The Case for the Spear

[Shurrikhan]

The self-contribution of that Spear will usually be outweighed by double duration on a Balance, Arrow (even on self), or Bole.

Your post, even in its entirety, claims that Spear is not "as bad" as people believe. It no way gives warrant to it being optimal over or in most cases even equal to consuming a Redraw or its use in Royal Road.

If you want Spear to be competitive, it needs, on average, to provide as much of a DPS increase as would Balance. Given that Balance is presently a raw 20% increase, entirely imbalanced, this would require either a nerf to Balance or an increase to some 50% effect, with that recast reduction only affecting offensive CDs, as not to become simply a gimmick card.

Making it less annoying, however, has altogether different requirements. For one, it would need to be able to advance all cooldowns at steady rates, yet one that does not realign cooldown use, that affect both cooldowns that have already been and have yet to be used. This would require changing the rate at which cooling occurs (in order to catch cooldowns already recharging) while allowing already cooled CDs to "overcharge", reducing their recast times by the same (in order to affect refreshed skills evenly), and by different levels per CD (in order to maintain alignment). Even then, especially with the advent of gauge skills, it is unlikely that even a 30% increased frequency of fixed-recast, no-resource abilities could meet the value of a 10% increase to damage dealt. Most classes gain at most 12% of their damage from fixed-recast, no-resource cooldowns.

Even removing the recast times completely, allowing a free use each, on every Monk non-resource Ability would only increase its damage dealt by some .0002% over a 5-minute fight.Compare that to a 1.7 to 2.3% bonus, depending on timing, of a Balance over said 5-minute fight. 2%... or .0002%. For a 100% (5x increased) reduction on next recast.

[Anova]

Those are very useful cases, and I believe ASTs have known about spear for a long time and do use it in many of those situations. It does not change the fact that there are many better cards to royal road or spread though.

If you get it and you have to spend it, then as you say, you can use it at the start of a fight on a dps or tank (when they pop their CDs), or on yourself during a fight (assuming you have your lucid dream and other cds ready to use). Even under these ideal circumstances though, it's tough to argue that a Spear is better than an Ewer for MP regen, nor that it dramatically improves hps when put on a healer who blows through largesse, since it is very rare where you have such fast burst healing that spear makes enough of a difference to change the outcome of a heal check.

[HyoMinPark]

I wish I could have read the entire post, because I usually try to do that for every post I read. Sadly, I'm a little tired and unfocused, but here are my thoughts on the Spear.

It's useful, but extremely situational with its current design. Outside of using it on yourself, there IS no way to use it on other party members effectively unless you are involved in direct communication with them: i.e., your co-healer and you are in voice chat together, and you happen to draw a Spear at the precise moment their Lucid Dreaming + Celestial Opposition comes off cooldown, and they directly tell you "Hey, toss that on me so I can have a shorter cooldown on LD + CO." However, outside of a static environment where you do have this sort of direct communication (which is a lot of content for a lot of players), the Spear in its current design is too situational to use for much else but Redraw, Royal Road, or Minor Arcana. Personally, I don't find the card worth enough to hold in my Spread, and if Sleeve Draw gives me one, I immediately get rid of it whether I need it or not; there are more useful cards to hold (I tend to hold Balances, like a lot of ASTs, but sometimes in fights with squishy tanks, I hold Boles instead, or a Ewer for myself).

Now, players will always favor Balances over any other card, regardless of if the card keeps its current potency or is rebalanced with a different potency, but the developers should honestly look into redesigning the Spear to make it more viable and less situational than it already is.

A good way to do this would be to have the card outright reduce the cooldown duration of skills that are already on cooldown. For the sake of not being "too OP" or unbalanced, regular Spear could reduce the cooldown by 10%, Expanded Spear by 5%, and Enhanced Spear by 15%. Extended Spear is tricky with my suggestion, since it's more so based off of the idea that Spear is an instant buff rather than one with a duration, but I suppose you could give Extended a 5 second duration, and any cooldowns a party member uses during would also be affected by the 10% reduction. I would find this immensely useful on, not only ourselves as healers, but for tanks and their mitigation skills.

Take a PLD's Sentinel for example: extremely useful mitigation for heavy hitting boss attacks/tankbusters, 180 second cooldown. Under the effect of a Redesigned Spear, the cooldown duration would be reduced by 18 seconds flat, and NOT require tanks to have to already be under the influence of the card for the card to take effect. So, if the skill has 100 seconds left on its cooldown timer, Spear would reduce that by 18; if it has 120, reduced by 18, etc.

Hopefully my post makes sense; again, little tired and unfocused right now, but I really think the Spear needs a redesign. Whether it would be redesigned like my suggestion or not, though, the card would still remain situational at best, and it would still not be a card I would reserve my Spread for.

[Orlen]

Dont take haste away from Astrologians! Please!

[Orlen]

i think it would be much more useful as a band-aid ability. Modiffying things currantly on cooldown and then also applying it.

[Nowakii]

While it could be good under some circunstances, the problem is that small window of time you have to actually use its ability, im pretty sure a SMN would be happy to cut its Aetherflow Cast time duration by -20s, problem is, you have no freaking idea if he already used atherflow, or if its gonna be up in the following 20 seconds, same goes for any oGCD ability on any class, since you have no idea what/when they used you cant be sure the card its going to be any helpful, while having an extra insta heal is really good (for 8 members party, on 4m i always go on RR) ... I literally only cast Spear on my self when i have no RR and im about to cast Lucid dreams, Thats it.

[Pentt]

Dragoons will actually appreciate a spear because of how their eye system works, any CD reduction on their jumps helps them out.

Other than that, it's best used on yourself if you have a major CD ready like Sleeve Draw or Minor Arcana'd.

[Sebazy]

So I'm coming to the conclusion that the OP's post is a:

1) Thinly veiled snipe at raiders and people farming content.

2) Said snipe is then used as an automatic counter to pretty much any disagreeing response.

3) Try to think about using spear more.

4) Dropping it on a healer is likely good, dropping it on a DPS is likely bad

Regarding points one and two, I think you're missing one of the biggest factors that drives high end raiders along. Raid gear? Meh, we know we will get everything we want from a raid tier within a month or two now, most of it is ugly as sin and is just going to get glamoured over anyway. Rather the majority of us are there for the path of self improvement vs the limits of our own ability, the competition vs the limits of our peers, the banter with rivals as well as all the other social facets of the raiding scene and FCs in general.

Given that I spent most of my A10 farming sessions dodging troll button pushes and raising those that got caught napping, I find it kind of hard to agree with your assessment

Onto point 3 and the spear topic itself, it's a pretty legitimate point, the card does have it's uses (as do all the others that are invariably seen as RR/Crown fodder frankly). I also completely agree with point 4, dropping it on a DPS is a distraction that they likely neither want nor need, in a chaotic dungeon or 24 man run it's likely not going to be a big deal. In a Savage turn it's going to cause issues tho.

However, there's another aspect to this that the math always overlooks, quite simply, the time it takes for you to work out what to do with the card as well as the speed with which I can deal with a card appropriately and get Draw back on CD. If I waste a GCD or two flapping about what's best to do with a card that's not balance, I've likely lost any value that it would have offered and perhaps more. Any time spent with a card held waiting to be used is eating into my opportunities to pull a balance. I want to pull and use/dispose of cards as quickly as I can with as little thought as I can get away with.

In the end, it's usually more efficient to just auto arcana anything that's not conductive towards an AoE balance and instead concentrate on maximising your personal DPS.

[Fortune_Cookie]

1. Your party is taking a lot of damage and you are burning through your MP. You want to use Lucid Dreaming + Celestial Opposition, but you know that, at the current rate of MP use, you will need to use Lucid Dreaming again before its 120 second cooldown is up.

Solution: Use the Spear to reduce your cooldown to 96 seconds, preventing you from running out of MP.

2. You need to use several major cooldowns in a row in order to save the party, including Lightspeed, Largesse, Lucid Dreaming, Celestial Opposition, and Swiftcast. You know if you use all of these cooldowns, you will be left largely incapable of dealing with anything more than a single death, and judging by how often your party members have been dying, you will need those cooldowns sooner rather than later.

Solution: Use the Spear to reduce all of the cooldowns, allowing you to get your party back on its feet and be more likely to have your cooldowns back up in time for the next problem.

3. Combine #1 and #2, or even #1, #2, and several cards. Look at your cooldowns: how many have a cooldown of exactly 120 seconds or less? Feel free to use the Spear, then use all of them at once, putting all of them on reduced cooldown while simultaneously allowing you to deal with a disaster situation.

Those scenarios are a little artificial and mainly demonstrate that, in order to get the most use out of a Spear, the AST may well have made several inefficient decisions beforehand.

Re scenario 1. Why are Lucid and CO off cooldown? Are you holding them to wait for a Spear? Easy to see that this is going to cost you more than you gain pretty quickly. How long does the fight last - is there even any value in the reduced cd?

Re scenario 2. Why do you have a Spear just as you decide to blow all you cooldowns? Are you just lucky or have you been holding a Spear throughout the entire fight, potentially missing out on holding a balance for a dps check? What if that 'oh shit' moment never comes - you've essentially given up on you spread slot. Why are all your cooldowns available at the same time - would using some of them earlier have helped to stabilise the party and avoid the critical situation in the first place?

Spear is not useless. All things being equal I'd rather have my abilities have a shorter cooldown. But it's very situational and the opportunity cost of delaying or even missing out on an aoe balance is severe. Even from a defensive standpoint, damage equates to mitigation and mp economy by reducing fight times/phase transitions happening sooner etc.

[NocturniaUzuki]

@Hyomin Park

I'm interested in why you feel that "there are more useful cards to hold." From my perspective, I've always found the idea of holding Balance a little silly, actually. If you are looking at the game from the common DPS-centric view, I can see where this comes from. As I understand it, DPS-centric players mostly approach the card system in the following manner:

/cast Draw
>if Draw = Balance/Arrow
>>/cast Spread
>else
>>/cast Redraw
>>>if Spread = Balance/Arrow
>>>>if Redraw = Spear/Arrow/Ewer/Spire
>>>>>/cast RR
>>>>if Redraw = Balance/Arrow
>>>>>/cast Spread (Balance/Arrow)
>>>>>/cast Balance/Arrow

This is probably a bit off, but I'm not a traditionally DPS-centric player so I'm just trying to figure out how DPS-centric players approach it.

To me, though, I don't see Spread as particularly valuable for straight DPS increase. The power of Spread is that it allows you to have absolute control over when to use the card that is held. For DPS-centric players, I suppose the idea is that you fish for a Balance or Arrow, hold it, then fish for a RR effect or another Balance/Arrow, then use the card(s). This definitely increases DPS, but I don't think it increases it enough to justify sacrificing most of the potential power of the control aspect of Spread. Instead, I see Spread as the skill I use to hold cards that are highly situational so that I have them available when an applicable situation arises. This resolves the issue that several people have commented on: that Spear is situational, which clashes with the fact that drawing a Spear is RNG. Well, yes, it's RNG. But you can work around that RNG by using Spread to hold it. The cost of doing this is not being able to use Spread. I don't know exactly how this affects the math, but the impression I get is that it doesn't make nearly as much difference as people think. Without access to Spread, the DPS approach would still revolve around fishing for Balance/Arrow. But now, instead of holding it, you simply use it immediately if you get Balance/Arrow. If you don't get Balance/Arrow, you just RR then fish for Balance/Arrow on the next Draw, which is the same as it was before. It's still a process that requires two Draws. The only difference is that now you have to use the Balance/Arrow immediately if you get it, instead of waiting to build the RR effect.

My approach to the game is safety-centric, and I believe in maximizing DPS by preventing disasters (though I only maximize it generally, rather than getting into extremely detailed DPS analyses). I think everyone can agree that if the party wipes, the battle is slowed down significantly more than if you don't use Balance/Arrow. Using Balance/Arrow throughout a fight increases the clear speed by... maybe 10%? If the battle would otherwise take 10 minutes, it will now only take 9, or 1 minute less. On the other hand, if the party wipes at the 6 minute mark, the fight has to be restarted, which increases the fight duration by the duration of the first attempt: 6 minutes. This logic is why I typically hold Spear (and sometimes Ewer or Bole), though I also just dislike the feeling of wiping and will almost never "just wipe" a run because it would be "faster" to restart.

My approach to the card system is very different from DPS-centric players:

/cast Draw
>if Draw = Spear
>>/cast Spread
>else
>>if [card] is needed
>>>/cast [card]
>>if [card] is not needed
>>>/cast RR

In other words, I fish for Spear instead of Balance/Arrow, then hold it until such a time as I need to use it. Then I start judging each card draw on the situation. For example if I draw Bole and I know a dangerous mechanic is coming up, like solo-tank Akh Morn in Royal Menagerie, I'll use it to mitigate the Akh Morn. I'll only use an offensive card if I deem it 100% safe to do so. Once I use Spear though, I will usually start fishing for it again. However, I won't just throw away useful cards to fish for a Spear unless I desperately need to find Spear. If I'm not looking for any particular card and I get Balance/Arrow, I will use Balance/Arrow. I only use offensive cards when I have determined that there is no significant risk in prioritizing DPS at that time.
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Also, I've seen the suggestion about changing Spear to have a weaker effect, but allowing it to affect skills that are on cooldown. I can get behind this idea since it doesn't remove or replace Spear - it just gives it a more direct impact on DPS for the DPS-centric players to get behind. I think this solution would a good compromise to the situation. I would point out, though, that just like how using the current Spear on a player besides oneself requires the player to predict what cooldowns the target player has available at any given time, the new Spear would require the player to know which of a target's spells are on cooldown at any given time. This problem can be somewhat ignored, since it will always have at least some effect on the target, but getting the most out of the card still runs into the same problem.