The Case for the Spear

[NocturniaUzuki]

Anyone who has played AST has probably heard the following somewhere:

"If you draw the Spear, either RR it, or discard it. It's useless."

This opinion is held by a large number of players, and those who may not even be familiar with AST also commonly accept this view as truth. It is the most widely accepted view on the Spear. However, not everyone agrees, and I think it's important for someone from this group to speak up and share a different view, so that players don't just dismiss the Spear as useless without considering its benefits and its weaknesses, and so that Square Enix knows that removing/replacing the Spear will not make everyone happy.

So first of all, for anyone not familiar with AST, here's what the Spear card does:

• Reduces ability recast time for a party member or self by 20% (10% AoE, 30% enhanced).
• Duration: 20s (40s extended)

Since tooltips can sometimes be a bit hard to understand, here's what it does in more common terms:

• Reduces the base recast time of any skill by 10/20/30%. Only applies if the skill is used while under the effect of the Spear. Does not affect the global cooldown.

So, given this information, we can make the following, reasonable deductions:

• The Spear has a greater effect the more skills are cast by the affected player over the course of its duration.
• The longer the cooldown of a skill, the more flat duration is removed from that skill's cooldown. For example, reducing a 10s cooldown by 20% causes the new cooldown to be 8s - a flat reduction of 2s; reducing a 100s cooldown by 20% causes the new cooldown to be 80s - a flat reduction of 20s.

At face value, these are clearly beneficial. So where does the common view (that the Spear is 'useless' - in other words, not beneficial) come from? To really understand the source of this, we need to delve into player mentality for a bit.
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Player Mentalities

The mentality of MMOs has long been focused on one thing: speed. But why are players so hung up on speed? I'll get to that in a bit. But first, it's important to consider the two most basic types of MMO players:

• Material Goal Achievers (people who play to acquire material rewards, like acquiring the best gear or all of the mounts)
  
• Immaterial Goal Achievers (people who play to meet immaterial goals, like clearing battles quickly or with an undersized party)

How can you tell which type of Goal Achiever any particular player is? Just ask them a simple question next time you're in a battle: "Why are you here?" If the player is a Material Goal Achiever, then their response will be material-oriented (i.e. "I'm here because I need [item]."). If the player is an Immaterial Goal Achiever, then their response will not be material-oriented (i.e. "I just like this boss; I don't need any items.").

Of course, everyone exhibits traits of both types at times. Sometimes a Material Goal Achiever will get bored of farming the same battles and go do some random battle for fun or to help a friend. Likewise, sometimes Immaterial Goal Achievers will feel like improving their gear and go farm a few raids for drops. However, in my own experience from asking around on many different MMOs, I have found that Material Goal Achievers far outnumber Immaterial Goal Achievers in MMO communities. In your average 8-player party, around 6-7 players will be there for a material reason (drops, WT, etc), and only 1-2 will be there for an immaterial reason (just liking the boss, etc). This varies a bit depending on what the specific battle is and what the battle settings are (for example, a Duty Finder queue for an ARR trial is typically comprised of around 2-3 first-timers looking to clear, 2-3 people who need it for WT, and 2-3 people who got it as a roulette); however, an analysis of queue/party fill times will very clearly show a trend that strengthens the claim that Material Goal Achievers make up the vast majority of players.

Now then, why speed, and how is this related to why people think the Spear is useless?

Because the majority of FFXIV's players are Material Goal Achievers, it follows that the majority of FFXIV's players are interested in getting material rewards. For Material Goal Achievers, acquiring material rewards is what is fun. They may somewhat enjoy the battles that they are repeatedly completing to acquire those rewards, but the context in which they really enjoy those battles is in looking forward to the material reward. Since the battle itself is primarily just a means to acquire the reward, they naturally want it to go by as quickly as possible: faster runs means faster reward acquisition, which in turn means reaching the ultimate material goal faster.

This is how 'farming' was born. And the term itself even has connotations that emphasize that the battle itself is not the actual goal, but merely a means to an end.

It's not just the Material Goal Achievers that contribute to the poor popularity of the Spear though. The Immaterial Goal Achievers also play a part. Specifically, the Immaterial Goal Achievers whose goal is speedclearing.

Players who enjoy speedclearing are often the ones who have the ability to do so. Therefore speedclearing players are often (but not always) the highly-skilled elite who have become bored with how 'easy' the game's content is. One way for these players to derive a greater challenge is to challenge themselves and others to clear content at record speeds. These players are the ones who will have initially made the claim that "the Spear is useless." To players at the skill ceiling who are trying to clear as quickly as possible, this makes sense and these players have taken to forums to prove this mathematically, showing the world that the cooldown reduction of the Spear can virtually never match the raw DPS increase from the Balance and the Arrow. And of course, if the DPS increases, so too does the speed at which the boss is defeated. These are undeniably true facts. However, they were also made by players who are assuming that all players play flawlessly. This too, makes sense, seeing as the players initially needing to make these calculations are generally those at the skill ceiling who never make mistakes on mechanics. At this level, the game truly does revolve entirely around the math that decides which skills are 'viable'. All other skills are deemed 'inefficient' and are relegated to being 'useless'.

Now consider this question: "Why is speedclearing the most popular way for highly-skilled players to display their skill?" A brief browsing of the skill-oriented streaming community makes it clear that this is the case, but why is it so popular?

The answer lies with the fact that the dominant player group in MMOs is the Material Goal Achiever group. Remember that members of this group derive fun from reaching their material goals. And it's more fun for them if their material goals are reached quickly. It's no surprise, then, that many of them are likely to find speedclearing impressive. After all, we admire that which we wish we could do. And Material Goal Achievers want to be able to clear their battles faster to reach their material goals.

From this, the largest player group in MMOs has developed a powerful obsession with speed; specifically the methods of maximizing speed that the speedclearing players originally developed. Members of the material goal achievers group have, of course, since learned the math behind speedclearing tactics and re-share it among themselves, leading to the widespread belief that speed (i.e. DPS) is most important.
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As a card that has been proven to be 'inefficient' by the speedclearers and consequently reviled as 'useless' among many material goal achievers though, the Spear seems, at first glance, to really be useless. So what makes this card worth using if so many people claim it's not?

The answer lies in the context in which it was originally labelled as 'inefficient'. The speedclearers are a group that idealize the concept of a 'perfect run'. Even if they are unable to reach perfection in their gameplay, they constantly strive towards it. Because of this, the math that supports the conclusion that the Spear (and so many other so-called 'inefficient' skills) was based in the context of perfection.

But is perfection realistic?

I think most of us know that perfection is not realistic - even many of the speedclearers who idealize it. Certainly, some players can play to a level close enough to perfection that the math supporting the irrelevance of certain skills holds true. But far fewer players can play at that level consistently, and a huge portion of the playerbase is made up of average players who consistently do not meet that near-perfect level of play. Everyone makes mistakes...

...and mistakes are where the Spear shines.

Think back to earlier when I pointed out the fact that the Spear becomes more effective based on how many skills are activated over the course of its duration, and how long those cooldowns are. The more mistakes players make, the more significant cooldowns they need to use to keep themselves (or others) alive.

Here, two more arguments against the Spear come in:

• 1. In order for the Spear to be useful, the affected player has to use many cooldowns over the course of its duration. However, the affected player may not be able to make use of this.
  1. You can't trust other players to make use of the Spear.

First, let's tackle #1. This is true in some cases. Think about the three roles though: Tank, Healer, DPS. Which roles can get the most use out of the Spear? Can the DPS make use of it? I'd say no, because they are defined by their rotations and may not even have a major cooldown up for the entire duration of the Spear. How about Tanks? Well, tanks can certainly use many cooldowns over the course of the Spear's duration; however, doing this would leave them completely vulnerable after their defensive buffs wear off. The Spear's cooldown decrease is not significant enough to let them use all of their cooldowns then have them up again by the next time they are needed.

So that leaves us with Healer. Can Healers make use of the Spear? I believe the answer to that is "Yes". Healers have a great number of cooldowns at their disposal. Several of them are related to MP management. Using these abilities will not result in the healer not having necessary tools at their disposal in the event that something bad happens to the party (e.g. several people die, people have too little HP to survive an imminent map-wide AoE, etc). However, the second issue still remains: you can't rely on another player to use the Spear effectively. This is true, even if Healer is the best target to apply the Spear's buff to.

So what is the solution? It's actually so obvious that some people might miss it: Astrologian is a healer!

That's right. AST is a healer job. This resolves the second issue. The player who has the Spear can use it on themselves with full awareness of what cooldowns they have available and what they intend to do within the next 20 seconds. This way, the player can maximize the effect of the Spear's buff. If the player is holding the Spear, they also hold maximum control over when to use it, which further maximizes the player's ability to make the most of the card.

If you're not a healer main (or even if you are), situations in which the Spear's cooldown reduction can be useful may not be obvious, so I'll give a few examples:

1. Your party is taking a lot of damage and you are burning through your MP. You want to use Lucid Dreaming + Celestial Opposition, but you know that, at the current rate of MP use, you will need to use Lucid Dreaming again before its 120 second cooldown is up.

Solution: Use the Spear to reduce your cooldown to 96 seconds, preventing you from running out of MP.

2. You need to use several major cooldowns in a row in order to save the party, including Lightspeed, Largesse, Lucid Dreaming, Celestial Opposition, and Swiftcast. You know if you use all of these cooldowns, you will be left largely incapable of dealing with anything more than a single death, and judging by how often your party members have been dying, you will need those cooldowns sooner rather than later.

Solution: Use the Spear to reduce all of the cooldowns, allowing you to get your party back on its feet and be more likely to have your cooldowns back up in time for the next problem.

3. Combine #1 and #2, or even #1, #2, and several cards. Look at your cooldowns: how many have a cooldown of exactly 120 seconds or less? Feel free to use the Spear, then use all of them at once, putting all of them on reduced cooldown while simultaneously allowing you to deal with a disaster situation.
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These examples are all in the context of a party in which the healer(s) (perhaps you are solo healing) are under pressure because of a high level of party error. What the Spear does is gives healers (the player's own AST in particular) a safety net. If you are used to only joining farming parties where everyone knows the fight and people die at most 1-3 times combined over the course of the fight, then there is very little pressure on the healer(s). Their MP is not being so heavily drained that they require a reduced cooldown on Lucid Dreaming just to sustain it. They may never even need to use any of their emergency skills except Swiftcast, which will likely be off cooldown and ready to be used for every death. This is a level of play that I mentioned before, where the entire party is playing at a level where the math behind the so-called 'inefficiency' of so many skills may actually hold true, even if it's not at the ideal, 'perfect' numbers. However, to claim that the Spear is a 'useless' card in general - to go so far as to actually suggest that it should be removed - that is akin to claiming that all players are capable of playing at the level of 'farming parties'. And the restrictive nature of farming parties should be proof enough that such a claim is ridiculous.

So next time you play as or with an AST, try considering the context you are playing in. Is that AST really "trash" for using the Spear? Or perhaps that AST using the Spear is the very thing that is keeping your party alive.
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In addition to your thoughts, I'd also be interested to hear what type of achiever you primarily consider yourself: a Material Goal Achiever, or an Immaterial Goal Achiever? Remember neither is "better" than the other, and everyone is likely to have a mix of both traits. Which one is your dominant trait?

I consider myself primarily an Immaterial Goal Achiever. I do try to get relevant gear so that I can enjoy all of the game's content, but I don't min-max if it will force me to farm the same battle over and over. In-game, I do whatever I feel like instead of restricting myself to farming specific battles to get the best gear. I primarily put together my gear sets from the drops I naturally get from random battles. I care more about the reward of challenging myself than any material reward, and can often be found hosting parties to challenge myself, like 4-player Royal Menagerie or other 4-man synced battles, or solo heal/tank 8-player trials/raids.