Thread: AST buffs in 3.4 Changes to Barries and Cards.

Originally Posted by Nekotee

Gurl please

At least we have some fun and challenge beside a mindless cure-spammer and an angry fairy enslaver !

If rng is your main concern about ast then you didn't even open your eyes on this royal class road
Whm shall fear for their Ass <3

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Ok i admit that RNGesus is favorably blessing my Ass because i always had the card i want/need what i have to have it xP

As I play all three, then the whm 'ass fearing' is immaterial.
If I was concerned about the other healer classes being somehow threatened by the Ast, then I'd not be campaigning to make it better.

It's not royal road, spread, shuffle etc, it's the fact that they've introduced rng into the selection of a class's skills. This is a gimmick. Selection of skills should be down to the player, not a roll the dice rng, ooh look what I got mechanic.
That pot luck is bad enough in ftp games with lockboxes, and has no place in a structured mmo class.

To me they looked at the Ast and tried to go for either a Whm lite or Sch lite. This was a missed opportunity to introduce a truly different type of healer.
But that chance has gone unless there is a major re-imagining of the class, unlikely.

What can be done are revisions to the Nocturnal sect, which needs a good looking at.
The devs tried to combine both pre-emptive and re-active healing in this class with the two sects - and have ended up with a lop-sided bias.

They've also painted themselves into a corner in making this third healer a me too ranged class with little real differentiation. It's now a very fine balancing act to get players to use all three.
Playing this class purely out of boredom with the others doesn't give you that much of a change to be honest, particularly compared to the whm which you have referenced.

Hopefully the next healer class will have real differentiation - a battle cleric or similar. An in depth re-working of the Nocturnal sect could go this way, but I fear any changes will just be tinkering with the class.

Originally Posted by Teraluna

It's not royal road, spread, shuffle etc, it's the fact that they've introduced rng into the selection of a class's skills. This is a gimmick. Selection of skills should be down to the player, not a roll the dice rng, ooh look what I got mechanic.

Crit Adlos allow you to completly bypass some mechanics and are also unreliable. The RNG of crit Adlos has even more impact on the fight than AST cards.
The only difference is that AST's cards include some kind of possibility of being "unlucky", whereas the effect of Adlos is always positive and spikes with a crit. You just don't pay attention to it because you always play around the idea that you won't have a crit, and that it's only a bonus when it happens, meaning it always feels rewarding. Getting a Balance or an Arrow doesn't feel that way, it just feels "normal", like it's the intended way of things... so the only real feeling you can have with the cards is when you don't get what you want, leading to disappointment.
But still, the effectiveness of Adloquium is tied to a RNG heavy mechanic too, no matter how it makes you feel. The punishment for being unlucky might not be the same in the two mechanics, but the RNG concept is.
Getting a crit adlo is a "ooh look what I got" mechanic.

Originally Posted by basketofseals

Let's not forget we have 4 buttons dedicated to this meh mechanic while other jobs got 4 real abilities. When you try to anything synced to level 50 as AST, it honestly feels like you forgot to equip your jobstone. You just have so few abilities.

This

It's padding in an attempt to distract from the lack of real utilities. All that just for a hit and miss rng bonus, whilst as you say other classes get real skills.

If they took away the rng and let players equip the card bonuses on their hotbars (with a common cool down) - then you'd just see a couple slotted. But they won't as this would remove the padding, making players more aware of the thin skills list.

So this slot filling gimmick stays put, suggesting somehow that playing an rng mini-game in the middle of an often hectic raid group is a good thing to do.

Originally Posted by Nekotee

I shoudo remind that with or without card and card skill your healing power doesn't change
While if you remove some abilities to the 2 others they are broken

And if we speak about sync
The one most hurt is the whm since 90% of his gameplay is suppressed by sync
Sch become hurt become he lose 75% of his healing power (less if EoS is rightly controled)
Ast on the opposite only lose a bit of his dps (ok nullify his aoe abilities) but stay fine

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Any player blaming rng on card did not learn to use them because they all are great and have utilities in their current state
I fear the up incoming because it might be so great that... Well some people might cry
And nothing make a dps pants go wet more than a well timed card from ast rather than a whm no support

It's not about learning to use them at all. They all have descriptions like every other ability.

It is about the RNG gimmick put in to pad out the hotbar for something that's just a buff, a pot luck mess getting in the way of the main elements of the Astro.
I've seen posts on here from healers who've cleared the content without even going near the card lottery.
That shows two things:
1. They are not playing the class to it's full potential, and.....
2. It didn't matter
- because for them the card mechanism is too much trouble for too little outcome.

Which other healers do we have where you click on a skill and wonder what's going to happen? It's totally different than the chance of seeing a skill crit or not, because you don't even know what's going to pop out of the lucky dip bag.

You know what? It's less trouble for other classes to complete their full rotation sequences that have a real impact, than this cumbersome rng mechanism for an unpredictable lesser output.

The whole slot padding card idea needs to go. It's a buff, and should be a quick one click action. Put them on a common cool down and let the player choose how many of these they put on their hotbar, - all of them highly unlikely, or what in fact would happen - just a couple.

Card system is far à trouble

Each card have 15zec duration it's more than enough to act
Beside when clicking draw you don't have an infinite possibility
Only 6 way to go, and 5 on redraw
It's not that much to think about and plan in battle

It's almost instant reflexe in most case

Not high random situation here

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The only meeeh point is that yes... You cannot macro that skill because of it's rng
Yes it force you to think and act accordingly
Something i know whm are not force to do often, i will admit that...