Please Return Randomness to Astrologian's Card System

[Carighan]

Why they changed the Astro card system to not work with Divination is beyond me.

Because there was no upside. For balancing they had to assume Divination was at full strength, but that just meant you could "lose out" and not get a full power one. But you never "won", that was just the expected outcome. With the occassional random "you lose".

You're right of course in that it'd work better if the actual healing was done via the cards, which makes me think they could just remove 4 of our CD-based abilities, re-tune the raw power and secondary effects, and replace the #2 and #3 cards with those. Sure they'd all be effectively-120s-CDs, but if retuned well we'd actually get reduced hotbar bloat, and very strong extra CDs, plus the 4 filler cards are removed.

[Azurarok]

Because there was no upside. For balancing they had to assume Divination was at full strength, but that just meant you could "lose out" and not get a full power one. But you never "won", that was just the expected outcome. With the occassional random "you lose".

Probably mentioned this before but I think the rng is what should be allowing Astro to be as strong. Its buffs not being entirely reliable introduced more variance in its damage contribution, and ideally it should've given it higher highs and lower lows than WHM unmitigated, while Sleeve Draw and the 3 Redraws allowed users to have some skill expression in being able to avoid that low. If we're not getting the rng back I think its buffs should be nerfed to put it more in line with the others.

[Carighan]

Probably mentioned this before but I think the rng is what should be allowing Astro to be as strong.

That's not how it works in MMORPGs though, never. Other jobs players complain that you can outdo them if luck favors you. So you get balanced so that at "equivalent luck" you are equal. Hence any time your job mechanic based on RNG doesn't pan out 100%, you are inferior. And hence these RNG mechanics always get removed as a game ages. It's hardly something new, it's like pet classes getting removed or their pets de-emphasized, that's also a constant of MMORPG aging.

[Azurarok]

Guess we really do deserve job homogenization then

[Valence]

The reason old AST felt very random was an imbalance between all damage buffing cards more than anything. When they finally got to reduce it near the end of SB with Spear being buffed up and Balance toned down a little the job suddenly became a bit less frustrating with different card options. Otherwise what generally helps reducing rng frustrations is reaching a good balance of control tools for the player to play around said rng, which has been found in many tools like MCH ammo, RDM acceleration, AST royal road, BLM sharpcast, etc. Rng inherently introduces skilled play with priorities and how to adjust to rng results at all times, but agency tools also add up skilled expression on top of it, which is a win win scenario as far as I'm concerned.

Obviously, when there is too many control tools, like BLM past HW with a craptload of sharpcast and even paradox vs very little rng generation (thunder of F1), or too little control tools like HW MCH where you could end up spamming split shot during mildfires, it's no bueno. AST had a solid control tool baked in with royal road which already accepted back then that if everything went well, you'd prefer damage cards, and recycling support ones was designed to seriously buff your damage cards. All in all if your goal was damage, then you had all the tools to ensure you could exploit this, and as I said previously, the only thing that worked against this was the imbalance between the Balance and the rest of the cards. If anything old AST rewarded skill expression very strongly, and SE didn't like it. It wasn't that much about swing rng (even though there was due to card imbalances).

[Carighan]

It's really not about skill expression and mitigating RNG, tbh. That's the kind of RNG that'll always get removed, because it's just busywork: There is no upside. You want to get outcome X. If you have tools A, B and C to in the case of a bad RNG produce outcome X, you have no sensible path except than using them to produce X. In fact not doing so is strictly inferior at 0 upsides.

As such, there is no "skill expression". There's just a rote formaic learned monkey-sees-light-push-button-for-food response. The reason these RNG-elements get removed.

If you wanted actual RNG and skill to express from it, you'd in fact not want tools A, B and C. So that whether you got X or Y or Z, you had to deal with that. If those are then wildly different, you can start to get into territory of actual skill expression, yes. Because now you, as the player, have to adapt to this different context, instead of just mechanically pressing a fixed set of buttons. As counterintuitive as it sounds, tools like Redraw or Road reduce skill expression, what they do increase in APM and key spam, OTOH, in a mildly randomized manner because sometimes you don't have to press them.

And yes of course a truly randomized set of cards would need more balance. Among other things I'd bee 99,9% sure it'd have to come without any damage-affecting cards at all, not even self-only. But the effects could swing wildly, from a 4s -50% damage taken buff card over a strong group heal one to a 30s small-area medium heal healing field. You get one card drawn, so you don't even know whether it'll be single or group or AoE or anything. As in, they're by and large not comparable, and hence actually modify what you have to do. Of course to make this work they'd first have to actually deal meaningful amounts of damage to the group, yeah.

[Valence]

There was skill expression in royal road, much like there is skill expression in every opportunity cost job mechanic that has been or still is a thing in this game. People complain about those because they can't be arsed to deal with damage gap closers, ED, or any proc control tool, but it doesn't change the fact that they do imply decisions, which means player agency on whether they want to use something in a way or not to achieve a goal, play greedy or not, etc and that's exactly what burning support for enhanced/extended balance fodder was. Now we can certainly discuss whether the support requirements were enough or not to counterweight this (I do believe that they have been alleviated way too much in SB comparatively to HW), but the concept remains provided the control tools don't overshadow the rng and allow coverage of everything, or to the opposite do way too little for the player, leading to frustration.

[Carighan]

Like I said, to have meaningful RNG you cannot have your RNG produce a 0%-100% result where 100% is the result you always want. Which was the case for every RNG-y iteration of AST so far, there was always a "best case scenario". Of course, this could have been alleviated (like I said there, various ways, one good start would have been not having any even indirectly damage-enhancing cards to begin with, taking one big element out of the equation entirely). But it's also just not a healthy baseline to start from.

A better RNG system sits at 100%, but with a few random types of 100%, let's call them A, B and C. Given each specific momentary situation (the 'momentary' is important) each of these options can vary a bit below 100%, but never far, and importantly sitting on them given an innate CD might also mean that a moment later it turns out to be the correct option. You can even do this on a mechanical level though it's not a good fit for AST: Each random draw saves you X seconds of cast time, but it's random which spells this specificially turns instant and for how many casts. Total gain is identical on a well-designed damage caster, but the gameplay and opportunity for movement changes and hence feels random in a meaningful way, you do have to be on your feet and react to what you get.
This would mean in the case of Astro that say, you randomly get one of three heals: One is a HoT for the whole group, one is a strong single target heal, one is a self-heal that heals automatically when you drop low. All three do entirely different things but given the expanse of our kit you never feel at a loss when you don't get a specific one. OTOH if balanced so they're the strongest choice in each scenario they could be used, getting "the right one" feels cool, but without any loss when you don't. Mind you that naturally the ability to create such setups are very limited, there's a reason MMOs by and large remove RNG classes as they age.

Furthermore, they could do RNG-y designs, but then they ought to base the underlying gameplay mechanic on randomness, not just a mechanic that is used in a static manner but with RNG-y results. Like say whether you get to draw or not is random because each X healing done you unlock another draw. That'd be the kind of randomized nature where having unreliable elements start affecting actual gameplay, instead of just "Aw drat, now I need to spend another 3 oGCDs fixing this, wish I had just gotten the correct pull instead".

(edit)
I should add, of course just some menial randomness can still be fun, as far as button presses goes. But I would personally hope that if they make the effort to re-implement random parts of the AST card draw system, then they go for something that's more designed to function long-term as a gameplay improvement instead of just adding extra carpal tunnel syndrome. Which isn't easy at all, like I said. There's a solid reason why ~every MMORPG removes ~all RNG-stuff from classes as they age.

[Zaytex]

Guess we really do deserve job homogenization then

Yes, we do.

This community deserves the current state of simplified and homogenised job design, because they spent years bitching and moaning about ''balance'' and how a job's uniqueness might mean it's not meta, or that its difficult or unenjoyable to play - despite FF14's unique strength of being able to swap between every job with the press of a button, something WoW doesn't have.

AST's current dog shit design is an example of what the community wanted. Stormblood was the meta of fishing for balance, so the developers changed every card to be just balance, but then people complained that was too ''boring'' (it really wasn't if you even tried to optimise) and so they got their ''diverse'' cards back, but in the worst way possible.

Ironically enough, I've never seen as many AST's as I do now than there were in ShB/EW - so by the developers own standards, the rework is a complete success and I doubt they'll ever reintroduce RNG because people like to ask for dificulty/nuance/uniqueness for jobs but the data has always shown they never want it.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

People can whine for the game to be made into an auto clicker simulator instead of requiring brainpower, and I'll still mainly blame the devs for pulling that trigger and their incompetence.