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

Originally Posted by Ayesafaile

Plenty of 4.x speedkill ASTs made incorrect card decisions, but their mistakes were typically obfuscated by the randomness of the system. I assume that's what you mean when you talk about "rewarding player skill".

To clarify, by "rewarding player skill" I intended that while in the 4.x iteration you were only praying that you could play the blatantly obvious optimum (hit draw and immediately play on cooldown praying it becomes AoE Balance on Trick), the 5.x iteration allows you to pre-plan every card to its optimal oGCD/target for every fight, thus it rewards people that spend time to think a lot more than the previous iteration.
I fully agree with you that in 4.x incorrect card decisions were obfuscated by the randomness of the system, but that can be said for the 5.x iteration as well with Crit DH variance influencing your card strength... and the same can be said for pretty much every other job in the game, so while this randomness is a frustrating part of the game (as you have mentioned) I don't think this is 4.x AST unique.

Originally Posted by Ayesafaile

As someone who has been involved in speedkills in the past (mostly Alexander Creator, a bit in Sigmascape), optimization of the current card system just seems tedious. You're not innovating, you're dissecting FFLogs for the correct answer. I can see how that's interesting to certain individuals, but it just seems like busywork to me.

Part of me understands this, while another part of me asks when was optimizing jobs not dissecting FFLogs/Google Spreadsheets/Excel for the correct answer? Coming up with 5-head strats is one thing, but my understanding is that you always needed to preplan how you would play your job optimally with that 5-head strat, and that typically was spreadsheet work. While I see that this is cumbersome to do, doing this busywork almost always had its rewards for most jobs in the game (although SQEX devs historically has gone great lengths to minimize this reward with pretty much every expansion post HW).