Please let Astrologians Pick the First Cards outside combat within Raiding Instances

[ShaneDawn]

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PLEASE READ THE POST IN ITS ENTIRETY AND MAKE SURE YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT IS BEING DISCUSSED BEFORE POSTING.

This thread is written from a speedkill perspective of raiding. Similar priorities and "needs" may apply for performance-centered groups.

Hello.

I think everyone reading this is probably familiar with the change made to cooldown timers within Raid and Trial instances that allows us to always start out with a fresh set of cooldowns upon wiping. While that was a great, stellar change, there is now a new issue wasting extended periods of potential raid time.

Due to the changes made to class balance, Astrologian has become a very frequent pick for raiding compositions. While I'm happy to see our Astrologian friends welcome in the raids again, there is one thing that is absolutely awful: having to wait for the right cards so you can pull with same buffs present consistently. Having waited 13 minutes today to see a single Balance drawn, I decided to take the time and write this post.

With the recent popularity of Astrologians on raid compositions, I feel like the changes made to cooldown timers has been largely irrelevant at times. Our group among others has spent even more time standing around pre-pull than ever before without the cooldown reset due to bad luck with drawing cards. Frankly, I feel like some Quality of Life changes would be appreciated here to lessen the down-time in raiding.

I propose a system, that would allow the Astrologian to pick his first cards when outside of combat. Obviously we could restrict this within raiding or trial instances if we're worried about such a change shifting dungeon balance too much into Astrologian's favor. If implemented well, such a system could reduce the unnecessary down-time between pulls and actually result in more time spent on actual raiding. Which as a whole would improve the raiding experience for any team taking Astrologians with them.

I expect some people to tell me and similar groups to just deal with the current system, but having dealt with wait times like these for around 5 months (current raid tier), I think it is healthy to discuss about possible QoL changes to be made for the system. The current system is extremely cumbersome from a speed kill oriented viewpoint of raiding, where we would actually want to raid instances we already have on farm for the majority of our raid time rather than sitting on our hands, waiting for an Astrologian picking the wrong cards for an extended period of time. From my perspective, if this matter is not taken under further inspection, it kinda devalues the earlier effort made to fix similar issues in the form of cooldown resets.

Feel free to comment, suggest better alternatives or criticise the idea. Free hugs and peer support available also for the poor ASTs feeling bad about drawing the "wrong" cards for ages. Looking back on the last 5 months of raiding just made me really want to write about this, as I haven't seen anyone else really bring this concern up here, despite it being a pretty known thing within the raiding community.

Obviously appreciating everything you're doing for the game SE. I just hope that this kind of thing can be taken into consideration from a raiding perspective for both current and future design.



Interesting suggestions by other people:

> Redraw's cooldown reduced to 1 second outside of combat (this would be easier to do than adding a card selection system).

Comment: this wouldn't break the "class aesthetic" while still allowing to roll for the desired cards within an acceptable timeframe. Just limit it to raiding instances so dungeon meta doesn't get screwed by this.

While I am neither on the dev team nor someone who would actually want this to happen, a sadistic solution to this player-created problem could be to only let ASTs draw cards after combat has commenced, or something equally frustrating. Be careful what you wish for.

Comment: this has actually been proposed elsewhere and I would be fine with it as a solution. It could also bring AST more in line in with WHM, if even just a little bit. Balance Spread + an Extra Balance on pull is crazy strong.




EDIT. PLEASE NOTICE THAT

AST in terms of class-balance is a whole another can of worms entirely.

I'm not here to discuss AST in terms of class-balance, but the (in my opinion) problematic nature of draw pre-pull. I'm not gonna respond to any further "but AST is already broken" strawman arguments, when balancing them is a different matter entirely.

EDITEDIT. Obviously this is coming from a speedkilling and/or optimized perspective of raiding. Clearly specific cards are not """"necessary"""" for clearing any content, but are absolutely necessary for any serious group attempting to do more than the bare minimum of getting their weekly kills and be done with it.

To specify even further, this comment is spot-on...

I think some people are genuinely not reading the OP's intention correctly and should mayhaps take some reading classes again. OP is not talking about regular groups, he's talking about speedkilling groups. You might say it's a minority, but an AST-change like that will mean a lot to them and change absolutely nothing for everyone else as they just pull anyway, so all in all, a plus gain.

OP is asking for the ability to choose your card OUT OF Combat (ONLY IN RAIDS), and as such, a change like that will do nothing in terms of healer balance MIDfights, it just eliminates downtime, waiting on Balance and a lot of hassle for groups that want to pull with the AOE Balance. It's the same deal with Stoneskin 2 being exclusive to WHM. It being WHM exclusive is not an advantage for WHM, it being made available for all healer classes would not change ANYTHING about healer balance and the only thing the WHM-exclusivity does is being an annoyance and waste of time for AST+SCH groups that have to manually stoneskin eight times pre-pull. There is no valid reason for Stoneskin II to be WHM exclusive, yet it is anyway.

Why do we need to rely on having an AOE Balance prepull? Exactly because we are speedkilling and playing the game for the purpose of getting a good killtime. Doing a pull without an aoe balance+singletarget balance prepull during a speedkill run is an act of futility since 3.4 Balance buffs. It's a necessity for speedkilling groups nowadays, but the wait for the rng gods is sometimes just atrocious.
Having waited 35 minutes without actually playing once in our A9S Speedkills, just for getting our first Balance prepull, I'd greatly appreciate it, and what would the harm be of allowing that? It makes speedkill groups not waste half an hour waiting for a balance, and for everyone else, it changes not much else anyway. Having done competitive speedkilling in Midas Savage and Alex savage, I really preferred speedkilling in Midas Savage, this whole deal about waiting for balance pre-pull in order to even dream about getting competitive times that skyrocketed in Alex Savage thanks to the balance buff should just die away.

Eitherway, a change like that would be really appreciated in Stormsblood OR a straight out hardnerf to Balance in general in order to put it in line with other cards. I'd rather have fun playing the game competitively instead of waiting half an hour not playing the game until we got the balance.
I get that not everyone is speedkilling, but you shouldnt exclude other kind of playstyles as this game supports a widerange of player differences. Just because you don't wait for balance, it doesnt mean that everyone does the same as you. And if you dont care about Balance prepull, what would a change like the OP suggested change for you specifically? Nothing, you dont care about getting prepull balance anyway, while others who do wait for balance prepull for speedkilling purposes will benefit from it.
And what about WHM Balance? Anyone who started to play AST over WHM solely for the Balance Buff in 3.4 is most likely always waiting for prepull balance eitherway, otherwise there's no sense & reason to their change of class. And as such, they will benefit from getting a QOL too. Anyone who mains WHM, the Balance change would change nothing for you. AST Performance in comparison to WHM would stay the same, they just have to wait less between pulls.