AST Adjustments 6.2

[SieyaM]

Here's the thing about AST cards: either they all need to contribute to damage or none of them should contribute to damage. That was the problem with pre ShB era cards: Half (post Spear change) contributed to damage and half contributed to utility (or were used to set-up for damage). The utility cards, being RNG, were faaaaar less useful than the damage cards, even with Bole buffed out the ass to equal Rampart. How was slightly less damage on a tank/the group that you couldn't plan for compete with a 5% flat damage buff? 7% crit buff? It didn't. It couldn't.

We also have to look at the pre-HW skill set AST had. Most of their Job skills went to card management (Draw/Play, Royal Road, Spread, Redraw). Gravity, their AoE filler spell, used to be 52. They didn't have it for any of the ARR post game dungeons. A lot of skills that feel like they should be job quest skills are instead learned during level up (Essential Dignity is at level 4, btw). This caused major problems down the road on introducing new spells for level up. The job design was too limited in scope. The ShB card changes alleviated a lot of this problem.

However, EW introduced a new problem by giving AST a bonkers amount of buttons to hit with a seal system that isn't practical with how cards are doled out. So, my proposition is thus:

Minor Arcana: neither card does damage. Lady is now an AoE heal with a regen effect while Lord is an AoE heal with a shield effect. (Celestial Opposition might get nerfed to be just a flat AoE heal, but maybe gets both regen and shield effects if used while under Neutral Sect).

Basic cards: Now only do direct damage by the AST (half are single target, while the other half are AoE. Redraw is 3 charges again. Draw grants the Celestial Redraw effect which automatically redraw the single-target card to the AoE one of the same seal and vice-versa (this will not consume a charge of Redraw). MP gain is buffed back to 700MP. Sleeve Draw returned and put on a 60s timer (will also grant Celestial Redraw).

Astrodyne: sits on a 60s cooldown timer. Seals determine what kind of attack is performed when Astrodyne is used (3 of the same = big AoE hit [can probably use current Lady of Crowns animation]. 3 different = big single-target hit [can probably use old Lord of Crowns animation]. 2 same = Earthly Star).

I'm aware this greatly lowers the amount of support AST does, but this does make it more solo-friendly and controller friendly.

Might as well just get rid of the cards all together then and just buff their Malefic potency since they all are just dps buttons anyway with this set up. And people are still going to complain about getting AoE damage cards when they need single target ones since I assume single target damage will be higher than the AoE counterpart, so it does nothing to appease the min maxers who complained about the original iteration anyway.

[inhaledcorn]

Might as well just get rid of the cards all together then and just buff their Malefic potency since they all are just dps buttons anyway with this set up. And people are still going to complain about getting AoE damage cards when they need single target ones since I assume single target damage will be higher than the AoE counterpart, so it does nothing to appease the min maxers who complained about the original iteration anyway.

The problem is AST's gimmick in and of itself just doesn't work within the context of FFXIV. Either all cards need to contribute to DPS and be random, or all cards need to be utility and be selectable. We can't have halfsies or else we have the problem of "Balance or bust". You may not like min-maxers, but that is the reality of the game.

[SieyaM]

The problem is AST's gimmick in and of itself just doesn't work within the context of FFXIV. Either all cards need to contribute to DPS and be random, or all cards need to be utility and be selectable. We can't have halfsies or else we have the problem of "Balance or bust". You may not like min-maxers, but that is the reality of the game.

The reality of the game is that there is nothing preventing people from clearing content with the previous iteration of cards, or when divination was tied to the seals, what happened was people were getting upset about missing out on a 2% damage increase with divination. And before that it was about a few hundred DPS between the top parsers when card effects were different. This has never been about the ability of the cards to make or break runs, it was about parsing the best numbers using the cards that is all, people got mad because they weren't getting top parses when the AST that was feeding them cards didn't draw enough balance cards.

[inhaledcorn]

The reality of the game is that there is nothing preventing people from clearing content with the previous iteration of cards, or when divination was tied to the seals, what happened was people were getting upset about missing out on a 2% damage increase with divination. And before that it was about a few hundred DPS between the top parsers when card effects were different. This has never been about the ability of the cards to make or break runs, it was about parsing the best numbers using the cards that is all, people got mad because they weren't getting top parses when the AST that was feeding them cards didn't draw enough balance cards.

And, guess what? You all got mad that the healers weren't balanced. Everyone wanted AST because they could do that. So, what did SE do? They catered to your demands. AST couldn't do that anymore, or, rather, that was all they could do. Honestly, you guys have no one to blame but yourselves for the state of AST. You wanted balance, and you got it. And, everything that goes with it.

[QooEr]

And, guess what? You all got mad that the healers weren't balanced. Everyone wanted AST because they could do that. So, what did SE do? They catered to your demands. AST couldn't do that anymore, or, rather, that was all they could do. Honestly, you guys have no one to blame but yourselves for the state of AST. You wanted balance, and you got it. And, everything that goes with it.

no "we" didnt ask for this. even without balance whm was woefully undertuned. what needed to happen was to increase the dps of whm to make up for the difference

and to be honest the biggest game changer wasnt even by SE, it was by fflogs introducing rdps. without rdps we would still be card feeding and padding players for their top parses and nothing wouldve been fixed

[Recon1o6]

And, guess what? You all got mad that the healers weren't balanced. Everyone wanted AST because they could do that. So, what did SE do? They catered to your demands. AST couldn't do that anymore, or, rather, that was all they could do. Honestly, you guys have no one to blame but yourselves for the state of AST. You wanted balance, and you got it. And, everything that goes with it.

incorrect
People have been demanding utility for WHM or highest pdps for years. its still not been granted

nobody asked for our cards to be reduced to nothing. Nobody asked for sch to get ripped to pieces with a fairy deleted and dots removed. Nobody asked for whm to lose almost everything in sb

balance is a matter of potencies, its nothing to do with what playstyle it is.

[ty_taurus]

And, guess what? You all got mad that the healers weren't balanced. Everyone wanted AST because they could do that. So, what did SE do? They catered to your demands. AST couldn't do that anymore, or, rather, that was all they could do. Honestly, you guys have no one to blame but yourselves for the state of AST. You wanted balance, and you got it. And, everything that goes with it.

When AST first came to us in 3.0, it was under tuned. It had MP problems, couldn't heal as well as WHM, and its RNG buffs coupled with low personal damage potencies meant WHM was superior. Between 3.0 - 3.3, AST received several buffs to improve its problems: increased healing potencies, better MP management, and an enormous buff to The Balance which rendered WHM inferior throughout the end half of HW. The biggest common complain of AST was how it was designed to replace WHM or SCH rather than just offering its own unique advantages, thus creating situation where it would only ever be better than or worse than WHM or SCH.

Going into SB, the main thing I remember people discussing was trying to move AST away from being WHM 2.0 or SCH 2.0 and giving WHM offensive buffs to compete with AST. SE Responded by telling us we didn't know what we were talking about and that giving offensive buffs to WHM would ruin its identity. They proceeded to reinforce its identity as a "pure healer" (a BS term that means nothing) by taking away many of its unique tools to give to the other healers without replacing any of them, adding new actions that did nothing to address WHM's weaknesses, and giving it SB lilies which were a disaster. Meanwhile SCH got Chain Stratagem which it didn't need, lost a bunch of DoTs due to the remove of cross class as well as Bio and Bio II getting merged (the former which made sense but the later didn't), and lost Energy Drain and Miasma II initially only for SE to bring them back due to outrage. And then there was AST who got a ton of new complimentary resources that continued to increase its dominance over WHM. It had clunk, yes, but was very powerful and largely enjoyable.

The only thing people wanted of the card system was to further iron out some of the weak aspects. Changing The Spear to a crit buff was one such answer that was given partway through SB. From there, the big topics were that Spire was never useful other than being Royal Roaded, something that would've needed to change anyway due to TP being removed, and not being able to use the Lady of Crowns correctly because Minor Arcana's cooldown wouldn't start until after you used her.

Literally no one was asking for or wanted EVERY card to become The Balance.

[Liam_Harper]

The reality of the game is that there is nothing preventing people from clearing content with the previous iteration of cards, or when divination was tied to the seals, what happened was people were getting upset about missing out on a 2% damage increase with divination.

The reality of the game is that there is nothing preventing people from clearing content without the previous iteration of cards. What I mean by that is we just don't need unreliable utility that we can't map, especially as we get better at the game. It's not that people are obsessed over parses, it's the fact that they're always going to prefer the option that is useful 99% of the time over the option that might have an impact 10% of the time. Who wants to sacrifice their groups damage for useless flavor buttons? It's just common sense.

I've personally never seen the obsession with mixing AST's dps cards with utility. Why can't we have both but just separate them? For example if Draw was only dps and MA was only non-dps utility.

[rewd]

The reality of the game is that there is nothing preventing people from clearing content without the previous iteration of cards. What I mean by that is we just don't need unreliable utility that we can't map, especially as we get better at the game. It's not that people are obsessed over parses, it's the fact that they're always going to prefer the option that is useful 99% of the time over the option that might have an impact 10% of the time. Who wants to sacrifice their groups damage for useless flavor buttons? It's just common sense.

I've personally never seen the obsession with mixing AST's dps cards with utility. Why can't we have both but just separate them? For example if Draw was only dps and MA was only non-dps utility.

But that's exactly what people have been asking for (just check previous comments). If everyone was fishing for Balance/DPS cards, then rework them so there are no DPS cards anymore. You would still dislike it because you don't like RNG utility, but that's a you problem and not an AST problem. People are starting to dislike parsing/minmaxing talk because it does suck the fun out of the game if everything needs to be mapped and all that.

People just want AST to have an identity again and to be fun. RNG has always been part of AST's identity and while utility you can't plan around 100% of the time might just be "flavour" for you, a lot of people enjoy it and it's what drew them to the job in the first place.

[Liam_Harper]

But that's exactly what people have been asking for (just check previous comments).

I think a lot of the arguments are because not everyone is on the same page on that. A lot of the statements are "bring back the old system" and attacks on the elitist parsers for ruining their AST.

Giving AST their utility cards separately from the dps cards would be great and I'd be all for it. The utility wouldn't always be useful due to RNG, but you're not sacrificing something that's actually useful. It's a bonus that isn't a detriment to the class in any way. Sounds much more fun.