Quote Originally Posted by Sparkthor View Post
I'm still very confused about RNG relations player seem's to have in the game :
- People want the old AST card system to came back.
- People blame crit RNG.
There is probably some nostalgia yes. But the point is, the theme of the AST, the identity and lore and what have you, is that it is a tarot-reading healer who bends fate to guide it's allies to victory. While it's subject to the capricious whims of fate, it has some control over that fate and can push it in certain directions, which is what we do with the card effects. RNG is a key part of the class's identity. By making all the card effects the same, the 'bending fate' feeling is lessened, because every 'fate' you can mess with (card effect) is essentially the same thing. It's like having an actual tarot reading that always draws the same cards, and gives the same prediction of 'you will be very successful in life because of X reason', at least sometimes IRL you get things like 'a chance encounter with someone in uniform will change your destiny' or such.

AOE Balance is the key reason it was so impactful in the past, yes. It's no secret that people started prioritizing that over everything else. But Balance was not the whole problem, so turning everything into 'Balance, but scuffed' was not the solution. The fact you could make it AOE, was probably more of an issue than the Balance itself, imo. Which is why the middle ground solution, that stares us in the face, is probably the best way to go forward: keep the cards single target as they are now, and add some unique flavorful effects back to them, while also giving them all damage contribution so the 'my parse' minded people don't complain too much about which they get. I've already said how I'd make them all useful on different roles (bole to tanks, ewer to healers, etc), the way they do their damage would be different thematically, ie reflecting enemy attacks back, 'spell multistrike', increasing AA damage, and with potency balancing they can be made to do roughly equal damage (I aimed for 30k damage). Once that's done, then they can have fun additional effects like movespeed, MP restoration, damage mitigation added too, and those are nice bonuses on top of the thing everyone's focused on, the damage. We never planned around having a 20% mit on the tank at X moment of a fight before, and we wouldn't with this change. But them taking 20% less damage from autoattacks is still nice to have, nobody's going to say 'no I would rather have nothing' and rightclick the buff off, are they?

But the two points you stated at the top, are the exact reason the argument falls apart. People hated how card RNG dictated your parse (and it was probably a pain for devs in terms of AST's contribution to a raid being so swingy), so it was turned into this 'everything is Balance' mush we have now. People still complain about Crit RNG and how that affects whether you hit enrage or not, and in some cases, how it affects their parse. So to me, that says 'people complain about literally anything, if it A: affects their parse, and B: they have no control over it'. So unless we delete Crits, damage variance (the swing of up to +5% and -5% on each hit), Direct Hits, etc, we'll see complaints still. Alternatively, we don't nuke 'fun' for the sake of perfect balance, and come to a sort of 'compromise position'. If I was working for SE, and I put enough effort in to balancing the numbers, I'd get the cards to all contribute the same damage. Just like now, which card you draw would basically not affect your parse. But they'd also have interesting bonus effects so they'd be more 'fun' to play with. A melee having movespeed cos of Arrow doesn't just mean they can move faster and it's a funny meme, it means they can potentially hit a positional easier. It means they can potentially greed one extra GCD. Stuff like that