AST Changes Ideas

[Heilstos]

Unpopular opinion but I have no interest in the obsession with utility cards. It's always the same ideas. "increased cast/attack speed", "restore mana", "increased movement speed", "increased healing taken", "tiny bit of mitigation". Most of these are flat out worthless in a lot of situations or even problematic (such as reduced recast time on the wrong class or too much unexpected movement speed sending someone over the edge of a platform). Fights are designed and we gear our classes to beat them without such Utility. It's the reason tenacity is worthless, permanent 10% damage reduction sounds great on paper but if the fight is designed so you can beat it the same without it, it serves no use. We use Piety if we need mana, we meld SkS/SpS if we need to reach a perfect breakpoint, we mitigate enough to survive. In other games it might work, but ff14 is just so scripted and exact.

(...)

I'd rather they looked at other ways to make AST more interesting. Delayed time magic, both heal and dps. A Sleeve draw that aligns with Divination. The ability to place a Return marker like on e12s. A buff Share cd, so you could share a card buff, shield or Lightspeed on you with another player. More dps abilities than Malefic spam. I'm just throwing things out, but there's plenty of other things they could look at. Cards are mostly fine though.

That Aspect of Cards still exist about the idea from Divination as trait. So you get the reforcement to play the card. So its like Card (Utility) + Divination trait ( that is the effect from very card now) (Dps push)
Your aspect that a dps push is important. Is there because you have to play every card, which are not independent of the jobs (Melee ranged) which are available for the DPS part. It feels not great to give ranged cards in a group to the melee but what is the other way to do it. To give a 3% card to the melee or 6% to a tank. The SHb Sytsem has is problems aswell.

This idea is intended to be a further development of the SHB card system. The DPS push is and remains trivial, but the card itself is a game for the branch.The style of play goes in the direction of the bard.
As you said, the utility effect of the card is a pure bonus that is under the RNG. And that Part is not important for you Liam.
Because the approach that every card pushes the DPS is important and correct. Otherwise there is no incentive to play the card.

[Payadopa]

act.

Sure some utility might be handy if someone screws up but I'd rather not build a whole class mechanic around "might be useful if you group sucks, maybe, then it's worthless later". Utility cards often just feel useful to players who don't really care if they're actually being useful. Dps cards are always useful.

And that mindset is exactly the reason why the game gets more and more boring, I'm sorry. It's all about fighting in your own little bubble while almost completely discounting the possibility that people would like to have more utility. Raw DPS increase at the exclusion of fun will just lead to stagnation. I can wrap my head around this spreadsheet approach of playing a game, no offense.

[Heilstos]

And that mindset is exactly the reason why the game gets more and more boring, I'm sorry. It's all about fighting in your own little bubble while almost completely discounting the possibility that people would like to have more utility. Raw DPS increase at the exclusion of fun will just lead to stagnation. I can wrap my head around this spreadsheet approach of playing a game, no offense.

That is the reason to make a compromise. If only the wishes of all parts of the community are felt. (So the DPS push and the desire for utility).
Did we win or am I mistaken Payadopa?

[Anhra]

Tl;dr

Take that attitute to the next WHM discussion Thread. In case you don't know, AST currently has despite the "utility cards" the lowest Dps in the game, having the Balance card as well as its Divination combinations as it has been suggested, would already be a good boost in damage.

If Jobs were to be reworked in a way where overall manacosts would be increased as well as the distribution of utility based skills would be limited to healers and only certain jobs such as bard and maybe DRK or GNB (not both), things would be different.

My point on this is, the Homogenisation Train for Jobs has been arround for way too long, if this doesn't change, then this Game wont last long enough until it has more People leaving the game, than joining. This isn't the first time this kind of stuff happens and it clearly isn't the last time either.

Tl;dr: current Jobs are boring anyway, so might as well rework it from the ground up.

[Rilifane]

Take that attitute to the next WHM discussion Thread. In case you don't know, AST currently has despite the "utility cards" the lowest Dps in the game, having the Balance card as well as its Divination combinations as it has been suggested, would already be a good boost in damage.

AST has the lowest personal DPS but the highest raid DPS of all healers. On all bosses and at all percentiles btw.
And what ultimately counts for compraing healers is not the pDPS but rDPS. Don't just look at flat ingame potencies or ACT overlay numbesrs.

[Anahlise_Auhn_Giinslai]

Hmn... The identity crisis of Astrologian seems to revolve around the old versus the new, with the problem at the center of that revolving, being that Astrologian has three different themes... like with those of us, myself included, in the Dark Knight community, or even as with the Bard community...

The Astrologian community will have to come to a identity consensus. / Is Astrologian: a Astrologian, a Cartomancer, or a Chronomancer?
what matters the most to Astrologian identity? chronomancy, time magic, Cartomancy, card magic and divination through cards, or Astrology-based/themed magic, and divination through the stars?

[ASkellington]

Cards are mostly fine though.

Cards are not "fine". We have 8 different cards with six (three each) that do the same damn thing. You could literally change Divination to a 1 button skill on a 120s cool down, remove the seals, keep say Balance and Ewer with Lord/Lady of Crowns and it would literally feel no different than the current state.

And while you are right to say that moving from the cards to instead distance AST from WHM in its healing deparment would be a better idea, the fact remains that what makes AST AST is the cards. Yes we had time magic (when I wasn't even playing the game). Yes I personally enjoy the idea of time based healing (Horoscope/Earthly Star). But what drew me and many other ASTs to the class was the cards. They have to be addressed. Either they should be outright removed, or changed from its current system.

[Anhra]

Hmn... The identity crisis of Astrologian seems to revolve around the old versus the new, with the problem at the center of that revolving, being that Astrologian has three different themes... like with those of us, myself included, in the Dark Knight community, or even as with the Bard community...

The Astrologian community will have to come to a identity consensus. / Is Astrologian: a Astrologian, a Cartomancer, or a Chronomancer?
what matters the most to Astrologian identity? chronomancy, time magic, Cartomancy, card magic and divination through cards, or Astrology-based/themed magic, and divination through the stars?

AST is nothing more than a fortune teller, and it would be great if it would actually feel like one with the cards as its main focus instead of being a healer who cant decide between going SCH or WHM.

[Liam_Harper]

And while you are right to say that moving from the cards to instead distance AST from WHM in its healing deparment would be a better idea, the fact remains that what makes AST AST is the cards. Yes we had time magic (when I wasn't even playing the game). Yes I personally enjoy the idea of time based healing (Horoscope/Earthly Star). But what drew me and many other ASTs to the class was the cards. They have to be addressed. Either they should be outright removed, or changed from its current system.

Changed to what though? All I've heard is "dps cards are boring" and "utility cards are fun" and no one touches on the fact they're also useless in the current game design. They don't even care. It's similar to how healbots don't care that spamming overheals is actually useless and they're denying their party about 5-8k rdps if they'd just spammed damage instead, because they feel useful and that's fun to them. I don't feel like designing a class to have useless abilities but "feel" useful is a good idea. There are other areas to look for adding fun.

Cards could use some tweaks, but you have ranged, melee and 3 flavors of seals that become a minigame to match 3 different colours on the correct role. The idea that every card does the exact same thing is flawed, although the basic cards are quite similar.

I'm sure there are some ideas you could do to spice it slightly. For example, occasionally drawing an empowered range or melee card that gives double/triple benefit to healers or tanks, or changing Lord/Lady into a card that causes the target to deal X potency damage with weaponskills or casts, with a bloodbath or small mana drain effect, so you could pass it to a tank/healer sometimes. Even then it's hard to balance it to being useful. Perhaps you could also only give a seal if you apply a card to the correct role, align sleeve draw with Divi but make Divi far worse without 3 seals so playing the seal minigame right becomes more important.
But mitigation, movement speed, reduced cast/recast, crit/DH/Det divides are all generally bad ideas.

[MintnHoney]

All I've heard is "dps cards are boring" and "utility cards are fun" and no one touches on the fact they're also useless in the current game design.

Please understand that optimal and useful are different concepts, just as sub/non-optimal and useless are also very different.
Utility cards would not be optimal for DPS gains, but would still be useful.
The fun part is subjective.
Though, with that in mind, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that you would want to mince words over whether or not we should view the current cards as being the same, considering that the differences between the cards boils down to 1/2 of them having a 1 word difference in their description (the optimal target). The Seals, meanwhile, are an underdeveloped, tacked-on token mechanic that's more trouble than it's worth, especially since it brings back that which had already been mitigated very well with the prior cards: fishing.


But otherwise, I think there's a lot we could do with the concept of fortune telling rather than what we currently have or previously had. For example, often times, when getting ones fortune told, the reading is made with something specific in mind (prospects of love, the future, the immediate fate of a specific person, etc.).

If I could ask for anything, then I propose we change the "Draw" command into "Astrology" and choose to do an astrological reading for 1 of 3 paths: Life (target allies only), Death (target Enemies only), and Fortune (target Allies or Enemies). Keeping the job's storyline as it is, we would end up revealing a celestial body through our reading; depending on the celestial body we reveal, the exact effect(s) changes.
Life corresponds to healing, Death corresponds to attacking, and Fortune corresponds to buffs/debuffs.
This way, we have access to a variety of effects for a purpose that we specify.

Some (not-necessarily-balanced, off the top of my head) examples of readings could be:

We use Astrology, and choose to read for Life, targeting an ally: our reading reveals The Spire. As a result, our target gets a 100 potency heal, and also gains a 50 potency regeneration effect every 3 seconds, for a period of 30 seconds.
Alternatively, if our reading revealed The Bole, then our target would receive Althyk's Gaze, a 10 second buff which records how much damage the target receives during the duration of the buff. Once the timer expires, the buff consumes itself and activates Nophica's Embrace, healing for an amount of the total damage received (say, 50%).

or

We choose to read for Death, targeting an enemy: our reading reveals The Spear. The target then takes 100 potency of (I'd prefer Ice-aspected, but elements in this game are "whatever" now) damage and covers them with ice. The next attack done to the target triggers the ice to shatter, dealing a 10 potency DoT to enemies within a certain radius, including the target, for 15 seconds.
Alternatively, if our reading revealed The Balance, the target would take 3 instances of 100 potency (fire-aspected) damage, applied each time the AST uses an offensive spell or ability, but not necessarily having to target the enemy.

or

We choose to read for Fortune, targeting either an Ally or an Enemy: we target our ally, and our reading reveals The Ewer. The Ally and allies near them gain faster passive HP and MP regeneration, and casting time reduced by 1.5 seconds for 15 seconds.
Alternatively, we target an enemy, and our reading reveals The Arrow. The enemy's auto-attack speed and accuracy are reduced by 25%.

Names and lore notwithstanding (assuming I remembered things correctly), that's what I would like.

Perhaps you could also only give a seal if you apply a card to the correct role, align sleeve draw with Divi but make Divi far worse without 3 seals so playing the seal minigame right becomes more important.

I also wanted to touch on this bit here.
1) This would make the skill floor rise, but the skill ceiling would stay the same. Put another way, it would bring about player suffering (especially new players) rather than consistently provide "more fun."
2) They used to have Divination provide worse buffs depending on seals obtained, but they changed those numbers to be closer together (likely to try and help bring back the players they lost when they scared them away at the beginning of the expansion, but also because the differences probably threw off the devs intended numbers for their boss fights).
3) I have seen complaints from players where they've been bitched at for not throwing cards on a specific party member, either because they did not realize that the AST never drew the right card or because they believed that the AST should always be throwing cards on that player. While that can be harassment (especially if they continued to attack the AST, assuming an explanation was provided) and should be reported, we should also be trying to avoid putting players into situations where they would be harassed.
4) Imagine trying to get perfect seals and drawing the same seal 3-5 times in a row. Or worse, imagine trying to get any seal, and drawing a card for a DPS type that was not present 3-5 times in a row. Coupled with the point above, we're leading players into situations that are aggravating.