Balance was balanced

[RichardButte]

My fiancee (who plays PLD) woke me up this morning by shoving her phone in my face, saying "Patch notes, RIP AST" (because she saw potency decreases)...

But I love these changes.

First of all, the spear no longer being boiling garbage is a fantastic change. I'll now actually be GLAD to draw one.

Second, the addition of the ability to dump our Spread and RR slots is a GODSEND because it gives us even MORE control over our RNG, especially when using Sleeve Draw.

I like the changes overall. Now instead of two "good" cards and four crap ones, we have three cards we can absolutely look forward to drawing.

And they did this the RIGHT way by not nerfing healing potencies at all. So yeah, I'm FINE with these changes. This is more of a buff, IMO, because we'll no longer be fishing for a balance forever.

Spear is probably a better card to RR on the whole party with because the 10% damage increase did nothing for healers where as all classes benefit from crit chance.

[Neela]

RIP AST? xD

...maybe she should change the game by her understanding of buff vs. nerfs... in general the majority is just locking for raw pots... on healers side like on dds side - potency is not the only thing what matters why can't people understand that by now... q.q

[RichardButte]

RIP AST? xD

...maybe she should change the game by his understanding of buff vs. nerfs... in general the majority is just locking for raw pots... on healers side like on dds side - potency is not the only thing what matters why can't people understand that by now... q.q

She skimmed it and saw the potency decreases but realized afterwards that it wasn't as bad.

...Just like I saw the increased potencies for MCH and thought it was a buff but MCH mains are saying it was actually a stealth nerf. :\

[Rhyn]

Reality check, spear is still garbage. +10% chance to crit is nowhere near +10% damage. Crit multiplier is 1.4x now. So it is just above 0.4x (due to crit dmg scaling) of the new balance. 0.2x of the old balance. It should have been 20% if it was supposed to be competetive. That way it would have been 0.8% of the new 10% balance, and won't pass it even at the end of the raid tier. Or 15% if it was supposed to be around 0.6x of the new balance.

[Neela]

potency is just the value the devs can adjust the easiest way... but its not the answer for every problem... I doubt that MCH will have a better "life-balance" just because they got some numbers up... the mechanic and clunky playstyle remains the same way like before - its like smn won't change if we would get Miasra 2 back as well nor any ruin pot buffs. some problems can't be fixed with only pot-adjustments... less people got this -> just looking at raw pots for their vote of "yay" or "nay"... is sad to read sometimes.

It should have been 20% if it was supposed to be competetive.

Honestly their is no reason for being competitive in every point with the other two healer.... imo there shouldnt be any kind of crit buff on asts at all. but thats just me...

[RichardButte]

Reality check, spear is still garbage. +10% chance to crit is nowhere near +10% damage. Crit multiplier is 1.4x now. So it is just above 0.4x (due to crit dmg scaling) of the new balance. 0.2x of the old balance. It should have been 20% if it was supposed to be competetive. That way it would have been 0.8% of the new 10% balance, and won't pass it even at the end of the raid tier. Or 15% if it was supposed to be around 0.6x of the new balance.

...And maybe it'll get that adjustment in the future, but this is a massive step in the right direction for the Spear card in general.

They either needed to make it speed up the CDs of abilities that were already on CD or do something else with it entirely and they chose option #2.

Again, healers don't benefit from damage increase but they do from crit increase, so factor in that 2 members of an 8 person party weren't getting anything from Balance.

And unlike with Arrow, crit is free damage AND healing that doesn't come at the cost of spending your resources faster.

It's not perfect, but this is a big change for Spear and they could very well still adjust it again at a later time.

[Wilbow]

Reality check, spear is still garbage. +10% chance to crit is nowhere near +10% damage. Crit multiplier is 1.4x now. So it is just above 0.4x (due to crit dmg scaling) of the new balance. 0.2x of the old balance. It should have been 20% if it was supposed to be competetive. That way it would have been 0.8% of the new 10% balance, and won't pass it even at the end of the raid tier. Or 15% if it was supposed to be around 0.6x of the new balance.

Yeah, I get the impression that people forget that crits are 1.4x and NOT 2x, a fact that completely changes how you look at spear's usefulness. At best, we're looking at it being around half as good as balance with the right comp at the end of this tier.

As somebody who mains WHM rather than AST, my question is (with the new SB skills) if it's statistically worth it to use AoE spear or just to throw it away for another chance at AoE balance.

Because if AoE spear isn't worth throwing if you get unlucky enough to get it, AST QoL hasn't really improved at all has it?


@Richard: While heals don't benefit from Balance, HEALERS definitely can. If an expanded Balance comes along, I'm totally snapshotting my Aero II/III ASAP and then again right before it drops. So for me as a WHM, it's about ~45 seconds of doing ~7-10% more damage on average (depending on how many Stone IVs I can throw out).

If we assume I'd hit the 75th percentile for WHM on FFLOGs, I'm doing ~1k DPS, so that Balance is giving me ALONE an extra 4k damage (8.5% damage increase for 45 seconds). It's not much compared to DPS, but it's not nothing.

[Rayvein]

As an AST main, I love the changes. Balance was just so over the top strong, it always felt like a card drawing meta game of balance or buff. Everything else was just fodder. While 10% Balance is still the strongest buff card, Arrow/Spear will be very acceptable alternatives.

In general, I think this will lead to a greater up time of DPS card buffs overall (whether it be Balance/Arrow/Spear), as before it was fish for balance, everything else be damned, in a general sense.

[Furious]

Reality check, spear is still garbage. +10% chance to crit is nowhere near +10% damage. Crit multiplier is 1.4x now. So it is just above 0.4x (due to crit dmg scaling) of the new balance. 0.2x of the old balance. It should have been 20% if it was supposed to be competetive. That way it would have been 0.8% of the new 10% balance, and won't pass it even at the end of the raid tier. Or 15% if it was supposed to be around 0.6x of the new balance.

Yeah, I get the impression that people forget that crits are 1.4x and NOT 2x, a fact that completely changes how you look at spear's usefulness. At best, we're looking at it being around half as good as balance with the right comp at the end of this tier.

As somebody who mains WHM rather than AST, my question is (with the new SB skills) if it's statistically worth it to use AoE spear or just to throw it away for another chance at AoE balance.

Because if AoE spear isn't worth throwing if you get unlucky enough to get it, AST QoL hasn't really improved at all has it?


@Richard: While heals don't benefit from Balance, HEALERS definitely can. If an expanded Balance comes along, I'm totally snapshotting my Aero II/III ASAP and then again right before it drops. So for me as a WHM, it's about ~45 seconds of doing ~7-10% more damage on average (depending on how many Stone IVs I can throw out).

If we assume I'd hit the 75th percentile for WHM on FFLOGs, I'm doing ~1k DPS, so that Balance is giving me ALONE an extra 4k damage (8.5% damage increase for 45 seconds). It's not much compared to DPS, but it's not nothing.

Crit multiplier scales with crit% from rating, which means that it is universally the best stat for dps for every class in the tiers to come thanks to quadratic growth, and that everyone's crit multiplier will be higher than 40% by a margin as much as their rating-based crit-chance.

At 3000 crit rating, for example, crit multi is 62%.

Many classes also benefit nondirectly from critical strikes even when it isn't a direct damage increase. Bard breaths from crit, monks have some interaction with crit, scholars need to crit for good shields.. is that it? I don't know enough to know other classes quirks. All of these are non-direct gains from crit that aren't visible in a pure direct damage comparison, and that don't "double dip" from balance in the same way.

Giving up a spear for a chance at a balance mid-fight would be an extremely bad choice. Even if we assume that crit damage is only 40%, the chance of rerolling a spear to get a balance is 20%, with a 20% chance at the mostly-neutral arrow and 60% chance of something worse (in most cases).

Spear is definitely not as good as balance and probably never will be, but it's good enough to use rather than using nothing.

[Rhyn]

So when people start melding crit over DH late in the raid tier (~3000+ is the current estimate), then spear will be 0.62x of the new nerfed balance. Which is still not competitive with balance. And until then it's 0.4-0.45x since people stack DH and only crit if they have to.