Astro changes 5.1

[Jaelommiss]

Tbh that could actually be a very very good solution. But which one should be put there?

If you consider regular draw, putting on Draw would be the best as you'd have 2 weaving opportunity for either Redraw, but Sleeve Draw would still be a mess and have insane dps value (3cards + no gcd lock). It would also help controller a lot by giving them more time to go up n down their list (I'm one of them T_T)

Or it could be put on Play/MA, that would make Sleeve Draw much easier to deal with as you'd have weaving opportunities after each Play. However you wouldn't be able to Redraw right after pulling the card and controller wouldn't benefit much from it.

Both have their pro and cons, however I have the feeling that making Sleeve Draw less of a spamfest would be the best solution, (so putting Play on the gcd)

Increasing the dps value of cards would also help cards feel more impactful. Because, while they do have some impact, let's be honest, 6% is really small, especially if it doesn't fall on one's burst window. Taking you scree, 11.1k on that ewer, when you think about it that's really weak... barely a malefic.

However it could be hard to balance. Let say you boost it to 15% to compensate the loss of a Malefic, well now for sure, your number will vary from on AST to another depending on when the card is used. You'd also get some really nice numbers on opener...

But I would raelly be curious to try it out tbh

I crunched a lot of numbers for it while writing my previous post, but removed them for brevity.

Looking at my last E4S clear, an average Malefic is worth 16.6k. For a 15 second card to break even, it needs to cause a 1.1k dps boost. This is the magic number. If a GCD card produces less than that amount then it would be better to skip it in favour of Malefic.

10th percentile Innocence Ex dps ranges from 7.2-8.5k dps. At this level of performance a card would need to be at least 13.0-15.3% bonus damage to break even.
50th percentile is 10.1-11.5k. To break even buffing these players would require 9.6-11.0% to match a Malefic.
95th percentile is 12.4-14.4k. These players would need 7.7-8.9%.

I used Innocence Ex numbers because there's pretty high uptime during that fight and it's easy enough that a large range of player skills will be represented.

Who do you balance these buffs around? If you balance them around the 95th percentile players then using all of an AST's kit is suboptimal play if the rest of the party isn't at a high level of performance. If instead cards are balanced around buffing the weakest possible players then AST rdps inflates as the party improves. A 15% card that equals Malefic's 16.6k damage on weak players will deal 27.9k on the 95th percentile player.

If cards are balanced around being worth, say, 2x Malefic when placed on a 50th percentile player (19.2-22.0%) then they will always be worth spending a GCD for, but then you run into problems with AST's damage being vastly superior in strong parties. The larger the percent bonus, the greater the impact that having a strong party has on AST dps. If AST is equal to WHM and SCH in a 50th percentile party, then they will be better 100% of the time with a stronger party, and the performance gap will grow as the buff percentage increases. By the same token, AST will be vastly inferior in weaker parties. This is a certainty whenever a significant portion of performance depends on other players.


Edit: One possible alternative would be to keep cards at their current effectiveness (3/6%, 4/8%), put them on the GCD, and give the AST a dps buff when one is played to balance the lost Malefic. Increase next spell's potency by 100%. If that is too powerful (hello 900 potency Combust III, or 1200 potency in 5.1) then the buff could be reduced to 25% for the next four spells. This way the card would always pay for its Malefic cost while the percentage buff could stay small enough to not cause wild imbalance in peak high and low performing parties.

[Sylvain]

Who do you balance these buffs around? If you balance them around the 95th percentile players then using all of an AST's kit is suboptimal play if the rest of the party isn't at a high level of performance. If instead cards are balanced around buffing the weakest possible players then AST rdps inflates as the party improves. A 15% card that equals Malefic's 16.6k damage on weak players will deal 27.9k on the 95th percentile player.
.

You can't, this is why they've been nerfed, because the value vary way too much from a bad to a good group. And this is why they buffed our personal dps and not the cards.
Well at least it was nice to dream about it for an evening.

One possible alternative would be to keep cards at their current effectiveness (3/6%, 4/8%), put them on the GCD, and give the AST a dps buff when one is played to balance the lost Malefic. Increase next spell's potency by 100%. If that is too powerful (hello 900 potency Combust III, or 1200 potency in 5.1) then the buff could be reduced to 25% for the next four spells. This way the card would always pay for its Malefic cost while the percentage buff could stay small enough to not cause wild imbalance in peak high and low performing parties.

I've thought of that. But as you pointed don't buff "next spell", just make "your next Malefic4 potency is 500" (I like round number, 480 is weird).
And this way I can finally chill a bit more while playing AST on a controller x)


Regarding CU being a channel, they could simply make it deal damage equal to a malefic spam while it's channeled. You could reduce the duration to 9s to compensate. I just don't know how you could balance CU damage since it would rely on server tick to deal damage... so it'd be hard to gauge when we can break the bubble without loosing a malefic. (server tick yahoo)