AST cards ramble

[ForsakenRoe]

Quick writeup of what I'd do to cards for a different thread. Numbers probably not balanced, but I needed something to do while waiting for a big fish

Major Arcana: now autodraws one every 60s. If you have one already, the timer ticks in the background, but if it hits a full 60s again, then it resets the timer and you lose out on a use (similar to Enochian/Polyglot generation). Only one Major Arcana effect can be active at a time, so no 'hold both charges for the 2min'

Minor Arcana: now draws a Minor Arcana every 15s. Unlike Majors, you can stock an additional Minor Arcana. When a second one is held in reserve, the timer continues to tick, as with Major Arcana, and like Major, letting the timer hit max without clearing room for a new card to be drawn will 'waste' the draw. Again, this is not meant to be 'dump everything in 2min window', but instead a more 'evenly distributed through the rotation' kind of design.

Playing Major Arcana is still OGCD, but Minor Arcana are GCD.

Additionally, Sleeve Draw would return, becoming a 2charge, 60s charge time action. When you use it, your currently drawn Minor Arcana becomes a Lady of it's suit. Just to make sure it's got some juice for the burst window

Now for Card effects (im not good with names):

Balance: 10% damage, 15s

Bole: 20% damage mitigation, 15s. Additionally, grants 3 stacks of Bole's Bulwark, causing the enemy that strikes the bearer of this buff to take 10% of that ally's Max HP as damage and consuming one stack.

Arrow: Grants 10 stacks of 'Arrow's Assault' (12 if the target is PhysRanged), increasing Autoattack rate by 400%. One stack is consumed for each Autoattack dealt under it's effect, and upon consuming all stacks, the Autoattack rate returns to normal.
Additionally, if the target of this card is the AST, grants 5 stacks of Arrow's Assault, speeding up the recast time of the AST to 1.5s for the next 5 GCD attacks, and making cast times of those spells instant.

Ewer: Grants 1000mp over 15s. Additionally, Grants 3 stacks of Ewer Overflowing, causing the next 3 attacks dealt by a healer to strike a second time for 100% of the spell's potency. Additional effects are not applied. This second strike cannot crit or DHit

Spear: 10% Physical damage, 15s. If the target of this card is the AST, their attacks are all considered Physical for the duration of the card.

Spire: 10% Magic damage, 15s

So ideally for the sake of damage, Bole to Tanks, Ewer to Healers, Arrow to Ranged, Spear to Phys (preferably Melee), Spire to Casters, and Balance to any DPS that has good gear, but things could be moved about depending on the state of the battle (ie, if a caster just died, Ewer them instead of a healer, so they have MP to work with)

A Note on Minor Arcana: Knaves, Lords, Ladies are 7 8 and 9 respectively. Due to not having a duration, these effects will last on the target until they are overwritten by another card, or KO removes them.

X of Staves: Increases the next 5 attacks dealt by the target ally by 60p. Additionally, increases the damage of the first attack dealt by target ally after this effect is applied, by 5 potency, multiplied by the face value of the arcana.

X of Rings: Deals 100p in counterattack damage each time the target ally is struck, up to 3 times. Additionally, deals an additional 5 potency, multiplied by the face value of the arcana, for the first counterattack only.

X of Knives: Causes the next 6 Autoattacks to deal a second strike for 50p. Additionally, a bonus potency equal to the arcana face value is applied to each of these bonus strikes.
if the concept of 'potency value not divisible by 5' is too much for the engine, make it 'first autoattack has bonus damage of '5 x face value'' like the rest

X of Cups: Causes the next 3 healer damage spells to cost half MP, and to strike a second time for 100p. Additional effects are not applied twice. Additionally, the first of these spells deals bonus damage equal to 5 potency, multiplied by the face value of the arcana

X of Crowns: Increases the next 5 instances of Magic damage dealt by 60p. Additionally, a bonus potency equal to the arcana face value is applied to each of these bonus strikes.
see arrow if game can't handle non-5 values

X of Irons: Increases the next 5 instances of Physical damage dealt by 60p. Additionally, a bonus potency equal to the arcana face value is applied to each of these bonus strikes. Additionally, if the target of this card is the AST, the next 5 instances of magic damage are instead considered physical, allowing them to benefit from this effect

Oh yeh, lastly, Astrodyne would be condensed so that rather than being three buffs with one effect each, the reward for getting more seals is still one buff, but it consolidates all previous 'reward buffs' into itself. Buff cap is already straining at the thought of these extra Minor Arcana effects. Additionally, Astrodyne's effects are lowered in potency (in my mind) because they'd be up more often. This is because I'd have Minor Arcana give seals too, leading to much higher uptime on Astrodyne

[IDontPetLalas]

Sounds nice.
By the way- good luck with the fishing

[ForsakenRoe]

Thanks for the gl, I got it, done till 6.5 now

funny thought while I'm trying to get something done in runescape, I was thinking about this idea again, and while I don't have the motivation to put more effort into balancing it and stuff, I did think: Minor Arcana is a 15s CD, and playing it is on the GCD. Presumably, that GCD would be affected by Spellspeed, but that means that rather than every 6 GCDs, it's every 'a little less than 6'. This means that Spellspeed is actually kinda not great, as you'd have to either commit another GCD, or wait a fraction fof a second to make sure you get the card play GCD out. It's the same reason Manafication and Reassemble have weird looking timers (110 and 55 respectively), so that Speed doesn't mess with the rotation. So then I was thinking...

What if the Minor Arcana CD (ie, the 15s time till you draw another card onto the gauge) was affected by Spellspeed too?

What if we could choose to have an AST where you go full Crit, as we do now, or another option, you go full Spellspeed, and while your own personal damage is lower, you get more Minor Arcana uses into the fight? No doubt some people would go 'its not worth it because misaligned from raidbuffs' but if the maths is done right, surely it's possible to make 'gained extra uses of the buffs' a bigger gain than 'kept the buffs aligned with 2min window', right? And if it's not, then I'd argue that it shows that the 2min window is too dominant in it's effect on the damage profile of a raidgroup and that's an issue of it's own

[Aravell]

Interesting concept with the auto-draw cards, I think it fits more with the class concept of "the stars gave you a fate, now manipulate it into something favourable".

On your point about stacking spell speed instead of crit being viable, you'd have to reduce your GCD timer to 1.2s to have perfect alignment again, that's a lot of spell speed, I don't even know if that's possible to achieve. It kind of reminds me of that GNB set that goes so fast and misaligns so hard that it eventually realigns.

[ForsakenRoe]

1.5 is the hard limit the engine can do (you can test it in Bozja pretty easily using haste gear/the 'dodge enemy 3 times' banner), but I was thinking, yeh again, that if the Minor Arcana has 2 charges to avoid overcapping, then surely the issue kinda resolves itself? If you need to hold a charge for a second to keep it aligned to the 1min mark, you just... do that? I see it more likely that you would hit 14s instead of 15, if you had 'fair amount of Spellspeed' on gear, which wouldn't be like, unplayable levels of speed. Then again, having only 1s of CDR might be kinda lame as the 'reward' for going heavily into Spellspeed. Although, Astrodyne would gain in use too, if you have more Spellspeed, since it also increases your speed, although not by increasing your Spellspeed stat

[Aravell]

Oh, I said the wrong thing, I meant 1.2s cast on Fall Malefic, which would make your Draw CD 12s, that requires a GCD of 2s, which would be impossible to achieve as it turns out.



This is the minimum GCD we can achieve on this tier, a 1.37s cast on Fall Malefic. So the "go so fast that you loop around and align perfectly" strategy wouldn't work. I would say giving it charges would probably work, something like "Every 15s, you gain 1 card, if the held card slot is full on recharge, the next card goes into your spread and will be moved into your held card slot after you play the currently held card."

[ForsakenRoe]

Yeh I imagine something like this for the gauge (forgive the bad art):



So the second Minor Arcana card (in this case, the 4 of Crowns) would show 'X sec' as it's info while it's on recharge, and the main display would have a countdown if the first card is also spent, like this:



If need be, I there could also be a third card held for Minor Arcana, which would appear behind the second. I wanted to avoid stacking them too far though, to try and dissuade from 'hold for raidbuffs' a little bit. I like the idea of them being less bound to the 2min window. The Major Arcana are there for that. I wonder if there's a way to have a 'proc' of sorts that accelerates the Minor Arcana CD in some way. Maybe under Astrodyne, each cast of Malefic reduces the CD on the next Minor Arcana by 1s or something? And since Astrodyne can be generated from Minor Arcana too, it'd feed into itself. I wonder if Astrodyne would feel better or worse if it became more like a maintenance buff that you aim to keep up 100% of the time, I think it has potential. Every 6 GCDs you play a Minor Arcana, but if you're playing Astrodyne well then you can get that down to every 5th GCD being a buff. I don't think getting to every 4th being a buff would be so good though for RSI reasons, we'd still have to refresh Combust too which would get annoying

[ForsakenRoe]

Sorry for doublepost, just adding a line to Arrow to make it actually useable in solo gameplay. It now has an additional effect of:

'Additionally, if the target of this card is the AST, grants 5 stacks of Arrow's Assault, speeding up the recast time of the AST to 1.5s for the next 5 GCD attacks, and making cast times of those spells instant.'

Essentially, Malefic-Hypercharge. By my maths, you'd normally get 3 GCDs in 7.5sec, with this effect on you would get 5 GCDs in those same 7.5s, a gain of 2 GCDs. Each of my Malefics is around 9-10k in current gear, so it'd gain me 20k, let's say 24k cos I don't have the raid weapon yet. Since I'm aiming for 30k as the damage value to balance the cards around, that'd mean this effect would be useful in solo content, but not 'optimal' in raiding (you'd rather throw it on a melee for the autoattack buff side of the card)

Edit: Was considering rewriting Ewer's 'healer spells strike twice' effect, because the passing thought of 'what if WHM/AST in Duty Finder, AST uses Ewer on WHM, Misery hits twice?' but y'know what, I'll leave it cos that sounds hilarious, and you're not likely to see WHM/AST in harder content until it's vastly outgeared anyway. I assume Phlegma-Dumping SGE would be the go-to partner as a target for the card in a 1pure 1barrier comp but hey maybe this would give people a small reason not to go AST/SCH for once

[SenahPanipahr]

Don't think you need to apologise for doubleposting in your own idea thread (within reason :P).

Speaking of, your suggestion certainly fits the class fantasy better than the current card mechanic. Much as I like the mechanic, the homogenised effects feel completely out of place on AST in particular. I particularly like the bit where you don't have the ability to stack up a bunch of major arcana -- always thought it was super weird that the stars/fate/whatever would decide "actually all 3/4 of these people are the ones destined to stand out right now!".

[ForsakenRoe]

Thanks, the main idea I had was twofold: obviously, the main thing is to make the cards feel different, while also trying to avoid making one 'the best'. As mentioned above, I aimed to have them balanced around boosting 'current BIS geared team' by 30k total damage per card so that's the balancing calculations I was aiming for. The other point though, was to reduce the APM of the burst window, while also keeping the APM of the class overall, by redistributing those button presses throughout the 'downtime' between the burst windows, and by making Minor Arcana a 15s CD system, I'd like to think it helps sell the idea that 'this is the class that buffs allies'. Every 6th GCD on average would be a buff being applied to an ally, there's leniency to delay for a burst window/you know an ally's 1min burst is coming in a sec/downtime changing things around, etc. So there would be plenty to optimize on the class, while also keeping the effect of the RNG (the Face Value effect) quite minimal. For example, the difference between drawing 2's constantly, and Lady's (highest possible card) on every draw, is like 60% of a Malefic per minute, roughly (40p difference per card).

It'd also be nice to have for the lore of the class. Everyone who plays the class knows the 6 cards. Most know the cards each have an element attached, ie Arrow = wind. Some know they're from a deck of sixty cards, and fewer still know the names of the suits of those decks. Until I dug up the details from a Tumblr post of the exerpt from the EE, even I didn't know that each suit was associated with a 'Class' (ie smallfolk, military, nobility etc), or that the suits all had alternate names for some reason (ie Crowns, the suit that the Spire leads, is also known as the Wreaths).

Since I had to copypaste the data, and the formatting was scuffed (thanks Tumblr), I'll post a screenshot of my offbrand Excel spreadsheet I used to work out which suit each Major card led, cos it's interesting



That reminds me, I'll change wording of something to clarify that Major Arcana is to be used at the minute marks and is not possible to 'hold one for 56 seconds, use, then get another 4s later, to have 2 cards in raidbuffs'

edit: since I was curious, I did some quick and grimy maths (I'm on like hour 18 of being awake), this design gains about 100 DPS from using Minor Arcana over Malefics, based on the performance of a very high level gameplay AST I took a peek at on the verboten site. Which means that if you ignore the system entirely, and just Malefic spam like currently, your performance (or lack thereof) is very unlikely to be the sole cause of an enrage wipe, and if it is, then 'the DPS got crit variance'd' definitely causes 100DPS between the 4 of them so blame that