I miss old AST cards

[Kansene]

Removing DPS check enrages indeed removes one aspect of encounter difficulty. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is definitely up for debate.
Getting rid of them would upset a great many people no doubt, many of which would point to raids now being the worst they've ever been because they now cater to mega-casuals who can't meet DPS checks.
People can argue until they die about whether DPS checks are a heavensent blessing, or a stifling burden, but one objective truth about the matter is that it would open the floor for the devs to be more adventurous in job designs.
At the moment, it's damage damage damage damage damage and damage.
And not only that, all of that damage must fit inside the 2min burst windows. Because more damage. AST cards? Changed to only buff damage. Then shoved into the burst window. More damage.

There's an argument to be made that many people prefer this gameplay loop, and all the more power to them. I strongly dislike it because in my view it just limits creativity and makes for a boring and unpleasant way to design things, but that's also why I'm simply opting out of doing it. Not for me, and that's fine.
But I'll still share my opinion about it, it's not like it's been this way since day 1 if people I've spoken to are any indication. It's a game whose design changes over time, and well, this is how I'd like to see it change; more variation.

Apologies if this rant hijacked the intention of the thread, but ultimately, encounter design basically governs how jobs are designed, so in order for AST to become more interesting, I think taking a good hard look at what is needed in the game's fights is necessary.

[Mithron]

And it would be factually harder if needing to meet a DPS check. Duh

Does Titan Ex have an enrage? It has body checks through Gaols (you need minimum three people to not wipe), and I'd consider that fight much more difficult than say EW ex trial 3, which does have an enrage and body checks.

[Maltothoris]

Does Titan Ex have an enrage? It has body checks through Gaols (you need minimum three people to not wipe), and I'd consider that fight much more difficult than say EW ex trial 3, which does have an enrage and body checks.

Ya titan ex had an enrage at 11 minutes I believe and it’s just an upheaval with unavoidable knock back and still kills you.

[Azuri]

Then the problem isn't with haste, but the poor design of haste not being strict DPS gains in all scenarios. Solve root cause. Removing haste just made the game infinitely more boring.

Also others being bad at their job already actively makes playing yours worse because if anyone drifts their raid DPS buff cooldowns, you lose, even if you time yours perfectly.

So you are saying that we should homogenize all jobs so they all have a DoT and close to no damage oGCDs? Because that is the only way you actually make haste universally desirable. You know what this reminds me of? Healer design. Or you know, we can actually go with the correct option and turn haste effect into something more palatable... you know, like a damage buff?

And again, entirely irrelevant counter argument. I don't care about them drifting or not. This has no relevancy on my moment to moment gameplay, only the final output. I do care about random oGCDs showing up there they shouldn't because some AST decided that their fun is more important than mine.

[ForsakenRoe]

I do care about random oGCDs showing up there they shouldn't because some AST decided that their fun is more important than mine.

Then you'll be happy to know that Arrow had zero effect on OGCDs, only GCDs. Spear USED to make your OGCDs used under it's effect incur a lower CD, but it got changed to Crit Rate. So yeh, you getting an arrow as RDM would give you more VerWhatever casts and that's it, and if you reach 100/100 too quickly because of it, just ignore the overcap and wait till the burst window. Your damage was still increased by virtue of getting more VerWhatever's out.

FireMage loves to throw the word 'strawman' around, but that first bit is a textbook example. You might want to look up the old card effects before you rant about how they'll ruin your precious game experience, because I guess either you forgot, or didn't even play when it was a thing. Now, if you want to go for 'it'll make me run out of MP too fast' I could maybe acknowledge it as holding some water, and by 'some water' I mean like a teaspoonful, because Lucid is so disgustingly strong in it's effect MP basically doesn't exist outside of limiting how many times a res can be used

[FireMage]

Then you'll be happy to know that Arrow had zero effect on OGCDs, only GCDs. Spear USED to make your OGCDs used under it's effect incur a lower CD, but it got changed to Crit Rate. So yeh, you getting an arrow as RDM would give you more VerWhatever casts and that's it, and if you reach 100/100 too quickly because of it, just ignore the overcap and wait till the burst window. Your damage was still increased by virtue of getting more VerWhatever's out.

FireMage loves to throw the word 'strawman' around, but that first bit is a textbook example. You might want to look up the old card effects before you rant about how they'll ruin your precious game experience, because I guess either you forgot, or didn't even play when it was a thing. Now, if you want to go for 'it'll make me run out of MP too fast' I could maybe acknowledge it as holding some water, and by 'some water' I mean like a teaspoonful, because Lucid is so disgustingly strong in it's effect MP basically doesn't exist outside of limiting how many times a res can be used

Arrow threw off multiple Jobs back in SB, and would throw off even more now, it wasn't a good thing to have in the game

[Azuri]

Then you'll be happy to know that Arrow had zero effect on OGCDs, only GCDs. Spear USED to make your OGCDs used under it's effect incur a lower CD, but it got changed to Crit Rate. So yeh, you getting an arrow as RDM would give you more VerWhatever casts and that's it, and if you reach 100/100 too quickly because of it, just ignore the overcap and wait till the burst window. Your damage was still increased by virtue of getting more VerWhatever's out.

FireMage loves to throw the word 'strawman' around, but that first bit is a textbook example. You might want to look up the old card effects before you rant about how they'll ruin your precious game experience, because I guess either you forgot, or didn't even play when it was a thing. Now, if you want to go for 'it'll make me run out of MP too fast' I could maybe acknowledge it as holding some water, and by 'some water' I mean like a teaspoonful, because Lucid is so disgustingly strong in it's effect MP basically doesn't exist outside of limiting how many times a res can be used

You do realize that's the exact problem, right? Any job, has two simultaneously running timelines that have a fixed interaction between each other - the GCDs and the oGCDs. Effects like haste only affect one of those timelines, shifting it forward. This leads to your fixed interaction points (the weave windows) no longer aligning the way they should. Making the whole exprience just plain unpleasant. But you know, admittedly, I might be asking the "fun" side to understand a bit too much.

And you know, if we are going with "just ignore and pretend it didn't happen" approach I think I have a great recommendation for you! Just ignore ShB changes. AST still has those old cards. Just pretend that you are giving someone haste with Arrow. Of course, in practice it's actually a much more useful direct damage increase, but you can think it isn't!

[flowerfairy]

snip

Damage will always be the number one goal when it comes to optimizing a fight, but I generally agree. Older fights had lenient hard enrages because there were way more soft enrages built in such as the boss getting a permanent stacking damage buff if a mechanic is failed. The fights were less of a dance floor and more about endurance, doing the same mechanic again and again in a phase, trying not to run out of resources. IMO the mechanics were not difficult movement wise but they hurt really bad even if you passed it. I think a hard enrage is still necessary so you aren't playing it too safe by not doing damage and regenerating resources, but yeah I'd also like to see a return to those kind of fights. But even if the current encounter design stayed the same, I think the jobs can still be interesting. Maybe it could use a bit more HEAL checks (not mitigation checks, yoshi p), but resource management is a thing that I think doesn't rely on encounter design to function.

[ForsakenRoe]

You do realize that's the exact problem, right? Any job, has two simultaneously running timelines that have a fixed interaction between each other - the GCDs and the oGCDs. Effects like haste only affect one of those timelines, shifting it forward. This leads to your fixed interaction points (the weave windows) no longer aligning the way they should.

So your whole argument against AST having a way to increase people's GCD speed is... it would make your OGCDs come off CD at a time that means you can't press them right away, because of your GCD animation lock? How do you manage, each tier when new crafted gear comes out and is stacked with skill/spellspeed? I don't think I've ever seen ANYone complain about GCD/OGCD alignment like this, like wow you had to use Fleche 0.5 seconds later because animation lock barse ruined

And you know, if we are going with "just ignore and pretend it didn't happen" approach I think I have a great recommendation for you! Just ignore ShB changes. AST still has those old cards. Just pretend that you are giving someone haste with Arrow. Of course, in practice it's actually a much more useful direct damage increase, but you can think it isn't!

Believe me, most of us wish we could. But we got stuck with zero interactivity Divination, 'play this correctly and it's still less than 1% DPS buff' Astrodyne, 1 nuke 1 dot rotations on every healer, etc. We WISH we could 'pretend' we're back in SB. I used to be like you once, thinking that the Balance-fishing sucked, and that the SHB cards were going to be better. Wanting stuff changed for the sake of balance. Then they came for me and my class at the time, DRK. Then I realised how stupid it was to throw away the flavor and identity and SOUL of the classes, to make the bars on a third party website nobody gives a rat's arse about be slightly more similar in size. Because we can't ever make them 'the same size'. One's always going to be bigger than the other, even if it's by one pixel. By one point of damage per second.

Removing all the flavor of the classes in pursuit of the unreachable goal of 'perfect balance' is like, idk, removing the aspects of taste of ice-cream flavors that some people don't like, to try and make a flavor that is perfectly balanced so everyone will like it. Someone doesn't like chocolate, we remove the chocolate flavor. Someone doesn't like mint, we remove the mint. Someone doesn't like vanilla, we remove the vanilla. And by the end of it, we have the ice cream flavor that offends nobody's tastes, the one that everyone will surely love: Ice. Frozen water.

[FireMage]

Ah so we're just going for flat out mass hyperbole now eh Roe?