AST changes for 6.0: Let's forget 5.0 happened, and just fix what was wrong with 4.0

[Jaelommiss]

Using the old card system as a starting point, make the following changes:
Balance: 10% damage buff
Bole: 20% damage resist buff
Spear: 10% crit buff
Arrow: 10% direct hit buff
Spire: 10% physical damage buff
Ewer: 10% magic damage buff

This is just another flavour of "cards are damage" except some are objectively inferior (spear is roughly a 5% damage increase, arrow is a 2.5% damage increase) and reverting to the 4.0 mistake of placing defensive and offensive tools on the same resource. Splitting spire and ewer between physical and magical is almost identical to the current melee/ranged divide, except magic damage jobs are less common.

It's simply the current system with a new coat of paint and trap options thrown in for good measure.

Reintroducing Royal Road is a good idea that would add depth to the card system. As long as Draw's CD stays divorced from Play I'd like to see it brought back. I'd also like to see more cards drawn per unit time. One card every 30 secs is far too infrequent for what is supposedly AST's defining ability.

[ShinShimon]

This is just another flavour of "cards are damage" except some are objectively inferior (spear is roughly a 5% damage increase, arrow is a 2.5% damage increase) and reverting to the 4.0 mistake of placing defensive and offensive tools on the same resource. Splitting spire and ewer between physical and magical is almost identical to the current melee/ranged divide, except magic damage jobs are less common.

It's simply the current system with a new coat of paint and trap options thrown in for good measure.

Reintroducing Royal Road is a good idea that would add depth to the card system. As long as Draw's CD stays divorced from Play I'd like to see it brought back. I'd also like to see more cards drawn per unit time. One card every 30 secs is far too infrequent for what is supposedly AST's defining ability.

1 non-damage card is fine, because it can always be safely rerolled for a damage card if you draw it, and allows for one critical fail state if you take a risky reroll. However, it can always be Spreaded to mitigate a tankbuster later. Risky RNG is good, that's the whole point of AST.

Some cards being straight-up better than others is the whole point. Again, RNG is good. The fun of the old card system was planning around the RNG on the fly to get the most out of your buffs. There is no point to AST if every card is functionally identical, but it's ok for almost every card to be a damage buff, because not all damage buffs are created equal. Some have more utility than others, some have more utility on certain jobs than others (like giving 4.0 Arrow to BLM or SAM, or Spear to Bard). Even if Spire and Ewer just follow the current melee/ranged divide, it would still be a fundamentally different system to new-AST if it exists alongside meaningful card diversity and Spread, Redraw, and Royal Road.