Rotations: Making them DIFFERENT

[Renathras]

Many say 'separate the utility and the damage since people only ever want the damage, and forgo the utility', but that just leads to a very similar issue.

I think the issue comes down to AST players LIKE their RNG. They like having various different effects. Part of the second of those means you'll have some niche, situational stuff; part of the first of those means you won't always have things when you need/want them, which is obviously a bit wonky when dealing with the situational stuff.

It's why I think the stock idea is so important, since it gives you some power over that. It allows RNG to exist, but gives you more control over RNG instead of you being totally at its mercy. And the reason for the separation is...well, I think you already understand that even while disagreeing, so I'll leave it at that. If you have damage attached, then the utility ALWAYS goes out the window. The playerbase has shown they will dump almost any utility in favor of damage, even ridiculously small damage. "A Sacred Soil here would help with the party better surviving this mechanic, even that player with the vuln stacks." Players: "Hehe, Energy Drain go burr!!!" This was what led to Balance Fishing in the first place.

And while you could just have all cards do the same damage + a secondary utility effect, you still run into the problem of "don't have the utility when you need it", and you'd still have people complaining that they're "bland" since they all have the same damage buff percent (e.g. if they were all +6% damage + some utility effect). And if the utility are a big enough deal, then you'd still get "Balance fishing", just for the desired utility add-on.

I think they have to be split, otherwise you WILL always have a "this one does 1% more damage", and it will always be the one people fish for and complain when they don't get, which brings us back to square one. You just have to have some RNG protection, which being able to stock a card can help with, as well as more free uses of Redraw. I think the answer is to combine making damage and utility buffs separate so they don't compete + give some kinds of RNG protection so that you maybe can't ALWAYS get the card you want ALL the time, but when the chips are down, you can more or less negate RNG and really do the AST "twisting fate" thing. Like say you have 2 charges of Redraw on a long CD and Redraw won't give you either of the last two cards of that type (offense or defense) played, you could use it to "force" any one of the desired cards once per 3 mins or whatever, but would have to be used a bit sparingly, so that most of the time you'd be finding uses for the other cards or stocking a card when you know you'll need it later.

The best part of PvP AST to me is their LB really feels like you're bending fate, and I feel like if RNG protection was done right, it could give this same feel of "AST is still RNG, but from time to time, you grab RNGesus by balls and say 'No, I want THIS card!'", which I think is as fundamental to the class fantasy as the general RNG element is.