Some AST changes

[Aelin_Ashryver]

Please put the DMG buff on the first seal, the haste of the second and then the mp gain on the third. I can be consistently unlucky and losing damage all the time due to it is only going to make playing astro feel incredibly frustrating esp in times where we wipe with 0.x% of hp left on a boss knowing I missed on my self buff and drew ladies instead of lords.. This will make bad luck in savage prog feel incredibly frustrating.

You removed so much of the luck of the draw aspect when you made all cards the same, why on earth you decided to lock damage behind that third seal idk. You gave divinations problem back and made it worse. Change it please.

[AnotherPerson]

The Astrodyne's design on MP being first is to guarantee AST will never run into MP issues because of bad RNG. Whether that's overtuned or undertuned is a different story, but I don't think making MP an RNG resource is a good idea.

Divination was changed to not require seals, which removed the big RNG aspect for party damage buffs in its ShB iteration. That's actually better because there's no more convoluted complexity in raid buffs - which affects parties more when aligning for burst windows.

The only difference in AST's DPS is their personal DPS. The Astrodyne's DPS self buff is most likely made to be more in-line to proc-based classes, where it's nice to have but not mandatory to succeed. Just think of not getting the seal as bad luck like DNC's fourfold feathers not proccing from their GCD skills.

[Liam_Harper]

The +5% from the 3 seal effect is surprisingly small, maybe 80-100 potency. Lord/Lady is a worse source of dps loss via bad rng.

Astrodyne is in a weird spot where it basically exists for flavor. As a button, it's just a second Lucid with some fluff potency to give the illusion that managing your seals rewarded you, without actually giving you much reward because that's hard to balance. Lord/Lady similarly exists for the illusion of flavor and to try and calm the players who wanted old AST cards back, but really it's 2 buttons that don't do much.

They really didn't know what to do with cards that wouldn't give AST even more ridiculous heal power or dps, so they've given us button bloat filler to keep us happy for now until they figure out what to do.

[Silver-Strider]

The +5% from the 3 seal effect is surprisingly small, maybe 80-100 potency. Lord/Lady is a worse source of dps loss via bad rng.

Astrodyne is in a weird spot where it basically exists for flavor. As a button, it's just a second Lucid with some fluff potency to give the illusion that managing your seals rewarded you, without actually giving you much reward because that's hard to balance. Lord/Lady similarly exists for the illusion of flavor and to try and calm the players who wanted old AST cards back, but really it's 2 buttons that don't do much.

They really didn't know what to do with cards that wouldn't give AST even more ridiculous heal power or dps, so they've given us button bloat filler to keep us happy for now until they figure out what to do.

Meanwhile, Earthly Star goes super nova

[Gemina]

The +5% from the 3 seal effect is surprisingly small, maybe 80-100 potency. Lord/Lady is a worse source of dps loss via bad rng.

The problem with that is the larger the increase to DMG from Astrodyne, the more penalized the player is going to feel if they don't get access to it. The other thing to factor is they are also getting haste on top of the 5% increase.

While I am of the mindset that a healer should be happy they are getting the ability to increase their own damage at all, I do agree with the OP that Astrodyne should give an increase to DMG no matter what. In another thread, I suggested that seal acquisition should be:

Good result: Haste
Better result: Damage up
Best result: Haste + Damage up

The MP replenish should just be a flat increase when the AST uses Astrodyne.

Lord/Lady in 6.0 is button bloat. If they can't figure out how to make Minor Arcana interact with the Divine Deck then it should just be deleted.

[Aelin_Ashryver]

Even if my actual damage loss is minimal, it still feels awful. And esp awful because I have no way to mitigate the bad luck, no sleeve draw and missing a seal in astrodyne feels worse than me missing my 3rd seal in divination currently, as at least I still get some damage buff with the 2 seals. Lord and Lady is just.. I am not going to PLAN any heals via lady so its just an extra heal to be there whether I need it or not (most likely not once things are on farm), due to lord also being on the same button I MUST push it on cd if I am trying to maximise my damage output regardless of the rng. And if they seriously are planning our mp management around using that skill I am baffled. I already have to use lucid and draw on cd to keep up with my mana usage at low piety. Like the above said, just put the mp regen on the button push and not on a seal at the very least.

And you can throw out that on average I will do x or y, but it doesn't change how it feels. I regularly during our e12s farm would get several of the wrong seals in a row and have to use 2 seal divination or delay and miss trick timing which I wont do. That's with 3 charges on redraw and every now and again I can use sleeve draw to prevent this. Now I get no saving grace, I will have runs that are cursed luck and they will feel awful and make the job overall less fun to play ESP prog where things are already hard as it is nevermind RNG screwing you.

I am already gna be healing a DRK as an AST with a now nerfed ED rip all my healing into that BLACK HOLE of a freakin invuln. Why SE.. why you keep that stupid invuln as it is.

[Gemina]

Snip

No raid in the game is going to be designed around the AST always getting the 5% from Astrodyne. There are some issues with this AST, but they are at least moving in the right direction. I know you won't agree with some of those decisions. One of which will be I believe Redraw will also eventually be pruned. Completely eliminating any ability to mitigate the RNG. I think it would be a really good idea to try and adopt a mindset where you see the DMG increase from Astrodyne as a bonus, and is based entirely on luck. Things are going to be difficult for the AST who views not getting the best result as a loss in DMG.

I am hoping that yourself and other ASTs can find some compromise if they adjust Astrodyne to give you at least a haste buff as consolation for not getting the best result. This still translates to an increase in damage. I believe the devs will eventually see that what they are trying to do with the seal system is basically the same as slots, and they will have to adjust the rewards like I pointed out in my last post.

As for DRK, we will need to see what happens with the stat squish. It should actually be easier to meet the Walking Dead removal requirement despite the nerf to ED. I got a lot of people mad at me when I said tank invuln skill should be made a role skill and function like Hallowed does now. ;p

[AnotherPerson]

Basically boils down to "don't think you need to get Astrodyne's 3 different seals or your raid will fail." It's very much so flavor.

As for Sleeve Draw's Lord/Lady, you basically put it on cooldown, holding the card for the best possible timing within the skills' window to use before sleeve draw comes back down on cooldown (basically a bit of optimization there for healing any mistakes with Lady or holding Lord if raid buffs happen right before next activation).

I'm actually quite curious now, if you draw Lord/Lady, would it be more beneficial to just wait and hold Lord of Crowns in raid buffs since you can't guarantee if you get unlucky and draw multiple Lady of Crowns in a row? Or do you just chance it for RNG? In a farm party, the illusion of choice in me tells me not using the skill on cooldown would be folly for the tradeoff to be a small DPS gain under raid buffs, but getting RNG for multiple rolls of Lady of Crowns is still possible, and thus would be even less DPS when you don't need the extra healing. Decisions, Decisions...

[Aelin_Ashryver]

Yes, I do understand that the extra damage will not be mandatory for us to clear. It really doesn't change how bad it feels for me, I much rather they make the bad luck feel less poopy. Damage should be the first thing and something else the nice little cherry on top that you really can live without (ik I can technically do without the dmg but I dont WANT to xD), such as the mp regen. The irony of the luck of the draw aspect being what drew me to ast in stormblood but once they changed the cards to all give damage that enjoyment pretty much vanished for me. Sleeve draw giving 3 cards was also fun and speedy.

I do like our bigger bubble flash bang and I like our level 90 skill. I can just foresee a lot of salt coming.