Attributes Hurts Astrologian

[Graveyardprincess]

They tried that in HW/SB, guess what, it all came down to Spread Balance as the one thing you wanted. You could get away with a spread spear, but it was deemed inferior.

However, regardless of that, I still do not understand the correlation between players having attributes and that being a detriment to AST having different cards. Having different cards that increase different stats is still a thing you can do, regardless of whether every job has a standardised set of stats or not.



Old cards were damage up (Balance), GCD speed up (Arrow), oGCD speed up [later changed to Crit rate up] (Spear), mitigation (Bole), TP refresh (Spire) and MP refresh (Ewer). Despite this, all everyone wanted was Balance and later Spear as a lesser Balance.

You also had the fact you could enhance cards to change effects, enhance (made stronger), extend (longer buff) and spread, made them AoE. there was quite a system behind it all, but it all boiled down to several things. The first being, you couldn't guarantee Bole would be up for a mechanic, so you couldn't rely on it over other tools. TP and MP refresh were made redundant by Bards/Machinists, plus, it couldn't be relied upon, plus you didn't know if the players in question had a Lucid/Invigorate about to come off of cooldown, which would make the card a wasted use.

This leaves Balance, Arrow and Spear. Starting with Arrow, getting arrow was bad, you went though your resources much quicker and so you were more likely to run out. Exception being BLM, having basically unlimited resources. Next, Spear. Originally being an oGCD recast reducer, it caused issues with alignment, especially for things like Trick Attack, plus, just like the GCD, the effect only took place if you used the oGCD when you had Spear up, which limited it's usefulness even more.

So, now we are at Balance and Spear 2.0 (crit increase). Both increased damage in different ways, Balance increased the party damage more mathematically than Spear, so it was the one that was preferred over Spear.

So really, it was down to RNG making mitigation/resource gain useless, one making the party do less damage due to lack of resources later in fights and the prevalence of damage is king that essentially forced players into spread Balance or spread Spear as your only 2 real options. If you want to have something more interesting, why not bring forward some suggestions, keeping in mind what has come before and how the player base treated it.

ur forgetting the boost that cards could give other cards, arrow was great to get back then because it increased the duration of a card'


every stormblood card had a use even if it was to just boost or spread another card, also arrow was god tier if your team had multiple mages instend of mele dps in some case i remember it being way better than even balance.


I feel like balance just got way to many looks because most peoples brains are like more damage =better but honestly speed out ranks damage its like how bleach explains it you can do more damage but you will have less attacks from that, the more attacks you have can honestly = way more damage than just pure damage boost.

kinda why i dislike how they design combat its 1 dimonsal and only revolves around damage

[Mikey_R]

ur forgetting the boost that cards could give other cards, arrow was great to get back then because it increased the duration of a card'

I did mention that.

every stormblood card had a use even if it was to just boost or spread another card, also arrow was god tier if your team had multiple mages instend of mele dps in some case i remember it being way better than even balance.

If a cards only use is to use it's secondary effect and never it's main effect, does that seem like good design? As for Arrow, already mentioned it was good for BLM, but others suffered for it, will explain in a bit more below.

I feel like balance just got way to many looks because most peoples brains are like more damage =better but honestly speed out ranks damage its like how bleach explains it you can do more damage but you will have less attacks from that, the more attacks you have can honestly = way more damage than just pure damage boost.

The problem isn't necessarily in the then and there. Sure, there might be cases where Arrow was superior (See BLM), however, for every other job, Arrow just made them go through resources quicker. Once you were out of resources, you couldn't do anything, which loses you even more damage over just using Balance or Spear. Even if you wanted to use spread Spire/Ewer to counter that, using up a card draw to do that would also result in less damage, as you could have just used 2 spread Balance/Spear for more damage without the threat of lack of resources.

Even today, where melees have no TP, Arrow wouldn't do well on them as jobs are tuned for a certain number of actions per 60/120 second window so that they have the right number of resources once the 2 minute window hits that they can properly perform their rotation. Speeding it up leads to having to dump resources early, which means it isn't in the window, or you overcap, which is a damage loss.

kinda why i dislike how they design combat its 1 dimonsal and only revolves around damage

If you wanted, yo ucould make all cards provide some sort of utility that doesn't involve damage at all, then you would have a true choice of what to use, however, you still run into the issue of unpredictability in that you cannot plan to use a card for a certain mechanic as you cannot guarantee you have it in the moment. The cards in DT, whilst having no RNG, you can plan around using them as you know what you have access to in a fight and can subsequently play around that.

Whether someone thinks this is good or not is entirely on them. I don't play AST much so I'm not going to comment on whether it is good or not. That is for the AST players to decide.

[Graveyardprincess]

I did mention that.



If a cards only use is to use it's secondary effect and never it's main effect, does that seem like good design? As for Arrow, already mentioned it was good for BLM, but others suffered for it, will explain in a bit more below.



The problem isn't necessarily in the then and there. Sure, there might be cases where Arrow was superior (See BLM), however, for every other job, Arrow just made them go through resources quicker. Once you were out of resources, you couldn't do anything, which loses you even more damage over just using Balance or Spear. Even if you wanted to use spread Spire/Ewer to counter that, using up a card draw to do that would also result in less damage, as you could have just used 2 spread Balance/Spear for more damage without the threat of lack of resources.

Even today, where melees have no TP, Arrow wouldn't do well on them as jobs are tuned for a certain number of actions per 60/120 second window so that they have the right number of resources once the 2 minute window hits that they can properly perform their rotation. Speeding it up leads to having to dump resources early, which means it isn't in the window, or you overcap, which is a damage loss.



If you wanted, yo ucould make all cards provide some sort of utility that doesn't involve damage at all, then you would have a true choice of what to use, however, you still run into the issue of unpredictability in that you cannot plan to use a card for a certain mechanic as you cannot guarantee you have it in the moment. The cards in DT, whilst having no RNG, you can plan around using them as you know what you have access to in a fight and can subsequently play around that.

Whether someone thinks this is good or not is entirely on them. I don't play AST much so I'm not going to comment on whether it is good or not. That is for the AST players to decide.

that what ast fun was you had to look at your party and figure out what cards were best for the situations you were in, that why it was amazing design in stormblood

[Mikey_R]

that what ast fun was you had to look at your party and figure out what cards were best for the situations you were in, that why it was amazing design in stormblood

Fishing for spread balance or spread spear in 99% of cases is what made AST fun?

[Graveyardprincess]

Fishing for spread balance or spread spear in 99% of cases is what made AST fun?

as said before u could make a dps mele job do massive amounts with arrow/spear lol in some case a increase of duration on a certain dps job was better than spread more so when the other dps sucked lol


and in fact spread bole had its uses as well lol

not even counting a increase speed from arrow also helped healers in a pinch


people saying what your saying, were the type that wanted to use the cards non stop but in alot of case you had to look at the fight situation which dps was better if they were mele, or range and look to see what part or stage you were in because a heavy hitting aoe spread bole helped a ton, someone and group taking alot of damage arrow yourself when your speed up was on cd helped alot, in some case saving the bole or arrow for a certain part or move in a fight was better than auto using your card.

even a duration extend ewer was nice sometimes grant it to a blm for more flare spam on groups lol