Everything wrong with 5.3 AST sleeve draw [Translated JP duplicate thread]

[Liam_Harper]

"This small anecdotal sample size represents everyone in a broad general category of new player."

Fair comment and I don't mean to claim it does. Just thought I'd share, feel free to disagree, it's not my own personal feedback anyway.

They are new players, and as such still don't know that more dps is all that matters. With more experience they will come to understand that having defence bole cards was worthless if you could launch a more damage balance instead.

I think the point was more they knew dps matters but didn't find that as fun. Which is, of course a wider problem than just AST and more the dps-centric design of the game and I don't think "revert back to old AST" is the answer there, but it does seem people like having some non-dps utility. Not sure how you'd mix that in though.

[HeulGDarian]

I think the point was more they knew dps matters but didn't find that as fun. Which is, of course a wider problem than just AST and more the dps-centric design of the game and I don't think "revert back to old AST" is the answer there, but it does seem people like having some non-dps utility. Not sure how you'd mix that in though.

Man i wasnt an astro main in any sense of the word, but like most people it came the time where i had to level it. had some fun times with the cards some not so fun times with people deliberately overwriting my cards even after w8ing for them to cast theirs for a really long time but from what i played my most favourite card wasnt balance, it was actually Bole. It felt so good giving a free rampart to the tank and yes sure dps is king yada yada but i thought the whole point of astro was to make the best out of what you got , it fit the jobs identity like a glove.
Add to that the timey wimey spells which boi was it cool to just put a massive regen on the tank and see him be undefeatable, now all it has is gravity and its completely odd for it to exist in there.
At any rate this just my piece on this matter.

[MPNZ]

I think the point was more they knew dps matters but didn't find that as fun. Which is, of course a wider problem than just AST and more the dps-centric design of the game and I don't think "revert back to old AST" is the answer there, but it does seem people like having some non-dps utility. Not sure how you'd mix that in though.

Ok, just going to plug one of my ideas again: Return the cards to having unique effects (mostly back to 4.0), but making divination a constant fluctuating DPS buff based on seals & repeated singular card use with a growth/degeneration system that would make balance fishing a short term burst damage at the cost of becoming a debuff if it's overused, with some mitigation abilities for RNG and general QoL. The risk/reward might be more interesting, and if it ends up being like way to powerful again: hopefully they'll just decide to improve the other healers instead of just repeating 5.0 again

They are new players, and as such still don't know that more dps is all that matters. With more experience they will come to understand that having defence bole cards was worthless if you could launch a more damage balance instead.

This is only partially true, and it's mostly just fors peed running and the higher difficulty raids and trails outside of progression. But, totally ignores pug content, and progression across the board. Extremely undergeared party members, broken equipment, DPS-only healers, player unfamiliarity with the content, and eating every aoe are still very common in PUGs, which regularlyplaced situational cards above balance. Being hyper focused to just one particular set of content or school thought probably wont sit well for players outside of those circles

[Genz]

For those players, the process of being inventive, optimizing, and discovering how to do things better than the general public are fun factors.

This is totally alien to FFXIV as a whole. Those players are certainly wasting their time on this game.

[Ayesafaile]

In your post you suggest that the old 4.x iteration of AST rewarded player skill more, but this statement is simply untrue. In fact many players in JP (and NA/EU as far as I can observe) that play this game at the highest level voice a very strong preference towards the 5.x card kit because its optimization factors are magnitudes deeper than the 4.x iteration of the kit.

Put simple:
4.x optimum: Spam AoE on trick. Very heavily luck dependent.
5.x optimum: Spread every party member's potency timeline and choose the maximum. Far smaller luck factors.

Plenty of 4.x speedkill ASTs made incorrect card decisions, but their mistakes were typically obfuscated by the randomness of the system. I assume that's what you mean when you talk about "rewarding player skill".

As someone who has been involved in speedkills in the past (mostly Alexander Creator, a bit in Sigmascape), optimization of the current card system just seems tedious. You're not innovating, you're dissecting FFLogs for the correct answer. I can see how that's interesting to certain individuals, but it just seems like busywork to me. I also find it amusing that this "depth" lies clearly in an area that Square Enix don't want to draw focus to (ACT/parsing).

Don't get me wrong, I didn't like the randomness of 4.x AST when doing speedkills either. It was often frustrating to have times beaten due to another team having better AoE Balance luck, even though they made no strategical breakthroughs.

[Aurelius2625]

Sleeve draw is nearly fine, as it is currently. The only thing that needs changing is moving its cooldown to 2 minutes to synch it up with Divination. If the devs wanted to be REALLY nice, they'd give it two charges. This would alleviate the loss in Rdps, while guaranteeing a perfect divination every time, regardless of pull, timers, countdowns, and so forth... for the opener.

You'd draw a card normally, then you'd get your two remaining seals from the two charges of sleeve draw. You don't HAVE to make that change to it, but it'd mitigate the loss of cards overall throughout the fight and balance it between what we have right now, and what we had pre 5.3

Alternatively, you could keep it as is, and reduce the CD to 60s if you really wanted to, to match the amount of cards you'd get from it (60s, 1 card, vs the old 3 mins for 3 cards).

Any of these options would be fine, but let me stress that it's not necessary, except for moving the CD to 2 min to synch it with divination. Everything else is purely optional.

[hiz]

Plenty of 4.x speedkill ASTs made incorrect card decisions, but their mistakes were typically obfuscated by the randomness of the system. I assume that's what you mean when you talk about "rewarding player skill".

To clarify, by "rewarding player skill" I intended that while in the 4.x iteration you were only praying that you could play the blatantly obvious optimum (hit draw and immediately play on cooldown praying it becomes AoE Balance on Trick), the 5.x iteration allows you to pre-plan every card to its optimal oGCD/target for every fight, thus it rewards people that spend time to think a lot more than the previous iteration.
I fully agree with you that in 4.x incorrect card decisions were obfuscated by the randomness of the system, but that can be said for the 5.x iteration as well with Crit DH variance influencing your card strength... and the same can be said for pretty much every other job in the game, so while this randomness is a frustrating part of the game (as you have mentioned) I don't think this is 4.x AST unique.

As someone who has been involved in speedkills in the past (mostly Alexander Creator, a bit in Sigmascape), optimization of the current card system just seems tedious. You're not innovating, you're dissecting FFLogs for the correct answer. I can see how that's interesting to certain individuals, but it just seems like busywork to me.

Part of me understands this, while another part of me asks when was optimizing jobs not dissecting FFLogs/Google Spreadsheets/Excel for the correct answer? Coming up with 5-head strats is one thing, but my understanding is that you always needed to preplan how you would play your job optimally with that 5-head strat, and that typically was spreadsheet work. While I see that this is cumbersome to do, doing this busywork almost always had its rewards for most jobs in the game (although SQEX devs historically has gone great lengths to minimize this reward with pretty much every expansion post HW).

[LaughingBanana]

I am currently raising my Astro and it's a really fun job! But its still 62 so I don't have sleeve draw yet, can someone explain to what it does and maybe also what it did before it becomes what it is today? The tooltips isn't really clear about this.

[YusiKha]

Snip.

It used to give 3 random cards, now it gives 1 card with a seal you don’t have already (a random card if you have all 3 seals).

Some people don’t like the change because it’s 2 fewer cards. Other people like the change because it’s 2 fewer cards.