Spear card suggestion

[Tinkerblue]

I just had an epiphany over in the samurai discussion. What if the spear card reduced enmity? DPS could go ham on the boss, your fellow overhealing cohealer...perfect reasons to use it instead of throwing away. Although I can see the troll healers popping it on tanks

[Darkseth]

or.... OR!
you could just get Tanks that are not shabby and know how their job works. And no dps will take aggro, nor any healer :P (except a WHM spams Cure 3 or something like that..)

Jokes aside. That would be a huge nerf. Attack Speed is already a dps buff for dps already "going ham", and noone is close in getting enmity problems.
While this change would be completely unneeded, since enmity is not an issue.

[Lunali]

That would be a huge nerf. Attack Speed is already a dps buff for dps already "going ham", and noone is close in getting enmity problems.

Spear is recast time, not attack speed. If I were to change it I would make it affect abilities that are currently on cooldown as well.

[Shurrikhan]

Spear is recast time, not attack speed. If I were to change it I would make it affect abilities that are currently on cooldown as well.

This. Have Spear increase cooling speeds by 20%. Abilities already refreshed are then also permitted to "overcool", decreasing their following next recast time by the overcooled amount. At that point there's no efficiency decrease from using after pull, and it's almost competitive with Balance in some scenarios (if the abilities are necessary enough to affect fight interactions via Healer/Tank CDs).



EDIT: That said, I'd still just like Balance itself to be more... balanced? Not only in the sense of not being the only desired card, but also of having an affect on more than just damage-dealing (similar to how Arrow will at least affect healing output to some degree as well).

Ideally, any of the cards should be worth casting on anyone, though this would require a change to Balance and Bole, Spire and Ewer alike.

[Tinkerblue]

Ideally, any of the cards should be worth casting on anyone, though this would require a change to Balance and Bole, Spire and Ewer alike.

I agree! It would add depth to the job instead of fishing for balances all the time.

[Shurrikhan]

I agree! It would add depth to the job instead of fishing for balances all the time.

Personally, I feel like SE would have done Astrologians quite a favor to have made the card effects a bit more complex and dynamic from the start. Rather than attaching arbitrary Royal Road contributions from each, give each a set mechanic that can stack into another. For instance, let's look at a way that Bole could remain defensive but be usable on anyone, see what mechanic that would amount to, and see if it could be applied effectively into another card's effect.

At present, to make best of use of Bole it must be cast on the person who would be taking the most damage and can stand to do so, as that provides the most increased eHP and eHPS. Using it on a player who may need the 20% reduction to survive now may save you another oGCD or a rez and his consequent stat debuff, but they'd make no use of it thereafter, wasting some 90+% of its duration. Now, this could be fixed by changing it to be less reliant on duration, such as by providing a capped amount and possibly a fading percentile, or about 3 other ways, but let me lead with the craziest solution:

- Make it raid-wide effect to begin with. Bole: causes a portion of damage that would kill a player is instead split among all allies, and a portion of all allies' mitigation duplicated among each other.

Technical bits: This applies 3 buffs, Bole (which carries the duration), Roots of the Astral Tree (which carries individual percentiles), and Astral Canopy (which carries the bonus mitigation). Each time an ally takes critical or lethal damage, the portion by which it would drop him beneath critical health (20%) is reduced from the portion that is shared to the raid.

So, the purpose remains defense, but the mechanic itself becomes something of a Spirit Link.

Now, let's take a look at how Arrow might be effectively applied on anyone. Jumping straight ahead to the crazy:
- Arrow: increases the rate of time for the target by 20%. One's global recast and ability recast times cool 20% faster, all periodic effects on the target trigger 20% more quickly, and all status effects 20% more potently, at duly reduced duration. MP and TP refresh ticks occur with 20% increased strength.

Now it's still about time, and thereby output, but it's useful on HoT targets, on oGCD dependent DPS, on non-oGCD dependent DPS, healers, tanks, etc., etc. Granted, this would already include the effect of Spear.

These are probably the worst possible combination of effects to try to link, a Chronoboost and a Spirit Link. But let's see how they might meet:

Let's say you have a team where certain skills would go unused, or would be far more highly prioritized than others. To be clear, this is not an AoE Chronoboost. It is a shared Chronoboost; for an individual, it differs from a 20% increase to cooling speed in that one gets to choose what to accelerate. So, you siphon time from your allies in order to "rush" those particular casts. Horribly OP in practice? Yes. But, this is just a conceptual shot in the dark. Each player has a certain amount of time saved up from his party, and sees on each of his currently refreshing CDs two refresh indicators, one accelerated (consuming party "Acceleration") and the other normal. Hitting these normally unavailable skills once the accelerated refresh has completed would allow one to cast it then, at that cost to the party's time generated. While active, the Astrologian can also shift the remaining portions of effect (attack rate, tick rate) around to anyone in the shared group effect, or strip it from them to spread it back among everyone, using the Draw slot while it is refreshing.

So there you go, Bole RR + Arrow, for a raid group that becomes able to pick and choose what skills to rush, likely avoiding a wipe as consequence. WHM co-healer spamming Assize.

I'd offer that in this system, though, Spire and Spear ought be trimmed, as there probably aren't enough mechanics left for all if working to make each card interesting and powerful. Ewer might allow for a chain-casting and/or shared reserve/overflow mechanic, and Balance for a sort of stat gain. The Astrologian's own output can be trimmed significantly without hampering its ability to perform, as Arrow and Balance could provide high output gains, Ewer high sustain or efficiency, and Bole high damage manageability. In exchange, one would be unable to draw a card they've already put to the Royal Road, and Draw may be used while on cooldown in some cases in order to further control effects. Also, Bole, Ewer, Arrow, and Balance get visible effects while in progress, making them look like team Limit Breaks in their own right.


...

Okay, so that's a bit much, but let that just stand example that Cards easily be more interesting and potent without making the healer whose outputs have been allotted towards them unable to meet heal checks.

[RichardButte]

Spear is recast time, not attack speed. If I were to change it I would make it affect abilities that are currently on cooldown as well.

We've been suggesting this for ~2 years now and I've no idea why they've never implemented it.

My only guess is that there had to be one card that was completely undesirable to sit opposite the Balance card which is always desirable.

And before someone starts in with "But the Spear can be useful...", someone mathed out using the Spear on a ninja during their rotation (a class with a lot of short CDs) and they determined that even with 100% Spear uptime, it still resulted in a lackluster DPS increase when compared to Balance.

It's just a bad card in general because RNG dictates you don't know when you're going to draw a Spear so you can't ask your raid members to hold off on burning their CDs while you try to get one.

It would actually be pretty amazing if it reduced currently ticking CDs appropriately, but as I said, we've been asking for 2 years with no change so I'm guessing the Spear is just meant to be buns...

[NocturniaUzuki]

And before someone starts in with "But the Spear can be useful...", someone mathed out using the Spear on a ninja during their rotation (a class with a lot of short CDs) and they determined that even with 100% Spear uptime, it still resulted in a lackluster DPS increase when compared to Balance.

It's just a bad card in general because RNG dictates you don't know when you're going to draw a Spear so you can't ask your raid members to hold off on burning their CDs while you try to get one.

The game does not revolve around DPS optimization, contrary to the common beliefs of many high-end raiders.

P.S. In conjunction with the explanation I gave in the post above, keeping players alive or raising fallen allies will actually achieve a significantly higher DPS increase than the current Balance meta. A single DPS player being the only one dealing damage will cut your party's damage output by almost 75%. Being able to raise these fallen party members more quickly and more often (as they are likely to continue to die in many of these relevant cases) will actually amount to a larger DPS increase than simply giving constant offensive buffs to your single remaining DPS player while raising the others more slowly (not to mention it will likely avoid party wipes down the road due to lack of players available for damage-sharing mechanics, etc).

[Rubiss]

Spear is recast time, not attack speed. If I were to change it I would make it affect abilities that are currently on cooldown as well.

AST doesn't need anymore buffs.

[LegoTechnic]

Melee DPS already have a new cross-role skill called Diversion that reduces enmity generation for 15 seconds (120 second cooldown).

Typically when a healer pulls aggro it is because they have heals active when an add spawns, and no amount of enmity reduction will help with that. AoE healing can also pull aggro, but if you needed to rely on a randomly occurring Spear card draw to handle it, then your group has problems that RNG isn't going to fix.