Please Return Randomness to Astrologian's Card System

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

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1. Like I've described before, IMHO the old potential to spread the cards was the culprit for extremely swingy rDPS that they provide. That was what makes their potential almost impossible to balance. How were you going to balance a potential 5% damage buff AoE per minute against all the other they provide through the use of Royal Road? Henceforth Divination was made to ensure an AST always have access to reliable AoE buff while RR and anything related to that was removed. Single targets effect are easier to control. I also mentioned that the potencies are mostly placeholder. I've given them the 'idea' of what each card could do, the potency tweaking to ensure each cards remains competitive to one another is up to them.

2. I think you're overestimating how much 20% critical damage buff could provide. It just means the card will increase the damage if you critical at all, which would goad the AST to throw them only at jobs they know whose nukes would auto-crits, or more willing to if their comp consists crit buffer like SCH, DRG, and DNC, which would also still make it less beneficial to keep playing Spear anywhere that’s not raidbuff window because the lower odds to score critical hits.

3. Personally I don't see Ewer as a "you lose"-draw. You can either (1)Redraw to fish other; (2)Spread them either to prepare MA or as a 'death insurance' for yourself or co-healer; (3)Throw that onto BLM or DRK, if you have them; or (4)Royal Road them. That's a lot of ways to mitigate the RNG in case you don't want XYZ card.

4. ... and neither Arrow. I'm fairly sure only BLM and Healers who are neutral or benefits from the haste today. Arrow’s bigger issue in the old times was how extended haste would cause some physical jobs to run dry of TP. The faster GCD itself was no issue as people would just resync themselves (oh hey, another form of skill expression forgotten). Now that we no longer have TP, I see no issue on readding this back.

5. Yeah yeah, I know. There's always the 'optimal outcome' depending on what comp the AST ends up with, and they obviously want XYZ card all the time over the rest in the deck. But here's what reads very odd to me: imagine complaining RNG on an RNG based job. One big takeaway from what I could learn from old AST was the fact their entire card system was not 100% mandatory. Why? SE can’t possibly make me believe that their idea of ‘balanced potential’ was to make AST requiring to get X amount of AoE balance spread or the raid group would flop. If I have to pick between ShB/EW/DT cards + Divination or the interplay between spread, royal road, so on, I will gladly take the latter.

I still blame SE that they caved in to their inability to parse the whys of peoples' complaint over the job due to their incompetence (draw getting 8% mp recovery in 5.3 for instance. But that’s too tangential & I will not discuss that in this thread) then ends up stripping job flavors to the point of what we're seeing in today's iteration. Feedbacks are useful if they can parse them, and I personally don't see them succeeding in doing that.