Thread: Astro changes 5.1

Originally Posted by MitsukiKimura

You're still blind to the RNG you can still get with drawing cards, nothing but melee's or nothing but Range and ALSO trying for 3 seals which you'll never get 100% of the time.
Ewer Card would be nice to have for that MP Regen cause Astro needs something other than lucid dreaming. WHM and SCH both have other ways to get it, AST needs something too.
Spire can be replaced with a direct hit buff instead of TP, honestly don't think you even care to think outside the box of much anything.
Having all the cards named differently only to give the same effect is "Lazy". Also CU in Nocturnal STILL makes you stand perfectly still to use it which is even not worth the buff. Rather have it place able so I can use my cards or keep casting. People who would complain about "Fishing for balance" didn't appreciate anything about the class. MY Class should NOT have to Suffer just to Boost your Parse in Raiding with just "Balance Cards" Disgusting in all aspects.

The point of the current card system is that the rng of the mechanic is the POTENCY of the effect and not the effect itself. Instead of setting up an AoE buff, you're setting up Divination. Instead of bad rng not allowing you to provide any group support, bad rng now causes your support to be weaker.

Again, as I've seen at least one other person parrot on this forum. Tying utility to RNG is a bad idea because you cannot rely on it when trying to make the most of your toolkit. Bole is bad because it was random. So it was removed and actual mitigation was placed in the toolkit. Ewer was bad because it was random. So the solution should be to place MP sustain on a consistent effect, like drawing the cards themselves, and not on a random effect that can't be relied on.

Also, look I can do this too.

MY class should NOT have to suffer just to Appeal to Gamblers who's Bias towards lucky draws want to make the class's Utility Difficult to Quantify and optimize my play around. Absolutley disgusting.

Originally Posted by LariaKirin

I wonder if this is going to be too much.

The Malefic/Combust changes are an approximate increase of 7% to the AST's dps. The CU buff in Diurnal is massive.

Currently: 50 pot regen every 90 sec.
5.1: 100 pot regen every 60 sec.
Stormblood: 150 pot regen every 90 sec.

It's 3 times stronger than current CU and equal to Stormblood in terms of throughput. This is alot of free healing that will result in a dps increase.

AST + SCH might once again become the strongest combination.

I'm surprised more people on here aren't concerned about these changes. AST's healing kit was already very strong and now it's going to be even stronger.
With these changes they will now have 3 powerful oGCD AoE heals on short CDs that will open up a lot more opportunities for SCH to DPS similar to Stormblood.
Now anytime a SCH would Soil an AST can just CU for free which means more Energy Drains not to mention depending on how damage lines up it can allow
for more Broils (which is only 20 less potency than Glare btw) if the AST can heal through the damage with an oGCD. This doesn't even take into account the DPS
buff to Malefic and Combust.

We're possibly looking at a repeat of 3.4/4.4. Not as bad of course, but I'm really thinking with these changes the best comp with once again be AST/SCH with
WHM/SCH being the undisputed best for prog.

Originally Posted by Sylvain

Tbh that could actually be a very very good solution. But which one should be put there?

If you consider regular draw, putting on Draw would be the best as you'd have 2 weaving opportunity for either Redraw, but Sleeve Draw would still be a mess and have insane dps value (3cards + no gcd lock). It would also help controller a lot by giving them more time to go up n down their list (I'm one of them T_T)

Or it could be put on Play/MA, that would make Sleeve Draw much easier to deal with as you'd have weaving opportunities after each Play. However you wouldn't be able to Redraw right after pulling the card and controller wouldn't benefit much from it.

Both have their pro and cons, however I have the feeling that making Sleeve Draw less of a spamfest would be the best solution, (so putting Play on the gcd)

Increasing the dps value of cards would also help cards feel more impactful. Because, while they do have some impact, let's be honest, 6% is really small, especially if it doesn't fall on one's burst window. Taking you scree, 11.1k on that ewer, when you think about it that's really weak... barely a malefic.

However it could be hard to balance. Let say you boost it to 15% to compensate the loss of a Malefic, well now for sure, your number will vary from on AST to another depending on when the card is used. You'd also get some really nice numbers on opener...

But I would raelly be curious to try it out tbh

I crunched a lot of numbers for it while writing my previous post, but removed them for brevity.

Looking at my last E4S clear, an average Malefic is worth 16.6k. For a 15 second card to break even, it needs to cause a 1.1k dps boost. This is the magic number. If a GCD card produces less than that amount then it would be better to skip it in favour of Malefic.

10th percentile Innocence Ex dps ranges from 7.2-8.5k dps. At this level of performance a card would need to be at least 13.0-15.3% bonus damage to break even.
50th percentile is 10.1-11.5k. To break even buffing these players would require 9.6-11.0% to match a Malefic.
95th percentile is 12.4-14.4k. These players would need 7.7-8.9%.

I used Innocence Ex numbers because there's pretty high uptime during that fight and it's easy enough that a large range of player skills will be represented.

Who do you balance these buffs around? If you balance them around the 95th percentile players then using all of an AST's kit is suboptimal play if the rest of the party isn't at a high level of performance. If instead cards are balanced around buffing the weakest possible players then AST rdps inflates as the party improves. A 15% card that equals Malefic's 16.6k damage on weak players will deal 27.9k on the 95th percentile player.

If cards are balanced around being worth, say, 2x Malefic when placed on a 50th percentile player (19.2-22.0%) then they will always be worth spending a GCD for, but then you run into problems with AST's damage being vastly superior in strong parties. The larger the percent bonus, the greater the impact that having a strong party has on AST dps. If AST is equal to WHM and SCH in a 50th percentile party, then they will be better 100% of the time with a stronger party, and the performance gap will grow as the buff percentage increases. By the same token, AST will be vastly inferior in weaker parties. This is a certainty whenever a significant portion of performance depends on other players.


Edit: One possible alternative would be to keep cards at their current effectiveness (3/6%, 4/8%), put them on the GCD, and give the AST a dps buff when one is played to balance the lost Malefic. Increase next spell's potency by 100%. If that is too powerful (hello 900 potency Combust III, or 1200 potency in 5.1) then the buff could be reduced to 25% for the next four spells. This way the card would always pay for its Malefic cost while the percentage buff could stay small enough to not cause wild imbalance in peak high and low performing parties.

Originally Posted by Sylvain

Tbh that could actually be a very very good solution. But which one should be put there?

The problem is that assuming you maintain the same rDPS overall, you will have simply swapped the inability to perform as highly in an unskilled party (who therefore cannot grant you as much rDPS from their use of your cards and Divination) for the inability to use your rDPS skills at all in an unskilled party; the cards simply won't be worth the cost to Malefic casts.

So, which is more important -- (1) the option for greater rDPS consistency across varying party skills levels (by ignoring your cards and balancing cards around the opportunity costs presented at higher levels of play, necessary for the theoretical balance anyone will actually look at), or (2) getting to use your cards even when in an under-performing party?

I'd argue the latter. If cards are important to AST, we should always want to use cards.

Originally Posted by Brandedblade

The point of the current card system is that the rng of the mechanic is the POTENCY of the effect and not the effect itself. Instead of setting up an AoE buff, you're setting up Divination. Instead of bad rng not allowing you to provide any group support, bad rng now causes your support to be weaker.

Again, as I've seen at least one other person parrot on this forum. Tying utility to RNG is a bad idea because you cannot rely on it when trying to make the most of your toolkit. Bole is bad because it was random. So it was removed and actual mitigation was placed in the toolkit. Ewer was bad because it was random. So the solution should be to place MP sustain on a consistent effect, like drawing the cards themselves, and not on a random effect that can't be relied on.

Also, look I can do this too.

MY class should NOT have to suffer just to Appeal to Gamblers who's Bias towards lucky draws want to make the class's Utility Difficult to Quantify and optimize my play around. Absolutley disgusting.

Regardless it's RNG no matter how you look at it. Obviously you fall into the small "Majority" who obviously complained about fishing for balance without appreciating the different ways of handling a situation with the tools given. Honestly ashamed because it's people like you who the dev's took opinions from that made people quit playing this class. I'm finished talking to you about this, you're obviously too stubborn to even come to reason or even appreciate what astrologian's had. Maybe one day when they take away what you love, I hope they don't care in the slightest.

Originally Posted by MitsukiKimura

1:You CAN however draw back to back cards resulting in only melee cards or Range cards. I've had this happen countless times using all my redraw stacks before a pull on a raid.

Well, knew that would bite me before I could get home to a PC to edit. God forbid I rely on contextual understanding.

Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Then reduce the RNG through Redraw chances: make it so you can't draw the same card twice in any draw period.

Originally Posted by MitsukiKimura

2: 30 seconds of not using 1 "balance" card is not going to kill your damage support. The devs already implemented a MP cost reduction -100 which is honestly why bother
3: It's not the point, the point of the different aspect of having a direct hit card is for variety and also timing this with a dancer's Devilment can be really good btw
4: Why make it a channeled skill if we're just suppose to instantly break it after using it? Serves no Purpose
5: It is my job to give party support yes but making it only "Damage" cards is not fun. A lot of people don't seem to understand that.
I'm honestly tired and I'm done ranting about it. SE you need to go back to the drawing board. End Rant

• Even once per 5 minutes is already a 10% reduction to your total card output.
• The multiplicity bonus works the other way; a scalar which multiplies that Direct-Crit damage alongside all damage, does more than one that simply increases the chance of a Direct-Crit occurring.

Let's say we have a 15% natural crit chance (enough crit for 50% bonus damage) and a 15% direct hit chance. You have therefore a 12.75% chance Crit, a 12.75% chance to Direct Hit, and a 4.5% chance to Direct-Crit. This grants a total bonus of 11.8125% damage, up from the 11.25% damage they'd do if they could neither stack nor conflict (until each over a sum of 100% chance). Thus, the multiplicity is responsible for exactly 5% of their damage bonus.

Now, let's say we increase the Crit chance by 20% via Devilment. On its own, at our current Crit Bonus, this should amount to an increase of roughly 10% damage if there were no multiplicity, for a total of some 21.8125% damage bonus. Instead, it gives 22.5625%, 0.75% higher.

Now let's say we have the choice of an added 5% damage or an added 20% Direct Hit chance (raising each to 35%, which is the best case scenario for multiplicity).

Damage: 28.690625%
Direct Hit: 29.3125% (~.62% higher or a relative increase of 2.2%).

But let's pretend for a moment that 35% of each chance is just such a pitifully small stat value that we just can't yet see the miracle of multiplicity reach its full potential, to where it could really outshine there mere +/- 5% damage modifier attached to every skill. In fact, let's go to the maximum: 80% of each chance naturally, or 100% each under Devilment/Spire.
Starting from the Devilment alone: 72% damage increase.
Adding Spire: 100% damage increase.
Adding Damage: 80.6% damage increase.

Finally, we can see multiplicity pay off. But, if that's what you're hoping for from XIV, you really ought to consult our stat charts: you would need over 4500 Crit just to reach a 30% Crit chance. You are unlikely to hit any point at which even the optimal addition of Direct Hit chance (raising it to one's already buff-inflated Crit chance) would outperform its nominally equivalent basic damage buff by more than a few scant percent. And, as they tend only to follow multiples of 5 once dealing with relatively large numbers, unless Direct Hit is balanced for nominal equivalence (that is to say, without relying on multiplicity whatsoever, a (Direct Hit) Spire will never outpace a (Damage) Balance within the lifetime of this game. A 15% added chance of 25% more damage and its Crit-multiplicity will never compete with a 10% Damage buff within the gearing lifespan of this expansion, even when stacked atop CS, BL, and BV, simply due to how limited our stats are.

Direct Hit is therefore, for all intents and purposes, just another Damage bonus, effectively indistinct from Balance.

• Why make Passage of Arms a channeled skill when its optimal to flash it? Why were Anatman and Meditate previously flashed despite being channeled resource-generation skills? Why is Flamethrower still so lackluster? I'm all for changing the whole lot of them, but it makes no sense to find this one uniquely problematic, nor is there at present any place for it if used as a channel given how strong AST mitigation and regen tools are already. At best your complaint is likely to force the skill onto the GCD in the fashion of Anatman, Meditation, and Flamethrower, without seeing it meaningfully buffed in any way.
• I never said we should be limited to damage cards; I'd rather have the full slew of card effects back (I merely dislike throwing out so many different flavors of the same card, as Direct Hit and Damage would be, whereas Speed and Crit at least have more versatile and varying usefulness). But, if you're begrudging the use of damage utility just because it isn't strictly labeled "Support", don't. It's probably the best way prog runs have of avoiding wipes, certainly better than what AoE Bole could do within the raid damage dealt in the fight designs we've seen so far from ShB.