Thread: AST Adjustments 6.2

Originally Posted by inhaledcorn

Here's the thing about AST cards: either they all need to contribute to damage or none of them should contribute to damage. That was the problem with pre ShB era cards: Half (post Spear change) contributed to damage and half contributed to utility (or were used to set-up for damage). The utility cards, being RNG, were faaaaar less useful than the damage cards, even with Bole buffed out the ass to equal Rampart. How was slightly less damage on a tank/the group that you couldn't plan for compete with a 5% flat damage buff? 7% crit buff? It didn't. It couldn't.

We also have to look at the pre-HW skill set AST had. Most of their Job skills went to card management (Draw/Play, Royal Road, Spread, Redraw). Gravity, their AoE filler spell, used to be 52. They didn't have it for any of the ARR post game dungeons. A lot of skills that feel like they should be job quest skills are instead learned during level up (Essential Dignity is at level 4, btw). This caused major problems down the road on introducing new spells for level up. The job design was too limited in scope. The ShB card changes alleviated a lot of this problem.

However, EW introduced a new problem by giving AST a bonkers amount of buttons to hit with a seal system that isn't practical with how cards are doled out. So, my proposition is thus:

Minor Arcana: neither card does damage. Lady is now an AoE heal with a regen effect while Lord is an AoE heal with a shield effect. (Celestial Opposition might get nerfed to be just a flat AoE heal, but maybe gets both regen and shield effects if used while under Neutral Sect).

Basic cards: Now only do direct damage by the AST (half are single target, while the other half are AoE. Redraw is 3 charges again. Draw grants the Celestial Redraw effect which automatically redraw the single-target card to the AoE one of the same seal and vice-versa (this will not consume a charge of Redraw). MP gain is buffed back to 700MP. Sleeve Draw returned and put on a 60s timer (will also grant Celestial Redraw).

Astrodyne: sits on a 60s cooldown timer. Seals determine what kind of attack is performed when Astrodyne is used (3 of the same = big AoE hit [can probably use current Lady of Crowns animation]. 3 different = big single-target hit [can probably use old Lord of Crowns animation]. 2 same = Earthly Star).

I'm aware this greatly lowers the amount of support AST does, but this does make it more solo-friendly and controller friendly.

Might as well just get rid of the cards all together then and just buff their Malefic potency since they all are just dps buttons anyway with this set up. And people are still going to complain about getting AoE damage cards when they need single target ones since I assume single target damage will be higher than the AoE counterpart, so it does nothing to appease the min maxers who complained about the original iteration anyway.

Originally Posted by inhaledcorn

The problem is AST's gimmick in and of itself just doesn't work within the context of FFXIV. Either all cards need to contribute to DPS and be random, or all cards need to be utility and be selectable. We can't have halfsies or else we have the problem of "Balance or bust". You may not like min-maxers, but that is the reality of the game.

The reality of the game is that there is nothing preventing people from clearing content with the previous iteration of cards, or when divination was tied to the seals, what happened was people were getting upset about missing out on a 2% damage increase with divination. And before that it was about a few hundred DPS between the top parsers when card effects were different. This has never been about the ability of the cards to make or break runs, it was about parsing the best numbers using the cards that is all, people got mad because they weren't getting top parses when the AST that was feeding them cards didn't draw enough balance cards.

Originally Posted by SieyaM

The reality of the game is that there is nothing preventing people from clearing content with the previous iteration of cards, or when divination was tied to the seals, what happened was people were getting upset about missing out on a 2% damage increase with divination.

The reality of the game is that there is nothing preventing people from clearing content without the previous iteration of cards. What I mean by that is we just don't need unreliable utility that we can't map, especially as we get better at the game. It's not that people are obsessed over parses, it's the fact that they're always going to prefer the option that is useful 99% of the time over the option that might have an impact 10% of the time. Who wants to sacrifice their groups damage for useless flavor buttons? It's just common sense.

I've personally never seen the obsession with mixing AST's dps cards with utility. Why can't we have both but just separate them? For example if Draw was only dps and MA was only non-dps utility.

I think some players here are missing the key word Yoshi P said. “Major” he said major adjustments are coming to Astrologian and he wants us to let him know if they take it to far or not. So are we looking at a summoner style rework or a major rework to their skills which could mean deleting and adding back maybe some they deleted before or changing them completely.

I do miss old Astro and yeah people fished for balance because it was the strongest card. However, people did ask for the balance to be changed since Astro had a guaranteed raid spot. They butchered and destroyed this job and scholar in shadowbringers. They didn’t need to do that. Now Astro is the least played healer and now we getting major adjustments to it. I hope they bring back time aspects of it. I miss that and the old cards.

Originally Posted by rewd

People are starting to dislike parsing/minmaxing talk because it does suck the fun out of the game if everything needs to be mapped and all that.

people need to realize that you can minmax anything, at any time, under any circumstances. like, minmaxing is the entire fun for some people, why make even minmaxing itself easy and boring? all i do with cards now is hold 3 cards and lightspeed every 2 minutes minutes. riveting .

Originally Posted by rewd

RNG has always been part of AST's identity and while utility you can't plan around 100% of the time might just be "flavour" for you, a lot of people enjoy it and it's what drew them to the job in the first place.

precisely. i used to do parse runs a lot in heavensward and Stormblood and not once did i ever think cards were a problem because to me it simply was another aspect of the job to make the most out of. yes is annoying to get bad rng sometimes but that's kind of the point of playing rng classes.

i guess the biggest problem i can see with rng utility is the reliability aspect, but they can have better rng mitigation without completely gutting everything. like, making sure you see every card every 6 draws, or giving options to use cards without using up the royal road youve been saving, or something like that.

Originally Posted by QooEr

people need to realize that you can minmax anything, at any time, under any circumstances. like, minmaxing is the entire fun for some people, why make even minmaxing itself easy and boring? all i do with cards now is hold 3 cards and lightspeed every 2 minutes minutes. riveting .

Indeed, but not all minmaxing is the same. Minmaxing with RNG feels like you are accepting a compromise, and I understand that some people might not like it. You can give AST six utility cards and unless you remove RNG, they won't ever be part of your healing/mitigation plan because they are not reliable. Still, some people might find the unreliability fun and AST is the only healer that can offer a similar playstyle.

DPS and utility shouldn't be connected, but I also don't think that having RNG utility would just be useless flavour. If anything, I think current jobs need more flavour.