Redoing AST Card System

[YusiKha]

Blah blah yadda yadda you know the drill let's get to the good stuff

Here's an image of the job gauge. Parts will be explained as


Level 30: Divination / Play
Divination - 180s - Increases damage dealt by self and nearby party members by 10%.
Additional Effect: Draws a card (arcanum) from your divining deck and draws the 5 other arcanum, one every 30s. An arcanum held while another is drawn will be discarded to grant you Lord of Crowns and Lady of Crowns.
Also grants 2 stacks of ‘Dilation Ready’
Can only be executed while in combat, executing will empty your hand, spread, and royal road, remove Divinatory Stasis, and remove Dilation Ready.

Play - 1s - Triggers the effect of your drawn arcanum and adds it to the discard pile.
Additional Effect: Restores 5% of maxmimum MP


The time until the next draw is shown on the 'astral clock' portion, with the star being an indicator which starts at the leftmost side and goes to the right.

And the card currently held is the one with the double border. It shifts 1 to the right with every new draw.

Level 35: Royal Road
Royal Road - 15s - Discard the currently drawn arcanum to enhance the effect of the next card.
Bole and Balance: 200% potency
Arrow and Spear: Doubled duration
Ewer and Spire: 35% potency, extends effect to nearby targets
Road is emptied upon casting Divination.


Unchanged from HW/StB

Level 40: Spread
Spread - 90s (2s internal cooldown) - Discard the currently drawn arcanum to store its effect in your spread indefinitely. Execute again to use the card.
Spread is emptied upon casting Divination.


Spread is back too. Basically the same as before but with a longer cooldown. With Draw always being on cooldown spread can now be used for tactically storing the most effective card for a desired Royal Road effect.

Level 45: Shuffle
Shuffle - 60s (2 Charges) - Shuffles the order of unused cards in your deck.
Shuffled cards stay revealed.


And here's the biggie. Every Divination is giving you one of each of card guaranteed - the RNG involved is the order that they come out in. Cards in your hand, or which are next, will be revealed and stay revealed even when shuffled to the back.


cont...

[YusiKha]

Level 56: Time Dilation
Time Dilation - 60s - Extends duration of arcanum effects cast on self and party members by 10s
Requires ‘Dilation Ready’

It only affects cards now. Maybe if the healing kit was designed with extension in mind, it could affect those too but let's play it safe for now.

Level 66: Minor Arcana (Trait)
Minor Arcana - Grants a stack of Lord of Crowns and Lady of Crowns when an arcanum times out. Stacks up to 6 times
Lord of Crowns - Next Malefic or Gravity will deal critical damage
Lady of Crowns - Next Aspected Benefic or Aspected Helios will restore critical HP

Nothing big - just something to make up for those extra-long transitions just discarding your beautiful buffs. Maybe an optimisation ceiling with defensive cards too.

Level 70: Sleeve Draw
Sleeve Draw - 0s - Grants Divinatory Stasis for 30s, doubling arcanum potency but disabling Divination from drawing cards, disabling royal road and its effects, and spread from being accessed.
Additional Effect: draws the first arcanum in the discard pile. When played, the second arcanum in the discard pile is drawn. When the second arcanum is played, draws the third arcanum in the discard pile.
When Divinatory Stasis ends, draws the next arcanum.
Can only be executed with 3 cards in discard pile and no card held

And a bit of an example on how this system would work.

The cards are bag randomised - you get one of each, guaranteed. You get fed one every 30s, so a 180s 'divination cycle'
The randomisation part comes with their order, you only know what card you have, and the next one coming (sort of like Tetris), but through shuffling the deck, you can get a better idea of what you have to work with.
Other than that - it's basically old card system just being given in a different way.

I'm not to happy with Sleeve Draw, of things, though. Since that's the place where you are trying to 'damage card fish', but it could also incentivise single-target card-use as you'll get double of them via Sleeve Draw.
And you wrap it up with some cool time-trickery.



It doesn't really matter the effects of the cards, since you're forced to get one of each anyway. Though I'm partial to:
Balance - DHit
Bole - Temporary Shield
Arrow - Haste
Spear - Crit
Ewer - +Healing received
Spire - Defense

[Wawachume]

Okay, it's going to take me a few rereads to understand this, but FWIW, I really like the aesthetics of the job gauge. I've always thought we needed the cards in an arc so they're like an actual hand of cards. But I never considered connecting that to the rising and setting of celestial bodies; that was really creative.

[LariaKirin]

The way it's going to be played is that you will go for spread Balance + spread Spear in every Divination window.

The fact that you cycle through all cards at least once means that either Ewer or Spire is automatic fodder for Royal Road in order to spread either Balance or Spear. So two cards are already decided. They will be played at the end and stacked with the next Divination.

Your thought process will be to ignore Bole and Arrow and look at: Spear, Ewer, Balance, Spire.
You want them in a permutation where Balance and Spear are not next to each other. This is a 1/3 chance of a favorable permutation. That's pretty bad, so using Shuffle here is not the best.

Your safest bet becomes to wait for one of the four cards and put it into the appropriate slot. Say you draw Ewer - which you Royal Road. Then if Spire comes up, you Shuffle, otherwise you lose your 2nd spread.
Your chance now is 2/3 for a favorable permutation of the other three cards.
Considering Divination + 2 Shuffles, you have three shots to get that favorable permutation. The probability for that is around 96%.

Everything else is "whatever" because the spread dps cards are simply too powerful.

Time Dilation, you just hold and use 2 charges for each spread card.
Minor Arcana is worthless.
Sleeve Draw is a more of a detriment. The only possible benefit is that you can get a spread dps card + Divination in the opener, but the chances are not good enough to make it worthwhile in normal play. Every other Divination is stacked and you'll want to delay your first spread dps card for buff windows rather than speed it up.

I ignored Arrow as a dps card because it's annoying and everyone rightfully hates it for causing misalignment. It also makes probabilities easier to understand. That said, it's probably still better than a single spread in that window.

So my question is, what is the goal behind this system?
Because if your intention was to encourage people to use Support cards, it's not going to work. My current opinion about Support cards is that they have to be completely divorced from DPS cards in order to create a healthy system.

[QooEr]

i like the whole "you get to see every card per cycle" thing. it makes the job still have rng but it doesnt make it insufferable. besides, the guessing minigame of what card ur getting next is pretty neat, but as pointed out above it might just end up like old ast where ppl will only ever want the optimal opener. it would be better if more cards increased dps, if only bole increased defense and everything else in some way increased dps, that would be very good imo.

also sleeve draw seems like it just kinda pointlessly speeds up the inevitable if im understanding correctly. itd be nicer imo if it "reset" the set of cards you have for more aoe balance shenanigans.

[YusiKha]

snip

I’ve taken your feedback and made the following changes:
Expanded RR 50%->35
Enhanced RR 150%->200
So all Royal Road effects approximately double the potency of a card.

Time Dilation has a longer recast so it can’t be used twice in a row on the existing cards.

Divination removes active RR status, so nothing (except for active arcanum) is carried over into the next Divination.

I’m not happy with Sleeve draw either, it realistically the problem stems from RR using non-damaging cards to buff damaging ones. I’m considering making RR be a sidegrade effect (like 50% power but you can place 2 cards, or half duration for double power) and having Sleeve draw refund the RR’d card.

Minor arcana is supposed to be (near) useless, it’s a consolation for losing cards to transitions/you messing up.
Arrow is good and only SMN/MCH could really complain about itself effects, it was better than Spear for everyone else.

And I do want all cards to be equally viable. I appreciate your feedback.

[LariaKirin]

snip

That brings the Royal Road effects closer together. The changes will make it a more complex thought process (e.g. double potency on a 15k single target can give you more than spread on 80k total raid dps).
So in this case, you'll likely be happy with either effect because you'd risk more by shuffling (unless you have to RR Balance). So this does make it less mandatory that Ewer and Spire be in RR because RR Bole is good enough.

The adjustment to Divination doesn't really change much. It's not so much about RR carrying over, because your goal was to hold on to your last pair until the next Divination window. You simply play your stored pair before going into the next Divination. There are cases in the initial design where you wanted to carry over the RR effect, but the odds were so favorable that you'd only rarely have to deal with that.

I hesitate to look at probabilities right now because it's harder and there are more factors to consider. Maybe in a future post. Also because your main goal remains to manipulate the RNG so that you get pairs of Royal Road Support card + Spread/Play DPS card.

I don't really see how you can make it worthwhile to use one of the Support cards when they compete with DPS cards.

[YusiKha]

I don't really see how you can make it worthwhile to use one of the Support cards when they compete with DPS cards.

If Royal Road only decreased the power of a card rather than discarding it - that would allow them to be played as well as RR fodder.
That system could be worked as Sleeve Draw’s purpose. Salvaging Royal Roaded cards (like the ‘bottom draw’ card trick, to match Spread’s ‘second draw’ card cheat). Sort of like a second spread, it would let you save mitigation for exactly when you wanted it.

What are your thoughts?

[Eloah]

I'm sorry, but it just feels like you are backtracking, and not in a good way. The main issue I see, if I am able to follow this display correctly, is you are forcing players into a time sensitive ability. Instead of manually choosing a card in succession, they just appear, what about between pulls or downtime. It would be best to leave the drawing of the cards to manual inputs.

[YusiKha]

I'm sorry, but it just feels like you are backtracking, and not in a good way. The main issue I see, if I am able to follow this display correctly, is you are forcing players into a time sensitive ability. Instead of manually choosing a card in succession, they just appear, what about between pulls or downtime. It would be best to leave the drawing of the cards to manual inputs.

While Draw could be its own cooldown, I wanted to keep the system to as few buttons as possible (6, the same as the current card system) because the design team tries to have a standard action count of about 32 (including role actions) to fit on 2 controller hotbars. Downtime is rarely longer than 30s (30s being the absolute minimum time until a card is lost) and you can still use your Royal Road and Spread. Longer downtime is an issue for other classes as well, like Dragoons losing their dragonsight, NIN/SAM losing their haste buffs.

Could you elaborate on the backtracking?