Fix AST's Accessibility Issue

[Gemina]

I agree with this so much. AST's old card system was less fishing than now. It's so frustrating when you just can't get that last seal.

Why can't you get the last seal? Or do you mean you can't get three different seals? I'll mention two things here. The first is it is so rare for me to not get three different seals by the time divination is up. The second is in those rare instances I have to settle with two different seals, i just do it. The difference between two and three seal buffs are not significant enough to hold onto divination in the majority of content.

You're not really fishing for anything with the new system, or at the least it's been reduced as fishing for balance was something like a 17% chance, while the chance for your desired seal is 33%. My math is not the best all, but I'm pretty sure that speaks for itself about which system has you fishing more. The old system simply had more ways to eliminate the rng with spread, redraw, and royal road.

Both royal road and spread are very likely to never return. At least not the way they once were. They might come back with the same name different guise like how minor arcana was changed. Under the new system, I could see royal road doing something like playing the opposite of what's drawn so in the case you draw a melee or ranged card but that respective role is unavailable, the AST can still play the card without penalty.

Basically, they are more likely to nurture the new system before reverting back to the old based on current issues.

[Risvertasashi]

The second is in those rare instances I have to settle with two different seals, i just do it. The difference between two and three seal buffs are not significant enough to hold onto divination in the majority of content.

This is kind of what I was trying to say earlier in the thread.

If your fishing doesn't work out in the new system, you lose 1% on divination. Maybe 2% if you're phenomenally unlucky. You still get to buff people.

If your fishing didn't work out on the old system, you didn't get to play a card at all.

Now if people want the old system back because it's more interesting - OK. Understandable and relatable. But for those that want it back because they're annoyed at not getting the cards they want... The old system is much harsher when RNG doesn't play nice; going back isn't going to fix it like they want.

[HyperiusUltima]

This is kind of what I was trying to say earlier in the thread.

If your fishing doesn't work out in the new system, you lose 1% on divination. Maybe 2% if you're phenomenally unlucky. You still get to buff people.

If your fishing didn't work out on the old system, you didn't get to play a card at all.

Now if people want the old system back because it's more interesting - OK. Understandable and relatable. But for those that want it back because they're annoyed at not getting the cards they want... The old system is much harsher when RNG doesn't play nice; going back isn't going to fix it like they want.

All I was suggesting is that Royal Road be brought back to recover some of AST's depth of gameplay and decision-making instead of this Seal Fishing Contest with 3 Charges of Redraw. As far as old Royal Road goes, it literally made 1/3rd of those things useless since 150% didn't work out for most cards(except Balance, Spear and Ewer back then?). They can reimplement Royal Road so that AST isn't clogged up by Sleeve Draw. Namely, they could decide on the following for effects:

- All Royal Road effects are AoE, no matter what and can only be applied via Play or Minor Arcana.
- Lunar Seal: Increases Ranged DPS by 2%.
- Solar Seal: Increases Melee DPS by 2%.
- Celestial Seal: Recovers 1000 MP for the entire party.

Now, you may think: "But we only want Lunar and Solar Seals to matter when we Play or Minor Arcana!" But given that AST already has a decent buffing system in place, I didn't want to tack on too much given how we might wind up in the problematic issues we had before with balance in both HW(overbuffing AST) and SB(AST contributing better than WHM, but only because of WHM mechanical oversight).

It's easy to differentiate between Sun and Moon either way for DPS Buffs, and Celestial Seal could definitely go a long ways for AST recovering MP for the raid by a set amount(given it's capped at 10000 anyway). It won't be much, but it can help healers that are still learning for the high-end plus deal with some of AST's MP issues in Dungeons in particular.

[Risvertasashi]

-snip-

Oh just to clarify, I think most of your suggestions are pretty reasonable. Just others - in this thread a little bit, and in other threads a lot more - some of the complaints are system-agnostic and will be here no matter what SE does, because they're essentially saying they don't like RNG. But non-RNG buffs are SCH's thing, so no matter what changes come for AST, I doubt RNG will be taken out.

Back a little more on topic. So I agree targeting can be very messy, RR might be one way to address it; overall I do like that your suggestions aren't a total revert that would bring back all the problems of the old system.

Just one specific criticism: 1k mp for the whole party sounds a bit excessive. It might not sound like a lot at first, but when you consider lucid cycles every minute, and the fairly powerful natural MP regen, throwing in another 1k like that could have quite a bit more swing than it sounds like. If something like that was added - honestly, I'd be a lot more comfortable if it went to RDM or physical ranged or similar, so it's not tied to any particular healer...

[HyperiusUltima]

Oh just to clarify, I think most of your suggestions are pretty reasonable. Just others - in this thread a little bit, and in other threads a lot more - some of the complaints are system-agnostic and will be here no matter what SE does, because they're essentially saying they don't like RNG. But non-RNG buffs are SCH's thing, so no matter what changes come for AST, I doubt RNG will be taken out.

Back a little more on topic. So I agree targeting can be very messy, RR might be one way to address it; overall I do like that your suggestions aren't a total revert that would bring back all the problems of the old system.

Just one specific criticism: 1k mp for the whole party sounds a bit excessive. It might not sound like a lot at first, but when you consider lucid cycles every minute, and the fairly powerful natural MP regen, throwing in another 1k like that could have quite a bit more swing than it sounds like. If something like that was added - honestly, I'd be a lot more comfortable if it went to RDM or physical ranged or similar, so it's not tied to any particular healer...

You make a valid point. I wasn't sure if it was a viable way for balance, but AST has been lacking in the MP management department since the other two healers have better management. Especially in regards to N.AST, which needs the extra MP. If 1k MP is that much, they could simply just make it 500 MP since that's what a Aetherflow is for SCH. Though in hindsight, we already have WHM that has a ridiculous amount of MP Management(Infinite MP for 12s, Free GCD Healing, Free Instant Cast, etc.) while SCH has to manage a fairy while on GCD and their Aetherflow which is all oGCD.

My guess is what you're trying to say is that if we go over the top on MP Recovery, we basically nullify an issue Healers SHOULD have by design: Running out of Resources, and on top of that people would prefer AST/SCH since N.AST isn't in the best of spots. It doesn't invalidate AST/WHM, either though, but it would make AST a bit more appealing to the raid crowd by doing that simply because of the DPS that MP can provide for certain jobs(extra Despair for BLM in particular should the stars align, since I think limit on MP for it is 1000).

Edit: Also, thanks for clearing that up for me.

[Risvertasashi]

You make a valid point. I wasn't sure if it was a viable way for balance, but AST has been lacking in the MP management department since the other two healers have better management. Especially in regards to N.AST, which needs the extra MP. If 1k MP is that much, they could simply just make it 500 MP since that's what a Aetherflow is for SCH. Though in hindsight, we already have WHM that has a ridiculous amount of MP Management(Infinite MP for 12s, Free GCD Healing, Free Instant Cast, etc.) while SCH has to manage a fairy while on GCD and their Aetherflow which is all oGCD.

It's worth noting that a frequently-overlooked SCH CD lets them use anything without consuming aetherflow and guarantees crits. Sort of the SCH version of thin air.

N.AST has issues, but they run much deeper than MP - to make it competitive with SCH, we need to be talking about completely different things. AST as a whole... well, let me put it like this. As of the 5.1 buffs, AST is already topping the damage charts ahead of every other healer, and every tank. And buffing AST's MP (along with faster casts, etc) in stormblood is what sent the healer balance from the relatively balanced 'SCH+AST for farm, but WHM for prog' to the completely out of control 'SCH+AST for everything', so I'm a bit wary about this.

500 MP would be more reasonable, but I think it would be better still if the ability was on something not in the healer role.

Then why not make the "undesirable" cards more desirable, rather than tossing out the baby with the bathwater? The old card system had a minor flaw, and that could have been remedied without scrapping the whole thing and replacing it with something that I cannot even see the benefit of without a parser...

They started to do that.

What happened was more and more of the cards became DPS buffs. Inferior to Balance, however, so most people still sought that.

[Side-Eye]

They started to do that.

What happened was more and more of the cards became DPS buffs. Inferior to Balance, however, so most people still sought that.

Making all of the cards practically the same (and worse than Balance) was not making the old cards more desirable -- it was just a cheap, quick, easy thing to appease DPS who just wanted bigger epeens.

Squeenix could have kept the flavor of the old cards and simply made each better at its purpose, and given Spire a purpose to replace TP. And if they were going to kill off RR/spread, they could have attached a minor DPS boost to each of the cards so that they could provide their original benefits and still be useful on a recipient even if the original benefit wasn't particularly needed at the moment.

What they did was neither creative nor inspired; and it left a lot of AST mains wondering why the F so much was taken away that was scarcely related to the card system, like TD buff extension and AE stun.

[HyperiusUltima]

It's worth noting that a frequently-overlooked SCH CD lets them use anything without consuming aetherflow and guarantees crits. Sort of the SCH version of thin air.

N.AST has issues, but they run much deeper than MP - to make it competitive with SCH, we need to be talking about completely different things. AST as a whole... well, let me put it like this. As of the 5.1 buffs, AST is already topping the damage charts ahead of every other healer, and every tank. And buffing AST's MP (along with faster casts, etc) in stormblood is what sent the healer balance from the relatively balanced 'SCH+AST for farm, but WHM for prog' to the completely out of control 'SCH+AST for everything', so I'm a bit wary about this.

500 MP would be more reasonable, but I think it would be better still if the ability was on something not in the healer role.

I wasn't entirely aware of how much MP had an impact on healers in Stormblood given how I was still getting better and understanding the different jobs. If we really had to throw in something that's not MP, then we need to make sure that we don't wind up with Balance Syndrome. If anything, we could make Celestial be a minor Haste buff...though the problem that comes with that then disjoints a lot of openers. It's really hard to think of something that could benefit for Celestial, because AST does not need more healing, nor can they be given an MP Boost...on top of that making it 2% increase raid-wide for all party members just makes people fish more for that card since it's more beneficial; though honestly, they can still get a good benefit off of just RRing the Lunar/Solar Seals as well. Doing it that way may work for the time being perhaps.

Also, Recitation is dumb, yes. At the least, they could put a little more pressure on SCH's resources and just make it guarantee a critical while costing resources to make it more competitive so that SCHs have to make better decisions instead of Recitation Excog/Indom(which when those can guarantee Crits it makes SCH look strong on the healing front).

[HyoMinPark]

You make a valid point. I wasn't sure if it was a viable way for balance, but AST has been lacking in the MP management department since the other two healers have better management. Especially in regards to N.AST, which needs the extra MP. If 1k MP is that much, they could simply just make it 500 MP since that's what a Aetherflow is for SCH. Though in hindsight, we already have WHM that has a ridiculous amount of MP Management(Infinite MP for 12s, Free GCD Healing, Free Instant Cast, etc.) while SCH has to manage a fairy while on GCD and their Aetherflow which is all oGCD.

My guess is what you're trying to say is that if we go over the top on MP Recovery, we basically nullify an issue Healers SHOULD have by design: Running out of Resources, and on top of that people would prefer AST/SCH since N.AST isn't in the best of spots. It doesn't invalidate AST/WHM, either though, but it would make AST a bit more appealing to the raid crowd by doing that simply because of the DPS that MP can provide for certain jobs(extra Despair for BLM in particular should the stars align, since I think limit on MP for it is 1000).

Edit: Also, thanks for clearing that up for me.

I would say that the issue is less the MP recovery is excessive for AST specifically—it’s that its excessive to have it be restored to the entire party. I don’t see this suggestion having much use without being a waste in the majority of scenarios.

The only people that use MP now are healers (which, WHM doesn’t have a terrible MP economy anymore, and they already have so many MP management tools at their disposal that it’s hard to run dry unless something is going terribly wrong terribly fast) and casters (MP is literally not a problem for a BLM since they have mega MP regen in Umbral Ice). BRD no longer uses it. MCH stopped using it after HW. DNC doesn’t use it. Melee don’t use it. The only tanks that use it are DRK and PLD (with only one of those requiring active MP management, and the other just following their base rotation to recover their mana after spending it all). It just seems excessive to have a party-wide MP recovery tool.

To alleviate AST’s MP issues, I’d rather the return of old Ewer, or the implementation of a system where Draw restores a bit of MP with each use—similar to Aetherflow. I wouldn’t recommend a party-wide MP Refresh when the number of jobs that actually use the resource isn’t the majority.

[HyperiusUltima]

All I was suggesting is that Royal Road be brought back to recover some of AST's depth of gameplay and decision-making instead of this Seal Fishing Contest with 3 Charges of Redraw. As far as old Royal Road goes, it literally made 1/3rd of those things useless since 150% didn't work out for most cards(except Balance, Spear and Ewer back then?). They can reimplement Royal Road so that AST isn't clogged up by Sleeve Draw. Namely, they could decide on the following for effects:

- All Royal Road effects are AoE, no matter what and can only be applied via Play or Minor Arcana.
- Lunar Seal: Increases Ranged DPS by 2%.
- Solar Seal: Increases Melee DPS by 2%.
- Celestial Seal: Recovers 500 MP for the entire party.

Now, you may think: "But we only want Lunar and Solar Seals to matter when we Play or Minor Arcana!" But given that AST already has a decent buffing system in place, I didn't want to tack on too much given how we might wind up in the problematic issues we had before with balance in both HW(overbuffing AST) and SB(AST contributing better than WHM, but only because of WHM mechanical oversight).

It's easy to differentiate between Sun and Moon either way for DPS Buffs, and Celestial Seal could definitely go a long ways for AST recovering MP for the raid by a set amount(given it's capped at 10000 anyway). It won't be much, but it can help healers that are still learning for the high-end plus deal with some of AST's MP issues in Dungeons in particular.

I'ma just leave this here in case you forgot an entire page ago; though with an edit from @Risvertasashi. It's something, and it's better than nothing.