GCD AST Cards, why not?

[Shurrikhan]

One of my old suggestions was to have draw function as is whilst you have charges, but change it to a GCD when you are out of charges.

Not the easiest thing to balance, but personally I'd take it over what we have right now.

This would leave it to, ~80+% of the time, a total value lower than that of Malefic. Sure, that'd be free damage while still oGCD, but it likely wouldn't be even as (un)impactful as it is now.

Else, you'd have to reduce AST's own DPS in compensation, with its rDPS being that much more dependent on having an ideal party of recipients, so that you open with triple-no-cost-Draws-with-Malefic, GCD Draw, Maleficx5, maybe one more GCD Draw for a 30s-miniburst (though that's basically just MCH unless GNB is worth buffing) or also on sustained-DPS every 6th GCD thereafter, another oGCD on your NIN before the 60s mark, then repeat.

Maybe worth, but those GCDs won't likely see use ever in solo content (which is fine, I guess?) and you'd at least need Cards to provide more personal-AST-power in compensation if you want them not be avoided even in most light party comps, just due to the sheer potency-in-window difference between full bursts, mini-bursts, and lulls for most jobs.

...I don't hate the idea, to be clear; it just would have some obvious balancing constraints that, even if met, might not have the most enjoyable implications.

[Sebazy]

My head cannon was always to pair it with the Stormblood era cards so it really would be a huge RNG fest. You could pull a bunch of boles and ewers or you could end up with a bunch of back to back aoe balances.

The balance issues could be managed a little by using RNG weighting, effectively giving each card a pity of sorts. A streak of good cards would leave your odds looking pretty rough for a bit and on the flip side, a run of awful cards could give you a behind the scenes boost for the good stuff.

IMO to actually be viable though, I think it would need to be paired with a shift back towards Sudo’s school of thought regarding DPS checks where the overall damage requirement isn’t actually that high, it’s little burst mechanics and specific phases or adds where stuff gets ramped up to 11.

Even if overall it’s a bit of a trap in general play, I think it’d be worthwhile trade if only to finally give us a healer that isn’t obligated to spam nukes to actually contribute in mainstream casual content.

[Rongway]

RNG weighting

The biggest problem with even dynamically weighted probabilities is that people will still complain about RNG being broken when they don't get good results in the number of draws that they think they should, when random is just being random. If you keep shifting the probabilities so that the results average out over time you might as well just leave the probabilities fixed because fixed probabilities will give average results over the long term anyway. Then people won't be complaining about the dynamic weighting not working; they'll just be complaining about the things they already always complain about due to not understanding probability.

[Shurrikhan]

My head cannon was always to pair it with the Stormblood era cards so it really would be a huge RNG fest. You could pull a bunch of boles and ewers or you could end up with a bunch of back to back aoe balances.

The balance issues could be managed a little by using RNG weighting, effectively giving each card a pity of sorts. A streak of good cards would leave your odds looking pretty rough for a bit and on the flip side, a run of awful cards could give you a behind the scenes boost for the good stuff.

IMO to actually be viable though, I think it would need to be paired with a shift back towards Sudo’s school of thought regarding DPS checks where the overall damage requirement isn’t actually that high, it’s little burst mechanics and specific phases or adds where stuff gets ramped up to 11.

Even if overall it’s a bit of a trap in general play, I think it’d be worthwhile trade if only to finally give us a healer that isn’t obligated to spam nukes to actually contribute in mainstream casual content.

Why dynamically weight to force Cards you may not want in the moment, when you could just use Seals to entice finding a good place to use them at least once per 90s, and get back AST personal output for your troubles (whereas dynamic weights have no such feature)?

[IceBlueNinja]

GCD Cards? The way people hate gcd heals already(not saying I do or dont have problems with gcd heals) I really do not think this is a good idea sorry. Anyways as I will say in any post related to ast cards, just give back stormblood ast card kit and those who do not the complexity of stormblood ast then just play whm.

[Sebazy]

Why dynamically weight to force Cards you may not want in the moment, when you could just use Seals to entice finding a good place to use them at least once per 90s, and get back AST personal output for your troubles (whereas dynamic weights have no such feature)?

My personal (and perhaps spicy) take is that Seals go against what I think the cards should represent. If I can get some value from dumping cards that don't fit my exact criteria into seals then IMO that defeats the purpose of the system. I'd argue that even Royal Road is kind of a stretch of what's acceptable tbh. The beauty of HW's card play was that I had to build plans on the fly to adapt to what RNGesus handed down to me and it was immensely satisfying when I found uses for sequences that would otherwise be considered bad pulls (Eg Bole on the Warrior during A12S final adds to allow them to stay out of tank stance and save CDs).

Weighting RNG is purely there to stop variance making or breaking runs ala what we've sometimes seen with Crit variance during prog in some tiers.

GCD Cards? The way people hate gcd heals already(not saying I do or dont have problems with gcd heals) I really do not think this is a good idea sorry. Anyways as I will say in any post related to ast cards, just give back stormblood ast card kit and those who do not the complexity of stormblood ast then just play whm.

At the risk of sounding brutally rough here, I don't think you understand what you're saying and the reasoning behind it.

It's not about hating GCD heals, it's about hating wasted GCDs. Cure 1 is a GCD heal, spamming it on a tank needlessly in a dungeon is a waste of time, thus it gets hate. Afflatus Rapture is a GCD heal, spamming it on a tank needlessly in a dungeon ISN'T a waste of time because you get something back for it, thus it doesn't get hate. There's a big difference.

I can't speak for everyone and all the other suggestions out there, but in my eyes at least, the whole point of enabling an AST to spend GCDs on upping their card game (Remember, my suggestion is to keep Draw initially function as an oGCD until you are out of charges) is to provide an alternative to mashing nukes that isn't a literal waste of time most of the time.

[ty_taurus]

At the risk of sounding brutally rough here, I don't think you understand what you're saying and the reasoning behind it.

It's not about hating GCD heals, it's about hating wasted GCDs. Cure 1 is a GCD heal, spamming it on a tank needlessly in a dungeon is a waste of time, thus it gets hate. Afflatus Rapture is a GCD heal, spamming it on a tank needlessly in a dungeon ISN'T a waste of time because you get something back for it, thus it doesn't get hate. There's a big difference.

I can't speak for everyone and all the other suggestions out there, but in my eyes at least, the whole point of enabling an AST to spend GCDs on upping their card game (Remember, my suggestion is to keep Draw initially function as an oGCD until you are out of charges) is to provide an alternative to mashing nukes that isn't a literal waste of time most of the time.

I don't feel like that's the entire picture either. GCD healing is generally disliked not because it's a loss of damage specifically, but because you shouldn't need to lose that damage almost ever in most content anymore. Before, even during Stormblood to some degree, it was understood that you would need shift from attacking to healing at least occasionally. You knew you would probably need a bit of use of your heals, and thus figuring out how to use them in the most effective manner itself made them rewarding to use correctly. It's only when we started getting free healing out the ass that now GCD isn't liked, because you shouldn't need to use them at all.

[Shurrikhan]

My personal (and perhaps spicy) take is that Seals go against what I think the cards should represent. If I can get some value from dumping cards that don't fit my exact criteria into seals then IMO that defeats the purpose of the system. I'd argue that even Royal Road is kind of a stretch of what's acceptable tbh. The beauty of HW's card play was that I had to build plans on the fly to adapt to what RNGesus handed down to me and it was immensely satisfying when I found uses for sequences that would otherwise be considered bad pulls (Eg Bole on the Warrior during A12S final adds to allow them to stay out of tank stance and save CDs).

Weighting RNG is purely there to stop variance making or breaking runs ala what we've sometimes seen with Crit variance during prog in some tiers.

This doesn't particularly make sense to me.

Having an overarching mechanic doesn't remove the reward for individual card usage or even reduce in any way the considerations that go into that. It's similar to how an AoE having some rare situational use in single-target combat, or vice-versa doesn't degrade the actions you'd normally perform, but merely adds use cases and reduces the sense of button/ability-bloat.

With it, you want to find an optimal use case for each among, say, Bole/Balance, Spear/Arrow, and Ewer/Spire at some point within each 90s --if prioritizing your own output and able to get an extra self-buff within the fight by fulfilling it per 90s-- or per 120s.

That doesn't reduce the cognitive load of individual decisions made (what cards can I best find use for in the next 60s). It just makes that decision a bit more complicated while also adding a couple extra layers of decision making that shift your priorities over the course of your gauge fulfilment.

It doesn't prevent the likes of Spread or having multiple charges on Draw or even of Royal Road (though unless balanced, RR is a poor mechanic, and even when balanced it's mostly made redundant by a second charge of Draw or any more interesting Card effects). It precludes nothing except keeping things far more simple (and yes, Old Cards w/o RR would be even simpler than New Cards with Seals).

There's no loss to including Seals or any other overarching mechanic besides just not wanting any extra cognitive load.

[Sebazy]

<snip>

It's probably my pretty dated perspective on AST skewing my view tbh. I played AST a *LOT* in HW and loved it post 3.2. I had a pretty brief fling with it in early SB but couldn't get past how clunky Draw/Play/Undraw felt and never really touched it again until the first tier of EW where I realised there were 'means' to make the card hotkeys work like HW again. I'd probably have gelled better with the job but my old hands struggled with the burst window APM requirements over the course of an evening's worth of prog.

Perhaps I didn't give seals a fair shake but I'm going to play the cantankerous old Seb card and stand by my opinion that they were a lazy cop out of a system that added complexity for the sake of complexity without actually bringing enough to the table to justify their existence. Also get off my lawn

I can defo agree with the difficulties of RR though, you're absolutely right that old cards without RR would be overly simplistic and IMO spending GCDs to single target buff the group for a burst window probably isn't going to feel all that great. The old cards were great not so much because of the cards themselves, but because of how not only Spread and RR worked, but also the interactions with time extensions and other AST buffs such as Shroud and Regens.

That does make me think though, what about the idea of having Seals grant a targetable 'totem' that we can place and AoE cards off? I'd much rather get that than a minuscule buff tbh.

[Shurrikhan]

It's probably my pretty dated perspective on AST skewing my view tbh. I played AST a *LOT* in HW and loved it post 3.2. I had a pretty brief fling with it in early SB but couldn't get past how clunky Draw/Play/Undraw felt.

HW was identical to SB, except in that you didn't have to use your mouse to click off cards that would otherwise waste your loaded RR (and you were no longer punished for holding a card --for up to 30s-- if I recall that part correctly, as I'm pretty sure that's why they split them in the first place).

Well, that and, if you really needed an emergency heal or the DPS in your party were truly, truly awful, you could then just sac a card for a spare oGCD heal or a new oGCD direct attack. And Spread's CD was made less obnoxious. And you got Sleeve Draw.

SB AST was just... better/smoother/more fleshed out HW AST.

I can defo agree with the difficulties of RR though, you're absolutely right that old cards without RR would be overly simplistic and IMO spending GCDs to single target buff the group for a burst window probably isn't going to feel all that great. The old cards were great not so much because of the cards themselves, but because of how not only Spread and RR worked, but also the interactions with time extensions and other AST buffs such as Shroud and Regens.

I never really felt like the "synergies" there were anything more than a reward for pacing that obliged an AoE Balance (or Arrow, at worst) per CelOpp, since anything else was a waste of a mass-duration-extension.

I'd have preferred that Expand doubled the potency and duration, both, of the given card, before splitting it among self and all allies, with CelOpp then extending the Card effects by a portion of their granted duration. Else, it ends up being just one more thing imbalancing the whole setup towards AoE damage buffs, since mitigation tends to complete its use too soon and 10s more to 8 people will be worth so much more than to 1 person.

That does make me think though, what about the idea of having Seals grant a targetable 'totem' that we can place and AoE cards off? I'd much rather get that than a minuscule buff tbh.

I'm not perfectly sure what you mean by this.

But, what from what I can imagine... Wouldn't that just be a CD that we save our cards for to burn as many charges we have on its CD, and --by being damage, which is wasted on none (instead of MP, mitigation, etc., which are wasted on all but 1 or 2 people each)--- further favor just plain damage?

At that point you may as well again just have a Divination accepting 1 to 3 built gauge-thingies from which you get AoE effects based on Cards used earlier.