Astro changes 5.1

[Shurrikhan]

After realizing I failed to account for another factor, I'll correct this. It is in fact too much.

The buffs to DPS jobs that happened across the board has put AST at the top by quite a bit.

And now AST+SCH is dominating, being above WHM+SCH by a very significant amount, even in E1S.

Ouch. Such were my fears. Though I'll give it another week and/or the removal of WHM from the top 10 combined healer damage ranks of each Savage fight before I transition from conscientious alarm to a wallowing in disappointment.

Meanwhile, how do we all feel the solution should progress? Should we rein unintended overbuffs back in or increase healer relative contribution through role power creep in our next attempt at parity?

[LariaKirin]

Ouch. Such were my fears. Though I'll give it another week and/or the removal of WHM from the top 10 combined healer damage ranks of each Savage fight before I transition from conscientious alarm to a wallowing in disappointment.

Meanwhile, how do we all feel the solution should progress? Should we rein unintended overbuffs back in or increase healer relative contribution through role power creep in our next attempt at parity?

I say this based on 95 percentile, so at the time of this post:
- In the case of AST+SCH, that would would cover about 11 samples.
- In the case of SCH+WHM, that would cover about 78 samples.

I expect volatility from AST+SCH given the number of samples, that's the number that is most likely to change in the following days. I agree that we have a sampling problem, but I think it's enough to conclude that AST+SCH will be on top. The question will be, by how much?

What I thought AST needed before knowing anything about 5.1 was the Combust buff. And even then, I wasn't sure about it because of how good the AST+SCH synergy is (even more so now that CU is back to its broken state). The Malefic buff, I just don't understand. And I didn't when I failed to account for the indirect RDPS buffs either.

On the plus side, AST+WHM seems to be pretty close to SCH+WHM at the moment. So I suppose we'll soon have a pretty good idea of how much WHM needs to solidify its role as the "selfish" healer and bring the three possible combinations within competitive numbers with each other.

[Wayfinder3]

As a controller player these Minor Arcana changes are a huge step in the wrong direction, 2 Play buttons is the LAST thing i wanted. can we please just go back to spread buffs, or rather find some other intuitive way to have AST function because targeting abilities aren't user friendly when in the hands of someone using a controller. Having 2 sets of macros is irritating.

[Crushnight]

I say this based on 95 percentile, so at the time of this post:
- In the case of AST+SCH, that would would cover about 11 samples.
- In the case of SCH+WHM, that would cover about 78 samples.

I expect volatility from AST+SCH given the number of samples, that's the number that is most likely to change in the following days. I agree that we have a sampling problem, but I think it's enough to conclude that AST+SCH will be on top. The question will be, by how much?

What I thought AST needed before knowing anything about 5.1 was the Combust buff. And even then, I wasn't sure about it because of how good the AST+SCH synergy is (even more so now that CU is back to its broken state). The Malefic buff, I just don't understand. And I didn't when I failed to account for the indirect RDPS buffs either.

On the plus side, AST+WHM seems to be pretty close to SCH+WHM at the moment. So I suppose we'll soon have a pretty good idea of how much WHM needs to solidify its role as the "selfish" healer and bring the three possible combinations within competitive numbers with each other.

The numbers may not shift as much as you think, AST's playstyle has barely changed with 5.1, which is the biggest contending factor to how much it is used, WHM throughout SB was considered inferior to AST yet it still had plenty more parses in each raid tier than current AST does, the current numbers difference only matter for those trying to be as optimal as possible which is a narrow group by far, playstyle is far more important and the shift that AST got with the expansion created a decent amount of contention with a decent amount of people still not going to be happy now, potency fix would look like a plaster going on a scar to these people.

[Jybril]

Come back and AST still isn't the same job I knew so I know longer care about it.
I know I won't see any major changes this expansion anyway.
Probably won't ever truly go back until the revert the cards and rework spire.
They can buff the job all day and that's great but if they don't bring back
what AST was really about then bye lol.
-Tips my SCH hat to ye-

[Heilstos]

Hey Sora,

For this "Problem" I have a solution : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...59XMDFTe4/edit

And for the PC-gamers: http://bit.ly/34uEh9d

I hope the ideas can help asts whos have problem to play out the cards

[HyoMinPark]

Hey Sora,

For this "Problem" I have a solution : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...59XMDFTe4/edit

And for the PC-gamers: http://bit.ly/34uEh9d

I hope the ideas can help asts whos have problem to play out the cards

While this is helpful, and I appreciate the work and thought put into it, no skill should require this amount of set up just to use optimally/without inducing carpal tunnel in a person’s thumb. The Play and Minor Arcana systems are inherently flawed in their design and execution—personally, I’m of the opinion the entire card system is flawed, but Play/Minor Arcana really highlight some of the more glaring issues with these new single-target cards.

[Shurrikhan]

While this is helpful, and I appreciate the work and thought put into it, no skill should require this amount of set up just to use optimally/without inducing carpal tunnel in a person’s thumb. The Play and Minor Arcana systems are inherently flawed in their design and execution—personally, I’m of the opinion the entire card system is flawed, but Play/Minor Arcana really highlight some of the more glaring issues with these new single-target cards.

I can easily see why all this would end up an issue for controller, but I see M&KB players considering it an issue too and I have to wonder... why? With a mouse, we can consistently use Draw on the very GCD (gap) it refreshes, and Play it on the next, on the correct player, without delay. Between Minor Arcana and 3 stacks of Redraw, I'm far more likely than not to have a perfect Divination every time, often even when spending Sleeve Draw on Crowns for my two (lead) damage-dealers over the same Divination timing.

We could mitigate some issues by removing Draw itself, instead passively generating a new card every 30 seconds (or even allowing us to bank our current card for up to a minute such that we get our next instantly if held for 30+ seconds), but that, too, would likely be considered clunky due to the reduced player input in its timing making it feel... awkwardly loose.

Or, we could look at universal changes, such as allowing for certain actions even during animation locks. Pet actions would be an obvious place for this, but so would future rapid stance-swaps or, for AST, card manipulation.

But, I have a hard time, as a M&KB player for whom the cards feel smoothly busy rather than wonky or invasive, seeing how its entire system could be considered flawed. There's plenty to help it, sure, but is it flawed from a fundamental level? I don't personally think so.

[HyoMinPark]

I can easily see why all this would end up an issue for controller, but I see M&KB players considering it an issue too and I have to wonder... why? With a mouse, we can consistently use Draw on the very GCD (gap) it refreshes, and Play it on the next, on the correct player, without delay. Between Minor Arcana and 3 stacks of Redraw, I'm far more likely than not to have a perfect Divination every time, often even when spending Sleeve Draw on Crowns for my two (lead) damage-dealers over the same Divination timing.

We could mitigate some issues by removing Draw itself, instead passively generating a new card every 30 seconds (or even allowing us to bank our current card for up to a minute such that we get our next instantly if held for 30+ seconds), but that, too, would likely be considered clunky due to the reduced player input in its timing making it feel... awkwardly loose.

Or, we could look at universal changes, such as allowing for certain actions even during animation locks. Pet actions would be an obvious place for this, but so would future rapid stance-swaps or, for AST, card manipulation.

But, I have a hard time, as a M&KB player for whom the cards feel smoothly busy rather than wonky or invasive, seeing how its entire system could be considered flawed. There's plenty to help it, sure, but is it flawed from a fundamental level? I don't personally think so.

I can’t speak on KB+M users, as I have always played this game on controller, but I always thought that they would have the benefit of mouse-over macros for this, which would be significantly smoother than an entire macro-hotbar setup. I could be wrong, but I saw ASTs play with mouse-over for cards even back in HW and SB. I figured that such would be the same with ShB.

However, that still doesn’t excuse that it’s terrible on controller users, thereby supporting the notion that the system itself is flawed. You can’t say a system is not flawed simply because it works well on a KB+M setup. It doesn’t work well on the other system—a system that the developers try really hard to flow as smoothly as possible compared to the other setup—thereby making it imperfect. Controller users have to supposedly set up an entire macro setup to use AST’s main gimmick in an optimal fashion; meanwhile, KB+M users get to have a single macro (mouse-over) by comparison, with no carpal tunnel of the thumb involved. How can you say that’s not an inherent flaw in the system?

This is to say nothing about Sleeve Draw and how awful it can be on controller, and that optimal execution still requires one to activate Lightspeed (for both KB+M and controller users), thereby taking the skill away from being used in a more versatile fashion (e.g., movement, MP conservation, faster Raises + MP conservation, etc.).

The Draw system before ShB was never this convoluted to manage on a controller scheme. Even when one was deploying a single-target card or using the old Minor Arcana.

[LariaKirin]

I can’t speak on KB+M users, as I have always played this game on controller, but I always thought that they would have the benefit of mouse-over macros for this, which would be significantly smoother than an entire macro-hotbar setup. I could be wrong, but I saw ASTs play with mouse-over for cards even back in HW and SB. I figured that such would be the same with ShB.

Have you considered that this might not be a limitation of AST, but a limitation of controller?