AST card arrangement

[Mhaeric]

I'll start by saying that I'm one of those people who is okay with the new version of the card system, although I'm not married to it. I feel the complexity just shifted from effect to usage making it quite a bit busier than it used to be and requiring slightly more thought.

That said, the one thing that irks me about it is why SquareEnix made the choice for which cards do what in the new system. The current system has cards arranged like so:

(This is my visual reference in game so the macros don't actually do anything. It just lets me see at a glance which cards do what. Melee/tank cards on the left, ranged/healer cards on the right. Sun, moon, star seals from top to bottom. The currently drawn card lights up too, which can be handy.)

What bugs me is that under the old system, the pairings for Royal Road were Arrow/Spear and Ewer/Spire but they broke those pairings for the seal pairings. It would have made far more sense to keep the pairings the way they were. Especially with the Spire and Ewer which would have been obvious a single seal pairing with Spire for melee/tank and Ewer for ranged/caster/healer. Spear would have made sense as the melee/tank one and Arrow as a caster one too. A quick edit of the image shows what I think it should be for the seal assignations:


This is a very minor detail, yes, but it's the only real beef I have with the new card system.

[YusiKha]

It doesn’t even make sense for the Elemental wheel, while your suggestion would.
Earth, Water, Air (Bole, Ewer, Arrow) Umbral elements
Fire, Levin, Ice (Balance, Spire, Spear) Astral elements

[Eloah]

It doesn’t even make sense for the Elemental wheel, while your suggestion would.
Earth, Water, Air (Bole, Ewer, Arrow) Umbral elements
Fire, Levin, Ice (Balance, Spire, Spear) Astral elements

You have it a bit backwards. Fire, Lightning, and Wind are Astral elements, and Earth, Water, and Ice are Umbral.

This new iteration actually follows the elemental triangles found inside the cycle of elements.

Plus, the uses are broken up by the offensive and defensive properties the cards initially had. The Balance, Spear, and Arrow were offensive cards, and the Bole, Ewer, and Spire were defensive(or more passive in the latter two's case)

[Mhaeric]

Plus, the uses are broken up by the offensive and defensive properties the cards initially had. The Balance, Spear, and Arrow were offensive cards, and the Bole, Ewer, and Spire were defensive(or more passive in the latter two's case)

This is a bit of a stretch. It was originally paired up by damage (direct increase and decrease), speed (oGCD and GCD) and resource (TP and MP). The oGCD speed card got changed to crit chance later on.

[Eloah]

This is a bit of a stretch. It was originally paired up by damage (direct increase and decrease), speed (oGCD and GCD) and resource (TP and MP). The oGCD speed card got changed to crit chance later on.

It's not a stretch, it's just how it's broken up. Whether that was intentional or not I dunno.

Odds are it was broken up into the two triangles as stated/shown in the prior post, more so.

[Mhaeric]

It's not a stretch, it's just how it's broken up. Whether that was intentional or not I dunno.

It's a stretch because there's no delineation between 'offence' and 'defence'. That's just something you made up to sort of fit your view. You even had to fudge it a bit by referring to 2 of them as 'passive' which could just as easily apply to the original oGCD cooldown reduction of the Spear which you labelled as 'offence'.

Odds are it was broken up into the two triangles as stated/shown in the prior post.

This, however, I can see and can accept. I would still prefer the seal pairings to match the old Royal Road pairings since those are baked into my muscle memory and they were originally obvious two sides to the same coin (...card?).

Sun: Damage increase <> Damage reduction. (RR Potency)
Moon: Ability speed <> Weaponskill/Spell speed. (RR Duration)
Star: TP regen <> MP Regen. (RR AoE)

[HyoMinPark]

It's a stretch because there's no delineation between 'offence' and 'defence'. That's just something you made up to sort of fit your view. You even had to fudge it a bit by referring to 2 of them as 'passive' which could just as easily apply to the original oGCD cooldown reduction of the Spear which you labelled as 'offence'.

To be completely fair, though, the OG Spear was more useless than a Spire (TP was actually a bit of a problem for some jobs in HW). It was pure RR fodder until they changed it, and since Spear being Crit was far better received, that’s probably why players put it into the offensive category instead of defensive. Technically, there’s nothing “defensive” about lowering the cooldowns of abilities anyways. Even MP/TP refresh wouldn’t fall under “defensive”, so I’d categorize them as “offensive” cards and “utility” cards: melee get all the “offensive” cards, and ranged get the “utility” cards.

I don’t really see the issue with the way they split it. This isn’t saying I don’t have an issue with the cards—just I don’t see this particular one as being anything worth making a change for.

[YusiKha]

Snip

Ah yes, my mistake.

[Eloah]

To be completely fair, though, the OG Spear was more useless than a Spire (TP was actually a bit of a problem for some jobs in HW). It was pure RR fodder until they changed it, and since Spear being Crit was far better received, that’s probably why players put it into the offensive category instead of defensive. Technically, there’s nothing “defensive” about lowering the cooldowns of abilities anyways. Even MP/TP refresh wouldn’t fall under “defensive”, so I’d categorize them as “offensive” cards and “utility” cards: melee get all the “offensive” cards, and ranged get the “utility” cards.

Thank you.

I'm not actually the only person that I've seen break it up that way. The main reason for that is probably do to a "law of opposites" phenomenon or whatever it's called. Basically, we we can name something, and then we have to name something else that is similar but fundamentally different somehow. Well the easiest thing to do is just name it the opposite of the name you gave the first thing; or a perceived opposite since some things we pair aren't opposites but mentally we link them together.

North/South, High/Low, Left/Right, Alpha/Beta, Red/Blue

It's easy to label the first set of cards as offensive, so mentally, by default, the other set are defensive. But as you said and I sorta indicated in my initial post, utility or passive would probably be more accurate.

[Iscah]

It's a stretch because there's no delineation between 'offence' and 'defence'. That's just something you made up to sort of fit your view.

It's an interpretation multiple people have come up with separately, though. It's also how I memorised the split between the two groups of cards - though I labeled them "attack" and "support" groups.