AST Adjustments 6.2

[QooEr]

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 need to realize that you can minmax anything, at any time, under any circumstances. like, minmaxing is the entire fun for some people, why make even minmaxing itself easy and boring? all i do with cards now is hold 3 cards and lightspeed every 2 minutes minutes. riveting .

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.

precisely. i used to do parse runs a lot in heavensward and Stormblood and not once did i ever think cards were a problem because to me it simply was another aspect of the job to make the most out of. yes is annoying to get bad rng sometimes but that's kind of the point of playing rng classes.

i guess the biggest problem i can see with rng utility is the reliability aspect, but they can have better rng mitigation without completely gutting everything. like, making sure you see every card every 6 draws, or giving options to use cards without using up the royal road youve been saving, or something like that.

[Absurdity]

people need to realize that you can minmax anything, at any time, under any circumstances. like, minmaxing is the entire fun for some people, why make even minmaxing itself easy and boring? all i do with cards now is hold 3 cards and lightspeed every 2 minutes minutes. riveting .

This. Absolutely this.

And it's not just an issue for AST either. Since SE reworked party buffs and big burst windows to be every 2 minutes the optimization part of fights has become rather stale, because almost every job automatically syncs up with party buffs anyway.
So now optimization boils down to either just doing your rotation for 8 minutes without letting it desync... or creating an incredibly convoluted custom rotation for a single specific fight, just to get an extra cast of your big potency abilities in.

As for the problem with rng... is it really such a big problem for parse runs when crit and direct hit already exist? You can already end up having to do the same fight a ridiculous amount of times just to get good crit rng.

[rewd]

people need to realize that you can minmax anything, at any time, under any circumstances. like, minmaxing is the entire fun for some people, why make even minmaxing itself easy and boring? all i do with cards now is hold 3 cards and lightspeed every 2 minutes minutes. riveting .

Indeed, but not all minmaxing is the same. Minmaxing with RNG feels like you are accepting a compromise, and I understand that some people might not like it. You can give AST six utility cards and unless you remove RNG, they won't ever be part of your healing/mitigation plan because they are not reliable. Still, some people might find the unreliability fun and AST is the only healer that can offer a similar playstyle.

DPS and utility shouldn't be connected, but I also don't think that having RNG utility would just be useless flavour. If anything, I think current jobs need more flavour.

[ty_taurus]

Indeed, but not all minmaxing is the same. Minmaxing with RNG feels like you are accepting a compromise, and I understand that some people might not like it. You can give AST six utility cards and unless you remove RNG, they won't ever be part of your healing/mitigation plan because they are not reliable. Still, some people might find the unreliability fun and AST is the only healer that can offer a similar playstyle.

DPS and utility shouldn't be connected, but I also don't think that having RNG utility would just be useless flavour. If anything, I think current jobs need more flavour.

Honestly, the RNG aspects were the only thing that kept me playing AST during HW and SB. I love gambler roles in games, even online games. Yes, it's unreliable and clashes with the concept of meta, but I love characters in games that have risk and chance involved in their gameplay.

Something that I think could work better for RNG utility is rather than just applying one short-lived buff to one party member, is if the effects instead augmented certain actions. You get windows where you know certain actions will apply certain buffs and can choose how to use them.