AST card system idea

[HyoMinPark]

Agreed, but in addition, I'd like seals to be applied outside of combat.

It's an arbitrary restriction, all it does is delay your initial Divination by 1m into a fight, which means you miss out on the first burst phase.
But it introduces clunky issues whereby you're forced to start a fight with a Combust, Aspected Benefic or an Intersection, whether you need to or not, and you run the risk of wasting a card if you use it towards the end of a pull when the last enemy is killed a fraction of a second before you use it.

The tentative opener posted in the Balance does not delay Divination, but rather use Swiftcast and Lightspeed in an attempt to get it out as fast as possible to line up with other buffs.

Pre-pull:
-12 ~ -9s — Earthly Star
-5s: Aspected Benefic
-4s: Arcana prepull, if possible
-3s: Draw
-2s: Sleeve Draw
-1.5s: Malefic IV

Pull:
0s: Malefic IV hits > Swiftcast
1s: Combust III > Play, Draw
3.5s: Malefic IV > Play, Lightspeed

And then it branches depending on cards and seals you have received and will receive in the next few GCDs:

6s: Malefic IV > Draw, Play/Redraw
8.5s: Malefic IV > Divination/Play/Redraw, Draw/Divination/Play
11s: Malefic IV > Arcana/Draw/Divination, Play/Arcana/Draw
13.5s: Malefic IV > continue/Play/Arcana, continue/continue/Play

Obviously, this is subject to change, but I have read that it may be better to do a 4% Divination if the cards are not favoring you for the 6% rather than cause Divination to drift too much, as that will result in future Divinations also drifting out of buff windows. That’s min-maxing/optimization territory, but for regular stuff, you can still do Divination within the opener without delaying it to 1 minute (unless it’s sub-70 content where you don’t have Sleeve Draw). You just have to become a concert pianist to do it.

[gumas]

I'd like seals to be applied outside of combat

ah yeah this too, or at least the moment we enter combat (or someone in party trigger it) we can apply card seal. i keep getting no seal in when the combat start just because the game still assume me not in combat yet (because i havent dont anything to harm or help my party in combat yet)

[Seraphor]

The tentative opener posted in the Balance does not delay Divination, but rather use Swiftcast and Lightspeed in an attempt to get it out as fast as possible to line up with other buffs.

Pre-pull:
-12 ~ -9s — Earthly Star
-5s: Aspected Benefic
-4s: Arcana prepull, if possible
-3s: Draw
-2s: Sleeve Draw
-1.5s: Malefic IV

Pull:
0s: Malefic IV hits > Swiftcast
1s: Combust III > Play, Draw
3.5s: Malefic IV > Play, Lightspeed

And then it branches depending on cards and seals you have received and will receive in the next few GCDs:

6s: Malefic IV > Draw, Play/Redraw
8.5s: Malefic IV > Divination/Play/Redraw, Draw/Divination/Play
11s: Malefic IV > Arcana/Draw/Divination, Play/Arcana/Draw
13.5s: Malefic IV > continue/Play/Arcana, continue/continue/Play

Obviously, this is subject to change, but I have read that it may be better to do a 4% Divination if the cards are not favoring you for the 6% rather than cause Divination to drift too much, as that will result in future Divinations also drifting out of buff windows. That’s min-maxing/optimization territory, but for regular stuff, you can still do Divination within the opener without delaying it to 1 minute (unless it’s sub-70 content where you don’t have Sleeve Draw). You just have to become a concert pianist to do it.

Some nice theory crafting, but it still seems to be a workaround for an issue that shouldn't exist (and if anything, shows how it's even more redundant of a limitation) and the clunkiness of losing seals to badly timed cards is still a problem.
And of course, this isn't possible pre-70.

[HyoMinPark]

Some nice theory crafting, but it still seems to be a workaround for an issue that shouldn't exist (and if anything, shows how it's even more redundant of a limitation) and the clunkiness of losing seals to badly timed cards is still a problem.
And of course, this isn't possible pre-70.

Most of the ASTs I’ve talked to do not like the clunkiness when it comes to the Divination/Sleeve Draw windows simply because of all the button pressing—it’s busy in the worst way possible. I typically like the busy jobs with a lot of double-weaving, but this just feels bad. I don’t know how to explain it other than I feel like I’m doing a lot of work.

Ideally, you want to try and toss out as many Minor Arcana cards while Divination is active since they are 8% over the 6% (though the opening one would be different since you can’t get seals out of combat and you need them for Div), but this also involves Drawing and Minor Arcanaing everything, and THEN hitting Play. It’s extremely cumbersome (especially for controllers where I can’t mouseover macro them and have to do soft-targeting shenanigans); and you have to save Lightspeed for the windows, or otherwise you risk hurting raid DPS by not getting your cards out in time. Which means that Lightspeed also lost some of its versatility to be used for periods of heavy movement, MP conservation for heavy healing moments, or for some sweet Gravity spam on trash pulls.

One suggested Sleeve Draw bypassing the Draw mechanic, where you get 3 random cards (that stack kind of like charges), and then you can Minor Arcana > Play them one by one without having to hit Draw every time. It would still require Lightspeed to execute smoothly, though, I think. Simply because you’d have to double-weave the MAs and Plays in between keeping your GCD rolling—so this wouldn’t solve the needing LS issue, but it would maybe mitigate some of the pianistness of it all.

But this is still an issue in sub-70 content, and I think the only fixes would be to either lower Sleeve Draw’s acquisition (which seems unlikely), or change the seal mechanic and allowing you to accumulate them outside of combat for the opening Divination—though...that would require some long pre-pull countdowns, and I don’t think the developers particularly liked the 60-second Infuriate countdown from HW that WARs had lol.

[witmsatfm]

I think if they just extended the length of cards to 30s and lowered the cooldown of divination from 180s to 90s and also extended its length to 30s it would be fine.

I think white mage’s mp regeneration is unfair to the other healers though and now that protect is gone it has felt harder for me to keep mp then it was before. I didn’t like the changes to the abilities as well because it took away all the diversity to the job so what I really would like to see is this.

Change draw and play back to their old functions.

Keep Balance the same but add 5% damage to all jobs

Keep Bole the same but add 5% to defense

Keep Arrow the same but add 5% to speed

Keep Ewer the same but have it restore 2000mp

Just delete Spire and Spear from the game.

Have divination only require two seal Balance and Ewer Become Solar and Bole and Arrow become Lunar.

Change divination to double the effects of next card played and spread to all nearby allies. Recast time 90s Cannot be stacked.

Reduce stacked redraws from three to two.

[Boomsmash]

The issue with all this is twofold with a few branches along each.

1) AST healing and damage is the worst of the 3 (some claim 3000 DPS worse, which is obscene), before buffs get involved. When buffs get involved it gets even worse. No, having more output for 10s doesn't "fix it", that's 4 casts. You'd be lucky to pull even.

2) Cards weren't that broken. Now the constellations literally mean nothing, it's all seals and card edges to shuffle around an identical buff. The old AST had a tool for everyone in their toolbox. The new AST just has a hammer marked, "Hit Harder" that requires a double wrist and experience with 3 Card Monty.

I said this on the main AST thread, but my QoL improved some by making the card display big and pushing it as far offscresn as I could so I could focus on just seals and edges. When you're better off not seeing what was/is a defining element of the entire job's story questline, you've failed as a designer.

[PyurBlue]

I hadn't though of making a hybrid between the new and old card system. I kind of like it now that I've seen it suggested. The 5% is probably too strong for what would be essentially a constant damage buff though. The cards would also still tied to randomness which would dilute the usefulness of the secondary effects like it did in the old system. I'd like to see something that gives you more control over the cards drawn, but I'm not sure how to do that without adding a ton of buttons to AST. Maybe an ability to provides a predetermined card to a given role, like under this ability any card given to a tank becomes a Bole? Or maybe rework MA to allow for more control over card effects. Pressing MA once gives you Lord which include a Bole effect, twice gives you Lady which regens MP.

As far as healing goes, I just want the old everything back. Skill balancing was needlessly excessive for things like CU, extending effects was a nice ability, and stun was useful.

[Sylve]

My suggestion:

1. Reverse the changes to CU and double the current CO potency,
2. Cards need to last at least 30s long, and some other changes need to be done as well, especially Sleeve Draw

While I absolutely agree CO needs to be stronger, another way to do that is reduce the Recast to match Intersection. Buffing the potency sounds nice on paper, but CI feels so good in its current state despite its low potencies because it has a short cooldown.

As for cards … I strongly disagree that they need to be longer duration. Lets assume our AST is feeding just one person.
Take for example, a Bard with Raging strikes on a fight that lasts for 8 minutes. RS is usable 6 times for a total duration of 120 seconds.
In contrast, an AST uses Draw (Without SD) 16 times in the same fight. 13 times the Bard received an 8% damage up, 3 times for 6% for Seals. So our theoretical Bard had an 8% Damage Up effect for 195 seconds, with a further 45 seconds of 6% for a grand total of 240 seconds worth of bonus damage.

Now double those durations. Do you see the problem? Someone with better Maths than I could tell you the average bonus damage RS provides vs Cards. This isn't even counting the party wide effects of Div which would happen twice each for a total of 30 seconds of further boosted damage nor Sleeve Draw which can provide even more uptime.

The old 30 second durations made total sense, since Balance was a 1 in 6 draw. You also needed to hold that Balance you did draw in order to burn a Spire/Ewer on AoE RR. So in practice, the best the old cards could do was 5% to the party at best, once per minute. But RNG was never kind enough to provide you with that perfect scenario for an entire fight.
Even were you pushing cards to singular players every 30 seconds for 30 seconds, You had a 3 in 6 chance to draw a DPS card. Averaged over the course of a fight … That's 50% uptime. No different to what we have now.
As a final note, Not all DPS cards were made equal. 10% Haste was not equal to 10% Crit or 10% raw Damage.
This fluctuation in damage yields and uptime is quite likely the reason all cards are now 6% at 50% uptime.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Well said by Sylve.

While I am all for pushing AST up to be on par with WHM in overall contribution or at least very close, I am NOT for bringing back the old card effects in any way.

The reason I'm against AST being the toolbelt healer is that it hogged too many buffs on a single job to the point that other players said "X job cant exist because AST is already that" - great example would be Time Mage being impossible because Arrow (Haste), Time Dilation, Gravity and CO (basically Stop) are all on Astro, thus Astro is Time Mage.