decks. Until I dug up the details from a Tumblr post of the exerpt from the EE, even I didn't know that each suit was associated with a 'Class' (ie smallfolk, military, nobility etc), or that the suits all had alternate names for some reason (ie Crowns, the suit that the Spire leads, is also known as the Wreaths).

Since I had to copypaste the data, and the formatting was scuffed (thanks Tumblr), I'll post a screenshot of my offbrand Excel spreadsheet I used to work out which suit each Major card led, cos it's interesting

https://i.gyazo.com/55d9f93f2786fb6d...35bb594875.png

That reminds me, I'll change wording of something to clarify that Major Arcana is to be used at the minute marks and is not possible to 'hold one for 56 seconds, use, then get another 4s later, to have 2 cards in raidbuffs'

edit: since I was curious, I did some quick and grimy maths (I'm on like hour 18 of being awake), this design gains about 100 DPS from using Minor Arcana over Malefics, based on the performance of a very high level gameplay AST I took a peek at on the verboten site. Which means that if you ignore the system entirely, and just Malefic spam like currently, your performance (or lack thereof) is very unlikely to be the sole cause of an enrage wipe, and if it is, then 'the DPS got crit variance'd' definitely causes 100DPS between the 4 of them so blame that

Honestly, work!

Even though all the buffs still translate just into damage, they are all flavored really differently and much better than just a flat increase. Also good thought about mixing the effects in a way that you'll see cards given to almost everyone in the party composition instead of just 2 set people. My only concern about the card design is that the Spear could also have an effect similar to the arrow when used on the AST themselves, just not to make it completely useless during solo activities.

I also take that given The Arrow having that unique instant cast design, Lightspeed could/should be reworked. I'd say make it just utility like a single target sprint buff castable on anyone.


You know what's the bad part about the OP's ideas? Now that they wrote them here, it will never have a chance to happen, lol.

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Originally Posted by Raikai

Honestly, work!

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Thank you, let me address your points, because I have nothing better to do atm (smithing cannonballs in runescape, it's slow and afk)

For buff variety, yeh, I feel that we cannot have a system that has damage competing with utility, as people choose damage pretty much every time, and complain when they're 'forced' into using the utility instead (look at Lady of Crowns for example). An idea that some put forth is to split the cards so that utility is separated from the damage, so the 'having to choose between the two' isn't a thing, but I instead elected to keep the 'Draw card' thing as just one system, to try and keep it from getting complex to play. Stuff like 'oh if I use this mit utility card, it gives me X seal, which screws my Astrodyne' could potentially come up, and I couldn't be bothered trying to resolve all that. But yes, I do feel that the whole thing we have now of 'pump all cards into your most geared DPS' is kinda bland. With this there can be room to do other, quirky things for optimization's sake, like the mentioned 'what if you could give PLD an extra Sheltron lmao'

For the Spear, I had thought this as well, I have the effect of the X of Irons temporarily convert the AST's damage to physical, similar to Steelsing from Bozja. Coincidentally, I was thinking it might be worded weird atm, but the idea would be that you'd be able to take advantage of the Spear's effect in some form, even though you're a magic user. I might go back and rewrite stuff or even change Spear to something else, but if the worst comes to the worst in solo play, we can consider the fact that Redraw cannot give you the same card, so having one 'dead' card for yourself is not actually an issue, as you can use any of the other five results just fine even in solo. Plus, Spear and Spire granting Celestial Seals, but being the exact opposite effect of each other (mag/phys damage) seemed fitting. I really, really, don't want to make Spear be 'lmao it gives crit rate' though, mostly because I don't want to do the maths to try and get it's raid-damage contribution to be roughly equal to the others (gear makes crit's effectiveness scale real weird mathematically). I might have an idea, and if it's balanceable enough I might add it in an edit at the end of this post (and in the OP)

Lightspeed would remain, however, due to the 'play cards in burst' changing to have Minor Arcana as an instant, and less Majors to play in raidbuffs (maybe 1, maybe 2 if I let people pool for 2min, not decided yet), Lightspeed's 'GCDs are instant so you can weave' is less pronouced, and so it gets to be used on Malefic as a mobility option, for those times where you want to DPS but the raid says 'run 45 miles to resolve this debuff'. Due to not being needed for the 2min window, I think it'd be fine staying at 90s (alignment is no longer an issue), and it probably wouldn't need a second charge (though I wouldn't say no to one). Arrow's instantcasts are actually not anything to do with Lightspeed, I just figure that if the GCD goes to 1.5 because of the card, you can't weave anything and that's not ideal, so instantcasts it is (plus it'd probably feel cooler to machinegun 5 spells in 8 seconds if they're instant rather than locking you down movementwise). But also remember, the effect of the instantcasts is actually only there for solo play, the intended use of the card is to throw on your melee or ranged

And we're playing the tail end of an expansion where 'the indomitable human spirit rejects the cruel indifference and apathy of the universe' is the name of the game, so even if it doesn't go anywhere beyond posting here, I think the fact you enjoyed reading it is a success on it's own. If SE want to take anything I've written and use it, I'd be delighted, so much so I don't care for credit or shoutouts, being able to play a more fun and engaging healer would be reward enough as it is. I write my rambling job redesigns because I guess I can't let go of what I went to uni for, to study games design and how to make them, it's in my blood. But also, I guess I write them to stand up and prove a certain crowd wrong, to show that it IS possible to make a design that adds something for hardcore players to optimize and have fun with, while keeping it super accessible and forgiving for someone who's still levelling it.

I'd like to believe that SE devs, should they choose to actually make changes, would choose that kind of design, so what I make would, I believe, have a higher chance of being implemented in some form. Also due to my studies I'm pretty cognizant of the dev pipeline, and the manhours required to do VFX stuff, so I try to keep my stuff grounded and 'able to reuse old animations', to keep the dev time down to a minimum. A full rework to some classes is cool, like SMN 'looks' cool at least (gameplay is subject to personal taste), same with MCH, the multitools look cool. But I do wonder how long it took to make those new animations and VFX, and so I try to avoid that pitfall. Like my pride and joy, my WHM redesign, would require, I think, one spell effect to be designed, that of the heal skill Blessing of the Elementals. Banish, Quake, Tornado, Flood, all of those while new, also have spell VFX in the files already that can be adapted

Anyway thank you again for taking the time to read (and for giving me something to do while these cannonballs smelt)

edit: the idea is not balanceable, most likely. I was gonna try to find a way to make Spear be 'the target melee/ranged can use a specific CD, with no regard to it's cooldown or cost'. So eg, Monk gets a free use of Riddle of Wind, DRG gets a free Wyrmwind Thrust, BRD gets a free Barrage, etc. But the potencies and gear differences and all that would make it insanely busted for certain classes, I think. Like how do I balance 'gear stacked SAM with Dance Partner gets a free Shoha' versus 'struggling DNC with no gear gets a free Fan Dance 4', it's cool in theory but the maths is a nightmare, especially when considering that not only do the chosen skills have to be balanced against each other, but also against the other cards effects

edit 2: might have found a way to get it to work, I'll put it in, and have 'if this is imbalanced, do 10% physical damage as a safe boring option' in brackets

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

edit: the idea is not balanceable, most likely. I was gonna try to find a way to make Spear be 'the target melee/ranged can use a specific CD, with no regard to it's cooldown or cost'. So eg, Monk gets a free use of Riddle of Wind, DRG gets a free Wyrmwind Thrust, BRD gets a free Barrage, etc. But the potencies and gear differences and all that would make it insanely busted for certain classes, I think. Like how do I balance 'gear stacked SAM with Dance Partner gets a free Shoha' versus 'struggling DNC with no gear gets a free Fan Dance 4', it's cool in theory but the maths is a nightmare, especially when considering that not only do the chosen skills have to be balanced against each other, but also against the other cards effects

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If you want a support card that functions differently for every job, why not have it interact with the job gauges? For example:

PLD: Grants 50 oath gauge
WAR: Grants 50 beast gauge
DRK: Grants 50 blood gauge
GNB: Grants a cartridge
WHM: Grants a lily
SCH: Grants an aetherflow stack
AST: Redraws and buffs the next card
SGE: Grants an addersting
MNK: Grants 5 chakras
DRG: Grants 1 firstmind's focus
NIN: Grants 50 ninki
SAM: Grants 1 meditate stack
RPR: Grants 50 soul gauge
BRD: Grants 1 free use of Empyreal Arrow
MCH: Grants 50 battery gauge
DNC: Grants 50 esprit gauge
BLM: Grants 1 polyglot
SMN: Grants 1 free use of Energy Drain
RDM: Grants 50 black and white mana

I didn't run the math on any of these, they're just examples for each job, could be imbalanced for most of them. (Also I don't know how they plan to fit all this into the tooltip)

That was the original idea, yes, just adding gauge. But when you look at, for example, a free Energy Drain on SMN vs one Firstminds Focus, it's like 500p (cos of the two festers it gives too) vs effectively 220 or so potency. So I moved to trying to balance a specific OGCD from each job, but it's not really possible for melee, because Monk only has the one (TFC) and so that'd have to be the benchmark to work off of, at 340p. So here we are with it being 'ranged focused', as weird as that might be thematically (spears aren't known for being ranged), but at least it's kinda balanceable this way

idk when MCH's Gauss Round changed from 150 to 130, or I'd have used 'one Gauss and one Ricochet', though it's still an alternative (just it'd be 260 instead of 300). I was also thinking about making MCH's be 'free reassemble', or 'a free Wildfire, that detonates at 2 stacks instead of 6'

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

That was the original idea, yes, just adding gauge. But when you look at, for example, a free Energy Drain on SMN vs one Firstminds Focus, it's like 500p (cos of the two festers it gives too) vs effectively 220 or so potency. So I moved to trying to balance a specific OGCD from each job, but it's not really possible for melee, because Monk only has the one (TFC) and so that'd have to be the benchmark to work off of, at 340p. So here we are with it being 'ranged focused', as weird as that might be thematically (spears aren't known for being ranged), but at least it's kinda balanceable this way

idk when MCH's Gauss Round changed from 150 to 130, or I'd have used 'one Gauss and one Ricochet', though it's still an alternative (just it'd be 260 instead of 300). I was also thinking about making MCH's be 'free reassemble', or 'a free Wildfire, that detonates at 2 stacks instead of 6'

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I don't know the extent of their technical architecture, but if it was possible, MNK's effect could be to turn SSS into a regular gcd, that would be 550 without the drawbacks of a longer gcd refresh. As for MCH, what about a free Drill that's half potency but always crits? That would be a 300 potency guaranteed crit, so not that far off.

EDIT: Although now that I think about it, granting free cooldowns like this would throw off the rotations of quite a few jobs. So maybe it being a physical ranged card exclusively would be better since they don't have any rigid rotation to speak of (other than BRD songs).

Yeh. This next part, I want to clarify that I'm not trying to be nasty/offend, just for the sake of explaining my thought process (hooray for neurodivergence), but for example, certain things that seem to be a potential solution at first glance, have additional issues when I consider them further. When you say Drill, for example, my mind thinks 'okay, but that free Drill is still a GCD, and so has to be compared vs Heated SlugSplitClean potencies', or 'BRD getting a free Empyreal, which leads to a free proc, which leads to an extra Pitch Perfect stack potentially', stuff like that. Same with the 'throwing off rotations', like if we gave RPR a free Bloodstalk, then they overcap too soon. Stuff like that. The easiest way around this is to only use OGCDs that are just 'this does damage' I think.

Hmm, another issue that I just thought of: You don't learn these skills at the same time as getting the card. Using a Spear on a level 70 DNC wouldn't do anything with this effect, because they don't actually know Fan Dance 4. Unless we made it so 'they can use the skill even if they don't know it yet', which would be pretty cool but who's binding FD4 as a pre-EW DNC?

edit: Another idea just came to me, but I cba building on it so I'll just drop it here. What if Spear's effect was basically 'next (specific GCD) is augmented, dealing 300p as a second strike', and the augmentation changes the animation to a lost/nostalgic old animation everyone misses? IE, if you Spear a DRK, their next Souleater becomes Power Slash, or Scourge? WAR's Storm's Path becomes Butcher's Block, DRG's Raiden Thrust becomes Phlebotomize (or Ring of Thorns for the memes), a NIN's Aeolian becomes Dancing Edge, a MNK's Snap Punch becomes Haymaker/Touch of Death, etc? IDK what to do for RPR though

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

Yeh. This next part, I want to clarify that I'm not trying to be nasty/offend, just for the sake of explaining my thought process (hooray for neurodivergence), but for example, certain things that seem to be a potential solution at first glance, have additional issues when I consider them further. When you say Drill, for example, my mind thinks 'okay, but that free Drill is still a GCD, and so has to be compared vs Heated SlugSplitClean potencies', or 'BRD getting a free Empyreal, which leads to a free proc, which leads to an extra Pitch Perfect stack potentially', stuff like that. Same with the 'throwing off rotations', like if we gave RPR a free Bloodstalk, then they overcap too soon. Stuff like that. The easiest way around this is to only use OGCDs that are just 'this does damage' I think.

Hmm, another issue that I just thought of: You don't learn these skills at the same time as getting the card. Using a Spear on a level 70 DNC wouldn't do anything with this effect, because they don't actually know Fan Dance 4. Unless we made it so 'they can use the skill even if they don't know it yet', which would be pretty cool but who's binding FD4 as a pre-EW DNC?

edit: Another idea just came to me, but I cba building on it so I'll just drop it here. What if Spear's effect was basically 'next (specific GCD) is augmented, dealing 300p as a second strike', and the augmentation changes the animation to a lost/nostalgic old animation everyone misses? IE, if you Spear a DRK, their next Souleater becomes Power Slash, or Scourge? WAR's Storm's Path becomes Butcher's Block, DRG's Raiden Thrust becomes Phlebotomize (or Ring of Thorns for the memes), a NIN's Aeolian becomes Dancing Edge, a MNK's Snap Punch becomes Haymaker/Touch of Death, etc? IDK what to do for RPR though

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Given the current job design, I'd agree that giving them a free OGCD hit is the only way to implement such a thing as anything else would probably throw something out of whack somewhere.

As for the issue of unlearned spells, I think a possible fix would be for it to augment the lowest level OGCD with extra potency to make it equivalent to the free thing that you intend to grant. Like MCH learns Gauss Round at 15, so if you augment it by 170 potency, you get 300 potency, which is equivalent to your target potency. For DNC, you could augment Fan Dance (gained at 30) by 150 potency so it's equivalent to Fan Dance IV (but then you run into the unintended issue where they can get a Fan Dance III proc from this at later levels)

As for the other idea, it could work, but for some jobs, it might be awkward. Like for WAR, depending on the timing they get the card, they can go up to 8 GCDs without touching Storm's Path, which could end up delaying the augment out of the allotted buff window.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Aravell

If you want a support card that functions differently for every job, why not have it interact with the job gauges? For example:

PLD: Grants 50 oath gauge
WAR: Grants 50 beast gauge
DRK: Grants 50 blood gauge
GNB: Grants a cartridge
WHM: Grants a lily
SCH: Grants an aetherflow stack
AST: Redraws and buffs the next card
SGE: Grants an addersting
MNK: Grants 5 chakras
DRG: Grants 1 firstmind's focus
NIN: Grants 50 ninki
SAM: Grants 1 meditate stack
RPR: Grants 50 soul gauge
BRD: Grants 1 free use of Empyreal Arrow
MCH: Grants 50 battery gauge
DNC: Grants 50 esprit gauge
BLM: Grants 1 polyglot
SMN: Grants 1 free use of Energy Drain
RDM: Grants 50 black and white mana

I didn't run the math on any of these, they're just examples for each job, could be imbalanced for most of them. (Also I don't know how they plan to fit all this into the tooltip)

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I feel like this idea would really throw a wrench into some rotations and buff alignments for jobs. They could end up overcapping on gauge if they want to wait until the next buff window or they have buffs that are going to misalign with their burst if they initiate it now. We also cannot see other jobs gauges, so if you would give this card to a BLM who already for whatever reason had 2 polyglots it would be essentially useless, or if you give it to a RDM who is already at or slightly over 50/50 mana and is just hanging on for a bit to align with buff windows.

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Originally Posted by SieyaM

I feel like this idea would really throw a wrench into some rotations and buff alignments for jobs. They could end up overcapping on gauge

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Yeh it's a cool idea in theory but it's very hard to make it work in practice without several layers of jank to fight through, which is why the rather more boring option of 'just make it 'balance for physical damage' is there as a backup design to fall back on