About Shuffle,Spread,Royal Road and Draw.

[Muahbec]

How about this: you can shuffle as much as you want, BUT shuffling doesn't reset the timer when you drew the first time.

This puts a limit on shuffles but prevents abuse and brings the risk of shuffling too much and losing the draw. They could shorten the card timers if needed.

Just a thought.

Yes that would be awesome, but if that were to happen they would probably decrease the card time from 15s to 10s or maybe 5s to keep balance.
But still, an awesome idea.

[Karatecatgrl]

Funny story... Did you know that Spear affects Draw cool down?

[GarnetTribal]

Funny story... Did you know that Spear affects Draw cool down?

If you had it held, use spear on yourself and then used draw it does. Otherwise, no.

[Phiglia]

Changes I will like to see:

Draw: 20s CD – 10s Buff

Shuffle: 40s CD
Note: You can’t draw the same card you put back on your deck.

Spread: 60s CD since you saved the card OR 30s CD since you used the card.
Note: The card saved can’t appear when you draw from you deck, since you are saving it.

Royal Road: 15s CD [NO CHANGES]

Break: 15s CD You break the card to get MP/HP/TP back or even attack. [NEW]

I hate when you draw the same card with Shuffle, I hate when you have a Royal Road buff and you draw a card you don’t want to use or consume to grant a buff since you have the buff you want or is the same buff. Another skill that don't cosnumes Royal Road and grants something like heal/damage should be a MUST for when you don't want that card.

[RazeLandale]

Spread: 60s CD since you saved the card OR 30s CD since you used the card.
Note: The card saved can’t appear when you draw from you deck, since you are saving it.

This would be really, really bad. Put balance in your spread and you're punished by not being able to draw balance anymore. Everyone would just put spear in there when they log in and never use the ability again. But losing a fun ability to filter out spear is not the way you fix the spear problem. You fix it by making the card not suck.

[Rongway]

I've also been thinking about Royal Road a lot lately. It always bothers me when I draw a card that could be useful, but using it with the current Royal Road effect would make it feel "wasted." This mostly happens with the expanded effect. To give an example, let's say you draw Spire and decide to burn it for the expanded effect. You then draw Spire again. Using that Spire with the expanded effect may not be the best use of that card considering it may not even benefit half the party and at half potency it might not be enough for those it can benefit. I would love to be able to use that Spire on an individual without expending my Royal Road effect. Which leads me to wonder, would it be too much if Royal Road were changed into a triggered action instead of automatically applying to the next card used? It would add another button to push, but we would no longer have cards simply dropping to the floor. I can't imagine they intended for us to be right-clicking on cards to turn them off, but Royal Road is the reason people do that.

I have very few complaints about AST, and I've reconciled with this being one of the cost-benefit trade-offs of Royal Road. Let's consider the alternative for a second.

Suppose using Royal Road the first time consumes your Drawn card and gives you a Royal Road buff. Then, while that buff is active, Royal Road becomes "Use current drawn card with the Royal Road buff effect." This would allow you to Draw and play a card unbuffed (so when you get Draw->Spire->Royal Road->Draw->Spire->Shuffle->Spire, you can throw the persistent Spire at a DD or tank without wasting your Royal Road). Sounds pretty convenient, right?

The problem there would then be that we can't use a held card with Royal Road, or if we could, we wouldn't be able to choose whether we want to use a drawn card or a held card. Something like
Draw->Arrow->Spread->Draw->Spire->Royal Road->Draw->Spire->Use held Arrow->Royal Road drawn Spire
would no longer be an option.

Yes, it would be nice to be able to opt to use a card unbuffed so as to preserve Royal Road, but giving us that option would take away some other equally good (or better) options.

[Kerrigen]

How about this: you can shuffle as much as you want, BUT shuffling doesn't reset the timer when you drew the first time.

This puts a limit on shuffles but prevents abuse and brings the risk of shuffling too much and losing the draw. They could shorten the card timers if needed.

Just a thought.

This is probably what needs to happen along with some card rebalancing if we ever want to use them somewhat strategically. I mean, even without an expiration would work just as well because you'd be actively punished by pushing your next Draw, but I like the risk/reward gameplay element you suggest.

I see no harm in being able to essentially choose a card with the RNG element being how many times a row you get screwed over with a Spire and AST definitely needs a tighter control over their buffs.

I also want to point out that even maintaining 100% Balance uptime on a single DPS (which would be virtually impossible) for the duration of a fight would result in a 150-170 raid DPS gain at best with a top-tier DPS, which is good but certainly not OP.

[Blueyes]

Suppose using Royal Road the first time consumes your Drawn card and gives you a Royal Road buff. Then, while that buff is active, Royal Road becomes "Use current drawn card with the Royal Road buff effect." This would allow you to Draw and play a card unbuffed (so when you get Draw->Spire->Royal Road->Draw->Spire->Shuffle->Spire, you can throw the persistent Spire at a DD or tank without wasting your Royal Road). Sounds pretty convenient, right?

The problem there would then be that we can't use a held card with Royal Road, or if we could, we wouldn't be able to choose whether we want to use a drawn card or a held card. Something like
Draw->Arrow->Spread->Draw->Spire->Royal Road->Draw->Spire->Use held Arrow->Royal Road drawn Spire would no longer be an option.

Actually, in that example, it would be possible to use Royal Road with the drawn Spire card assuming they design it in a way that allows for that to happen. I should note that it has been a while since I made that post and since then my play style has changed with me refraining from grabbing the expanded Royal Road buff prior to having a card setup to use with it, but that aside, I'll explain what I had in mind. Royal Road would be changed into a triggered ability and when used you would receive a short buff with an affect such as "the next card used received the effect of Royal Road" or something along those lines. This would allow you to use your Royal Road effect with either the drawn card, the Spread card, or simply held for later.

Where the issue lies is replacing that Royal Road effect with a new one. Off the top of my head it's possible they could come up with a way, though it would be a tad complicated. When using Royal Road with a card you would not get the buff and instead the icon for Royal Road would change to represent that buff. When activated the action icon goes back to being a "blank" Royal Road and you receive the buff which would have a 10 or 15 second window to be used with a card or it disappears. Perhaps if you trigger Royal Road a second time instead of using a card during that short time frame the card would be applied to Royal Road and the buff you had would disappear. It would have to be brought down to a 5 second recast, or less, to allow time to replace the Royal Road effect before the held card expires.

Basically it would be changed to do one of two things. It can be used to absorb a drawn card to generate a Royal Road effect, then after which it can be used a second time to receive the actual Royal Road buff, but it would have to have a short duration to prevent "stacking" with one buff active while Royal Road holds a second effect, though I think it actually would be pretty cool if we were allowed to do that as long as it's appropriately balanced to avoid abuse.

I didn't think I would ramble on this much about Royal Road. I'm not expecting SE to change how it works and wouldn't say it's a necessary thing to do, but it is fun to think about how Astrologian could play differently or in a more interesting way.

[Vlady]

If they would just fix where shuffle did not allow drawing the same card twice that would fix alot of the problems with the deck system.

[Muahbec]

If they would just fix where shuffle did not allow drawing the same card twice that would fix alot of the problems with the deck system.

But... not even that, all they did was that Royal Road "Fix"
ugh seriously