Astrologian 5.0 Discussion

[Hatstand]

One one button spam is much like another one button spam. If I'm hitting the same button over and over I don't really care if it does damage or extends buffs. Complexity and decision making is what's lacking in healers' offensive kits, not just theme.

[LeoLupinos]

One one button spam is much like another one button spam. If I'm hitting the same button over and over I don't really care if it does damage or extends buffs. Complexity and decision making is what's lacking in healers' offensive kits, not just theme.

At least I gave a suggestion instead of just saying no.
And I suggested changes for the card buffs. This would improve decision making.
And it's just a base idea, complexity comes with a lot of thinking and not with a base idea like what I intended to give.
This thread is a sum of ideas for the devs to make a complete work, and not for us to work for free. We are here to help with inspiration, no dev will take ideas from players as a copy paste.

[TankHunter678]

At least I gave a suggestion instead of just saying no.
And I suggested changes for the card buffs. This would improve decision making.

The card suggestion would improve things a bit. The time dilation version you suggested would not work. You would create an issue of AST players not DPSing or Healing because they are spamming it, and the card buffs would have to be rediculous to make up for the fact the pDPS output of the AST is 0 as their life is mashing the extend buffs button.

[LeoLupinos]

The card suggestion would improve things a bit. The time dilation version you suggested would not work. You would create an issue of AST players not DPSing or Healing because they are spamming it, and the card buffs would have to be rediculous to make up for the fact the pDPS output of the AST is 0 as their life is mashing the extend buffs button.

Sure. That's why I said it could be gated behind some condition as "only during Certain buff duration" as an example.
The thing is AST is our version of Time Mage, and now theres so little about time magic...

[Hatstand]

At least I gave a suggestion instead of just saying no.
And I suggested changes for the card buffs. This would improve decision making.
And it's just a base idea, complexity comes with a lot of thinking and not with a base idea like what I intended to give.
This thread is a sum of ideas for the devs to make a complete work, and not for us to work for free. We are here to help with inspiration, no dev will take ideas from players as a copy paste.

I agree that there should be some sort of card duration extension, but I don't think it should be mashable.

As for your suggestion about cards working differently on different roles, I think it would improve things in that you would be able to choose between damage mitigation, healing power, and dps, but part of me rankles against it because it would completely do away with the rng component of the class (which has also been removed under the current system). What I loved about AST was working out how to make the best of whatever hand you drew. And yes, that had problems for reliability. Also, your system would still limit your choices more than I'd like, since you wouldn't be able to put some mitigation on the dumb dps who keeps standing in stuff. Or restore some mana to the magical dps that just got rezzed. So, some suggestions of my own (quite possibly which have been written elsewhere by other people but if they have I don't remember who or where):

Keep the current lord/lady system but revert the original cards (in effect if not in potency, and putting something new on spire). Now every card can be a damage buff. No useless cards

Force the fates (cooldown): allows you to forcibly draw a card of your choice (would temporarily change your basic moves into card icons for selection much like the dancer steps). Now you can have reliable mana restoration or damage mitigation as its needed, and if you feel comfortable without that assurance you can burn it for more damage instead.

Bag randomisation (there's a thread for this one): ensures that you won't draw the same card over and over by picking from the cards you haven't already drawn until you've drawn all 6 is sequence. This, along with:

Shuffle (cooldown): resets the bag randomisation, so if you just got all the cards you want in a row you can have a chance at drawing them again without having to draw the ones you didn't want first.

I know some people will say that we should be focusing on how we can fix the new cards because there's no going back, but... to be quite honest I don't think there's any salvaging the new cards. Unless they actually differentiate between the effects of each card. At which point they might as well go back. And I know there are some people who like the new system, but clearly a lot of people don't, and I will continue to push for change because the only two classes in this game I really loved (SCH and AST) are currently in a place I can't bring myself to play them any more.

[KanameYuuki]

I know some people will say that we should be focusing on how we can fix the new cards because there's no going back, but... to be quite honest I don't think there's any salvaging the new cards. Unless they actually differentiate between the effects of each card. At which point they might as well go back. And I know there are some people who like the new system, but clearly a lot of people don't, and I will continue to push for change because the only two classes in this game I really loved (SCH and AST) are currently in a place I can't bring myself to play them any more.

It was just too good and cohesive, and I been thinking "ok sure, they could maybe get the 3 pairs (dmg / crit / skill speed)" a lot of us are begging just to have something, but even SE said that they thought about it (or giving each card some flavor), but then decided the "community" would go full circle and only fish for what ever was the best.

[Side-Eye]

It was just too good and cohesive, and I been thinking "ok sure, they could maybe get the 3 pairs (dmg / crit / skill speed)" a lot of us are begging just to have something, but even SE said that they thought about it (or giving each card some flavor), but then decided the "community" would go full circle and only fish for what ever was the best.

The fact that devs themselves use the "fishing" expression tells me that aside from basic testing, none of them have seriously played astro. Those of us who have, figured out a long time ago that every card had some value and (pre-5.0) had more than one use, so we weren't just treating each draw like fishing for balance out of a barrel. Devs aren't really playing healers and nobody from the media darling tour was representing healers either... which is how SHB managed to get released with healing being so out-of-whack, especially for AST. If I was a dev responsible for 5.0 AST I'd hide in shame.

[TankHunter678]

The fact that devs themselves use the "fishing" expression tells me that aside from basic testing, none of them have seriously played astro. Those of us who have, figured out a long time ago that every card had some value and (pre-5.0) had more than one use, so we weren't just treating each draw like fishing for balance out of a barrel. Devs aren't really playing healers and nobody from the media darling tour was representing healers either... which is how SHB managed to get released with healing being so out-of-whack, especially for AST. If I was a dev responsible for 5.0 AST I'd hide in shame.

Not to mention if fishing was really such a problem it could have been fixed by making 2 buttons, one a stance the other to act on that stance, to let you force draw the card of your choice. Throw in a second spread slot during leveling and boom, problem solved.

[Insertcoins]

The fact that devs themselves use the "fishing" expression tells me that aside from basic testing, none of them have seriously played astro. Those of us who have, figured out a long time ago that every card had some value and (pre-5.0) had more than one use, so we weren't just treating each draw like fishing for balance out of a barrel. Devs aren't really playing healers and nobody from the media darling tour was representing healers either... which is how SHB managed to get released with healing being so out-of-whack, especially for AST. If I was a dev responsible for 5.0 AST I'd hide in shame.

The fact that they used the term fishing tells me they DID play the job and looked at how it was being played. Cause why else would they use that term? Clearly I believe they did test and watch what the playerbase was doing. I'm not going to say they are correct but I WILL say if you want to blame anyone blame the META cause THATS what they looked at more then likely.

[MPNZ]

The fact that they used the term fishing tells me they DID play the job and looked at how it was being played. Cause why else would they use that term? Clearly I believe they did test and watch what the playerbase was doing. I'm not going to say they are correct but I WILL say if you want to blame anyone blame the META cause THATS what they looked at more then likely.

You're both correct, tbh. But, it really needsto be explaned that AST-the-balance-fisher exist because of the same reasons that strength-tanks were a literal scourge in normal dungeons: It's a set of skills/gear that are over-optimized for for the highest difficulty and skilled player to use and is then emumulated by lower skilled and aspiring players that don't really understand why they are used and believe that is the best set-up/use of skills for that job and proceeded to become detrimental to the entire experiece, blame everyonein the party for dragging them down, and be generally act like toxic pig-headed jerks. Strength tanks (not recommended by top raiders for normal content, and was bewildering to many that I would run into in instances) would wipe parties and were super stressful to heal. Balance AST played sub-optimally in normal/casual combat and was easiliy bested by Casual WHMs outside top level instances and raids. And, as such, AST is basically been hypertuned to only be useful at the topmost levels of play with data skewed highly by emulation of top tier players

IMHO