Thread: Everything wrong with 5.3 AST sleeve draw [Translated JP duplicate thread]

Disclaimer: This is a duplicate thread from the JP forums, translated in the hope to open discussion in the English community. With permission, I have integrated a few posts from the original thread for completeness. LINK TO ORIGINAL POST
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I predict that the changes to Sleeve Draw in 5.3 is mainly a response to:
A. Voices about how the difficulty/complexity of 5.x~5.2 sleeve draw had “bad QoL”
B. Voices about the stress around obtaining Divination Seals

Assuming the intent of these adjustments was QoL improvement catered to these voices, the real issues I have with new Sleeve can be broken down into two main points:

1. By reducing the total number of cards obtained, you destroyed a major optimization fun factor;
2. This implementation is flawed as a QoL improvement in the first place


Here are my thoughts about these points in detail.

[1. By reducing the total number of cards obtained, you destroyed a major optimization fun factor.].

While certainly outside the volume zone of the game’s population, there are a certain number of core players who love to do fights, and do them well. For those players, the process of being inventive, optimizing, and discovering how to do things better than the general public are fun factors.
The merits of optimizing AST cards are huge, and there are people that enjoy this immense advantage gained by optimizing cards correctly. However, this implementation of Sleeve Draw takes away a great deal from this enjoyment.

I felt this was well summed up by this response I saw in the Astrologer's Thread: LINK
Quoted below:

“There are many possible ways to play Shadowbringers AST cards as they are single target and can be played to any party member anytime during a 30 second window. Optimizing cardplay thus requires knowledge of your party’s jobs in addition to your own, which makes it very interesting and rewarding to do.
Sleeve Draw in particular allowed you to play an additional three cards in a burst window, so by spreading timelines of each job involved in this burst and doing simple math, I was able to come up with priorities on the most optimal action for every oGCD window. There was material return in doing this work, which made optimizing and playing this job worthwhile.”


What I want to request is, please do NOT deny us the pleasure of such optimization in the name of QoL improvements.

Continues to post 2...

So, what should be done?

A quick dirty fix could look like:
- Simply reverting to 5.2
- Bring back 5.2 Sleeve as a separate skill with a shared cooldown, and multiply the effect of 5.3 Sleeve by 2~2.5x (*1).

A more fundamental change could look like reverting to 5.2 Sleeve and:
- Allow players to randomly distribute three cards by hitting Sleeve Draw again
- Allow players to toggle an auto random-cardplay mode synonymous to old Arcanist Sic

The basic idea here is to maintain the number of cards available and allow the player to choose how many decisions they want to make. Changes like these will be a major QoL improvement for players that find cardplay difficult while preserving the optimization experience for higher level players.

I gave just a few example potential solutions, but the point I want to stress most through this thread is that there are many possible methods to improve QoL without hurting the optimization experience. It is my hope that for future adjustments you pay more attention to views of players that enjoy optimizing battle, and to not treat QoL and complexity like a tradeoff but rather concepts that can coexist.


(*1) My personal take is, simply reverting to 5.2 is best. I suggested shared cooldowns here to keep both versions because I understand that this revamp came from a decision that QoL improvement was needed. Effect multiplication for 5.3 Sleeve is there to alleviate the difference of DPS contribution between the two versions, as such a large difference may pressure players that prefer the new version to unwillingly use the other.

P.S. If nerfing AST DPS contribution was part of the decision-making process for this revamp, then to me simply nerfing Malefic 4 seems to be most appropriate for reasons already given.

While I'm at it, I'll also translate what I posted on the JP counterpart
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Thanks for quoting me in your post. I am in total agreement.


There are few thoughts I want to give regarding Divination Seals, a stress factor you raised as partially responsible for this problematic Sleeve Draw revamp.

It is true that prior 5.3, Seals in my eyes had the following issues:

1. With the old skill set, namely Draw, Redraw and Sleeve Draw, there was an unavoidable luck factor of varying degree (depending on party timeline) involved during opener in whether or not you were able to hit 6% divination at optimal timing.
2. There were times mid-fight when you could never get the Seal you wanted no matter how many times you spammed Redraw. In particular, it felt terrible when by spamming Redraw you started looping between the same cards.

The concept of a skill that restricts the Seal of your subsequent (re)draw, like the one SE implemented with 5.3 Sleeve Draw, actually is a viable solution these stress factors. Of course, as you have described in detail, revamping Sleeve Draw for this purpose was problematic in many ways but had this been a Redraw revamp I feel this would have been much more popular.


Concrete implementations could look like:

1. Transfer new Sleeve Draw’s Seal search effect to Redraw, and revert Sleeve Draw to 5.2 (this is an oversimplification of the job imo)
2. Add skills like Redraw II: Redraw a card with your missing Seal(s), Redraw III: Redraw a card with opposite Melee/Ranged properties with 180s~ cooldowns
3. Allow to redraw cards with your missing Seal(s) after spamming Redraw n times without Play.

The point is giving the player an option to obtain a desired Seal when in absolute need without changing the number of cards available to the player, and the above are only a few possible specifications of an idea that could take many forms. I feel a Redraw revamp in this direction will improve QoL and give players a wider range of options for optimizing cardplay at the same time.

SE Devs, if you are going to reconsider 5.3 Sleeve Draw in the near future, it would be great if you think about reworking Redraw as well.


P.S. This is not directly about Seals and I am sure I would be the billionth person to say this since launch of Shadowbringers, but Devs while you’re at it please disallow looping between the same cards when spamming Redraw? It feels terrible.

Originally Posted by Ayesafaile

Healer job design in general has been completely abysmal from 4.0 onwards. The 5.3 AST changes should come as no surprise to anyone who has played healer in this game for a long time.

Post HW job design and adjustments are bad in optimization context for pretty much every job in the game, and I've disliked it all along.

At least pre 5.3 cards were worth playing in my opinion (more so than 4.x cards for reasons written in the first post, which may be contrary to the opinions of some), and while I'm not surprised that they ruined this too, the devs ways of taking anything remotely complicated/interesting in the game and nullyfying it disheartened me enough to get myself posting (and translating!) in the forums for the first time in my life, fully aware of history showing I am most probably wasting my time.

I am dearly hoping for that 0.0001% chance they may hear us for once though... how great if such a world existed.

This is a kind of interesting contrast to the many complaints of AST having too much to do/too much micromanagement, which have been vocalized pretty often on these forums. Seems SE is going to make some people unhappy one way or another...