Astro Card Proposal

[Saefinn]

I think the only thing that needs to be changed from the current system is the effect the cards have instead of them all being "The Balance".

What happens when you get a card you don't want to use? I'd do what I do now, Minor Arcana it. And there, no useless cards. They fixed the problem with Minor Arcana and didn't need to give every card the same effect.

[Recon1o6]

4% 2%...these are insufficient for 15 seconds. You can't see those without a parser.
Royal road affecting lord of crowns would be a bit pointless, you could cast gravity.

We now know the reason for terrible utility on most jobs in shb was not because of balance despite claims on this forum, but because SE incorrectly thought that the bigger numbers and variety of buffs put off new players. With the stat crunch and myriad of complaints we should be able to get noticable and variable buffs back.

For players concerned with optimisation- optimisation isn't the most important thing about a job. The most important thing is the fun factor, and a lot of people loved the rng and flavour of the cards.

Here's an alternative that focuses on fun first

First:
Divination deleted
Draw and play recombined. Cards last until you play, RR or MA them, Undraw deleted, spread returned as a card holder
Draw can only be used every 30 seconds assuming no card is in hand.
Up to 2 card effects can be on a player at once (so 2 astros aren't fighting over cards)
Redraw: Now only has 2 redraw on a 60 second recast. Card removed in this manner will be drawn on your next draw
Royal road: Now has stacking properties. Cards stacking in this way are removed from the deck until a card is played normally. You get 2 RR effect stacks at 60, and 3 at 80. When a card is played using royal road, it will use the royal road buff to differentiate it
AOE- Balance and spear
Potency- ewer and spire
Duration- arrow and bole

Sleeve draw: Gives 1 of the missing royal road effects, recast 150

Lord and lady retain their current effects but effect is boosted to 10% Lord gives 10% to the astrologian casting the card on themselves when no melee or tank available (this is for situations like POTD, eureka, bozja and open world)

Cards
Balance: 12.5% damage boost for 30 seconds
Bole: grants 15% mitigation and a convelesance effect for 30 seconds
Ewer: restores 3000mp over 15 seconds regardless of other effects. Effect is written as 3% mp over 15 seconds, so if it gets extended, another 3% per tick happens
Spire: Extends current buffs by 12 seconds and grants a bloodbath effect for 30
Arrow: reduces auto attack delay and makes all spells instant cast for 15 seconds
Spear: Increases Dhit and crits by 20% for 20 seconds. % based positive effects alway proc

This gives back the fun cards used to have while retaining minor arcana so no cards are wasted. RR now also makes it worthwhile to sacrifice a balance or spear to redraw or RR if the parser is saving up for a full royal play. (Aoe+duration+boost)

[NobleWinter]

4% 2%...these are insufficient for 15 seconds. You can't see those without a parser.
Royal road affecting lord of crowns would be a bit pointless, you could cast gravity.

Cards are oGCD and Gravity is GCD. They dont conflict with each other and Gravity has room for weaving built in so you could use both for more damage. It's not a one or the other kind of situation. Its not really possible to see any of the current card efects without a parser so Im not sure if anyone even expects big numbers at this point over just knowing they are giving out a gain.

[Seoulstar]

Just give me something where I won't feel like I am a balance bot. I am happy the balance or bust crowd got what they wanted...but it seriously took a lot of the fun from it.

[Teraluna]

"The most important thing is the fun factor, and a lot of people loved the rng and flavour of the cards."
No they didn't. It may have for a few, but this "lot of people" just kept spamming/throwing away the cards until the magic one or two appeared, or just ignored the card system and got on with healing people.

Now we have posts complaining about changing from the old system, while at the same time we have posts (based on 6.0) complaining about changing from the current system. Go figure..

[Seoulstar]

"The most important thing is the fun factor, and a lot of people loved the rng and flavour of the cards."
No they didn't. It may have for a few, but this "lot of people" just kept spamming/throwing away the cards until the magic one or two appeared, or just ignored the card system and got on with healing people.

Now we have posts complaining about changing from the old system, while at the same time we have posts (based on 6.0) complaining about changing from the current system. Go figure..

Unless there has been update that has been missed..I don't recall seeing anything about changes to the card system. Only the fact that AST mains is losing the ability to decide if they want to do shield or pure healing. Those are like..two separate situations.

[EaMett]

"The most important thing is the fun factor, and a lot of people loved the rng and flavour of the cards."
No they didn't. It may have for a few, but this "lot of people" just kept spamming/throwing away the cards [...]

Both claims are pretty baseless lol.

The fact is. The old card system had its flaws but for 90% of players, RNG was not it. The only people really affected by the RNG aspect were highly optimized players that could use more consistency out of the system. The others who thought they were affected were non-optimized players who assumed that fetching for balance was all that mattered.
For all those in between, it was about using your card skills to decrease your chances of throwing cards away.
IIRC Throwing two draw CDs away (back to back) was a rdps loss compared to card states that were relatively easy to achieve (augmented single target). So you never fetched for too long if you were good. It was pretty easy to get a decent and consistent rdps baseline. Pushing that further was where the RNG could stab you in the back.
Now sure, I agree that even with the above, the system could really have benefited from a couple more good cards (and probably better scaling of the cards) but overall it wasn't half as bad as people make it out to be.

High-level parser and speed kill Astros needed more though, and the current iteration of cards addressed that. Sadly, I know many of these players who disliked the change regardless of it's efficacy.

[Teraluna]

"RNG was not it, RNG could stab you in the back"

Let me say I agree that some people didn't mind the downside of the old system. They obviously enjoyed the challenge and it's fair to say, frustration of dealing with unwanted cards when they turned up.
I still believe, and from first hand conversations with players, that the hit and miss aspect was a major turn off.

Then it got changed.
SE don't change things on the feedback of one person, or even a few people. But they do listen to majorities.
We have just seen that with cutting Ultima in favour of majority content, in the changes to DR after significant feedback, with the increase in relic item drop rates for the same reason.
They will also look at their metrics, of player numbers, of class outputs.

They will have done this with Ast, and the results will have caused them to move away from the old system. That obviously wasn't to everyone's liking - class changes never are - it will however, have been done based on majority feedback & data.

[EaMett]

Placing offensive and non-offensive resources on the same cooldown will always result in offensive resources being favoured. This is an immutable consequence of this game's combat system.

Mitigation tools that cannot be relied upon are worthless. A decent healer will have planned how to complete a fight in advance, making extra RNG mitigation unnecessary. Unless the extra mitigation can save a healing GCD it confers no benefit, and even with a beefy -20% mitigation this is unlikely to happen outside of intense healing checks like J Waves or Terminal Relativity. This stems from how damage in this game tends towards infrequent spikes that must be mitigated to survive. If the game treated HP as a resource that is consistently drained and must be replenished using finite healing resources (like in most other games featuring healers) then RNG mitigation gains value in that it conserves resources. Utility, such as MP regeneration, falls into the same trap unless it can be converted into damage.

Unless you want to make a portion of cards entirely worthless there is no way to implement them as anything more than an offensive tool without either overhauling the entire combat system or splitting AST's cards into offensive and defensive decks that are accessed using two separate resources.

The thing to keep in mind, especially when dealing with game design, is that you don't need to use something often to enjoy having it. Having options allows players to express themselves. And player expression directly correlates to player fun.
One (barely ever used) skill that gets you out of a bad situation once and reflects on how well you know your class will be a thousand times more fun and meaningful to you than a skill you spam all day long. Defensive cards had the potential to, and even sometimes filled, that role.

"RNG was not it, RNG could stab you in the back"

There was an entire post in between those two comments lol. Context is key.
And just to be clear. SE very quickly acknowledged the negative feedback surrounding the new cards. Given how little they acknowledge anything healer, and how much people can be seen complaining about the system here, in-game, Reddit, etc. I think it's safe to say that it was a significant amount of feedback they received. They did state that they weren't going to "change it back" because that would be harmful to the players that did enjoy it so I also assume they at least estimate that a fair amount also enjoys it. But the cards have gotten the most changes this expansion out of all healer skills so they're clearly still trying to fix something.

Given how "hot potato" healers seem to be to the team (feels like they just don't know what to do with the role). I'd assume the current system is here to stay. Besides, they're probably already changing a ton of stuff on AST next expac. It would be shocking if the cards were added on top.

[ForteNightshade]

SE don't change things on the feedback of one person, or even a few people. But they do listen to majorities.
We have just seen that with cutting Ultima in favour of majority content, in the changes to DR after significant feedback, with the increase in relic item drop rates for the same reason.
They will also look at their metrics, of player numbers, of class outputs.

Bard would like a word with you about this. They were unanimously the most popular DPS in the game last expansion yet their entire identity was gutted for no other reason than more casual players didn't understand how it functioned. Said players were not even the majority as, again, Bard was immensely popular. Now it's nearly the least played job. Dark Knights have been complaining about Living Dead for years yet no changes. It took players literally refusing to play Monk for the dev team to finally listen. I could go on but time and again, the dev team hasn't listened. Or they go from one extreme to the other.

As for the rest. They haven't made any adjustments to DR whatsoever and the Castrum drop rates were only buffed because literally no one was doing it.