How do you define (meaningful) choice?

[ForsakenRoe]

I think this is the problem, but it's super hard to fix. If we give people SB AST cards, how can we be sure there won't be people advocating for Balance fishing? We can't. And there almost certainly will be such people. The question is how to deal with it.

By having a design which does not allow for Balancefishing. The reason we fished for Balance was because AST back then was capable of giving people what we now know as Brotherhood, the 5% damage buff, for 15sec, potentially each minute. Compare that to other options, such as 'no damage (because you got Bole)', 'no damage (because you got Spire)', 'no damage (because you got Ewer)', and two flavours of 'a bit of damage but not as much as Balance'. Of course people were going to fish. But if the cards ALL give damage in some way, such that the 'extra effect' is the focus, eg the Mit on Bole, the MP on Ewer, etc. then Balancefishing isn't needed. In fact, the Seals (and Astrodyne) are the answer to Balancefishing from SHB onwards, even if the Balance was 'the best card', the reward for doing the 3 seals just needs to exceed the Balance's contribution to make 'play slightly worse effects for a massive payoff later' work out to be 'the best option'. As I've said previously, the easiest way the devs would have access to, to lower the 'damage variance' of the cards, would be to keep them singletarget and keep Divination as the 'big raidwide partybuff'. Then the cards only need to be balanced as 'Balance contributes this much RDPS, so the other cards should do this much too, but with their own way of applying that damage'. And then once that's done, slap the unique effects on them. Bole gets mit, Ewer gets MP regen, Arrow gets movespeed or something idk. And you wouldn't fish for one over another per se, because you'd still have Seals to play into I'd assume (since the devs seem to love that system).

I can guarantee, with 100% certainty, that people will not Balancefish if the design is set up to avoid that outcome. It's not some situation where 'we have RNG buffs, so we cannot have any outcome from them except 'players try to get the best one'

[ty_taurus]

But if the cards ALL give damage in some way, such that the 'extra effect' is the focus, eg the Mit on Bole, the MP on Ewer, etc. then Balancefishing isn't needed.

I don't think this is a good answer. If the cards have a DPS buff attached to them, then the AST player is heavily incentivized to use them when they're most convenient, such as saving them for buff windows. Any utility you attach to the cards will only ever offer value if the utility is conveniently aligned with a buff window. In other words, you're not going to use a Bole to mitigate a tankbuster, you're going to use it during buff windows, and if that helps the tank, great! If not? Oh well. Not to mention Ewers will never be used on healers for the same reason you never play Ranged cards on healers currently. Why boost the damage of a gimped DPSer when you could get more value from the actual DPS jobs? And none of them benefit from MP regen except for maybe Summoner or Red Mage and only if they had to rapid-fire res half the party since neither even has a way to spend large amounts of MP beyond their raises. Black Mage's Astral Fire negates MP restoration. You might as well bring back TP regen on Spire without returning TP for all the good the MP regen on Ewer would do.

If you want six cards with unique effects, you need to segregate them. Offensive buff cards cannot share a resource system with utility cards, or the utility cards will never see the light of day unless they're made aggressively busted. Hybridizing them is just another flavor of what we have now, just with the off chance that maybe the card utility will do something.

[Shurrikhan]

By having a design which does not allow for Balancefishing. The reason we fished for Balance was because AST back then was capable of giving people what we now know as Brotherhood, the 5% damage buff, for 15sec, potentially each minute.

That... doesn't actually fully explain Balance fishing -- or rather, even having that did not make constantly Balance fishing optimal.

At the time, even the most oGCD-based job in the game still did nearly 80% of its damage through GCDs and was not misaligned by receiving additional Attack Speed. When it offered new rotational breakpoints, Monks and BLM could actually do slightly more off of Arrow than off of Balance.

Granted, perhaps this comes down partly to semantics.

• If by "balance fishing" you mean only a preference for Balance, while still settling for other cards where it was net optimal to do given the chances for improvement under different conditions (your comp's raid buff timings with which to synergize / time until next raid buff set and density thereof, your comp's use of Arrow, your comp's use of Spear whether you had non-Balance viable single-target recipients to fill with, time until Spread was off CD, number of remaining Redraws, and so forth), then sure.
• But that's rarely been how the term was used then or since, which was nearer to "Get Expand, then throw out anything that's not Balance", even where such was non-optimal (perhaps just because it was easier than actual optimization and it made some people feel better to pretend that was all there ever was or could be).

As I've said previously, the easiest way the devs would have access to, to lower the 'damage variance' of the cards, would be to keep them singletarget and keep Divination as the 'big raidwide partybuff'. Then the cards only need to be balanced as 'Balance contributes this much RDPS, so the other cards should do this much too, but with their own way of applying that damage'. And then once that's done, slap the unique effects on them. Bole gets mit, Ewer gets MP regen, Arrow gets movespeed or something idk. And you wouldn't fish for one over another per se, because you'd still have Seals to play into I'd assume (since the devs seem to love that system).

I feel like this muddles the intent and available utility value of those other cards, though. Especially if still including Seals (which I like for the variance it can add) and Divination, both, it seems unnecessary, given that you could just have a bit more of that total rDPS value end up within Divination and re-tie Divination to one's Seals to ensure that the other cards are mixed in for at least half of one's Play casts.