Quote Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe View Post
Interesting, with the hand thing. My mind wanders in a different direction, of draw X cards, X being decided by balance/how finicky it is for gameplay (maybe 3), and play them in order. But the order you draw them in is random, so you might have eg melee melee ranged, or ranged melee ranged, or whatever, so it's like DNC step RNG? If they're miniGCDs like steps, and had a strong buff effect to make up for the fact they're slightly eating into your GCDs, I wonder if it'd flow well. OFC, you'd 'set' the cards, not immediately play them, with Divination triggering them all. Maybe make it so multiple cards can be applied to one player as long as they're not duplicates, so the optimization is 'ah I have Balance Bole Arrow. The MNK already has Balance set, so I'll Balance the DRG, Bole the BLM, and then the MNK gets the Arrow'. If you had to deal out 3 cards in this manner every 30s like DNC Standard Step, it'd definitely make the rotation feel pretty active. And with the 'Divination activates the cards' thing, you'd not be in any rush necessarily to do the buffs at exact timings. As long as they're out by the time Div comes out, there's versatility on when you actually do the card-dance.

Might need a way to have one set applied before combat, so your first Div isn't horrendously misaligned. Or maybe not, if you went (prepull malefic), Combust at 0s, weave Draw, Play Play Play (5.5s in now), Div, Malefic spam, I think that lines up at 3rd-ish GCD? If there's some other idea for removing the 'malefic spam' part and replacing it with something else, that can be whacked in there in it's place.



If it were a PBAOE like that, would it decide it's 'primary target' based on what you have targetted at the time, or the same logic as Dances (the closest target is the 'primary target', regardless of what you're actually targetting)? I don't personally mind having to adjust where I'm standing to 'force priority' onto a specific target, but others might want to stand in Narnia. Though I guess some people do stand in Narnia as DNC and miss their Dance AOEs already so /shrug
AST is currently disliked for a number of reasons. What is very likely the biggest reason is the amount of single targeting you have to do to play cards. I have very little doubt that whatever we get in 7.0 is going to kill playing cards on individual players because it's driving away the common player. The second biggest issue is that Astrodyne is a terrible reward and doesn't feel worth the effort it takes to get all 3 signs. The third reason is the current iteration of every card is the same flavor of nothing is loathed and defeats the entire purpose of having a card system in the first place. It makes the card system a convoluted mess.

Personally, the single targeting aspect never bothered me, even as a controller player. That said, I don't think the system can only function that way either, so I'm entirely open to exploring the avenue of having them be AoE, or not requiring targeting for some other reason somehow. Beyond that though, I have a negative amount of interest in entertaining the current Astrodyne or keeping all the cards in this melee vs ranged disaster we've been stuck with. I don't ultimately have a say of course, but as far as playing around with AST rework ideas is concerned...



As for the AoE factor, I didn't include it having any fall-off, but even if it needs fall-off for balance reasons, it really doesn't matter. AoE is not a thing in this game outside of trash mobs. As long as you're not whiffing enemies, which wouldn't happen with a large circle AoE, you're ultimately dealing with a difference in milliseconds of how quickly things die. Maybe in Deep Dungeons it could matter more, but if you're soloing Deep Dungeons as an AST.... May the Twelve help you.