Ast Cards

[Zaytex]

I haven't played DT AST yet, so this is a very knee-jerk thought, but I think what's missing from the new card system is a self/cohealer card. I think a card from each aspected draw should be serious contenders to be used on yourself or your cohealer. Like The Arrow could grant sprint to a target, and The Ewer could be the healing potency buff.

Spoiler: those cards would be just as useless as any other card which isn't just DAMAGE.

It's almost like we didn't have 2 expansions to learn that non-damage cards are incredibly niche and will always come second in priority. The only difference in DT is that they're all given to you so there's no fishing for a damage card. Instead of you actively fishing for balance at an rng detriment, you just overwrite the support cards to get to it.

Ironically the same problem but in a different flavour lol

[Ramiee]

Nah I heard HW monks loved getting the arrow, if a hw private server pops up and you play ast on it make sure you give every monk the arrow.

[Wayfinder3]

Did the new savage on AST, the first 3 fights were great. The 4th was awful and really shows how frustrating this new system can be for a controller player much like the last one. All the damn burst windows happen during mechanics that require focused positioning and that means a lot of the time, you’re hurting your fingers trying to do the mech, move? Do DPS/heal and tab target to give out cards. It’s extremely tedious. Please, just out the cards on the GCD like mudra and dances. It would give AST players gcds to spend on that contribute towards DPS aside from malefic, it would remove the insane button bloat the job has during burst faces, it would give the job optimized mobility as opposed to the nonsense go 2 charge light speed completely making the job a physical ranged and it would allow the job to play with concepts of the older card systems such a as expanding cards, holding card and cards that do damage.

I know it sounds bad but it works for Ninja, Dancer and Pictomancer. So it could definitely work for Astrologian

[Ramiee]

the cards effects seem fine, really its the lack of randomness that makes it boring.
Really think they should of just have a double draw on a 30 second timer one for dps one for utility and had them randomised, static cards are just incredibly boring.

[Carighan]

the cards effects seem fine, really its the lack of randomness that makes it boring.
Really think they should of just have a double draw on a 30 second timer one for dps one for utility and had them randomised, static cards are just incredibly boring.

Kinda agree? I mean I would like some randomness, but not with how the current draw mechanism is aligned around the 120s burst window. To get something like that, I'd like the following system (that also frees up a hotbar slots!):

- Every 15s, I automatically draw a single card. This restored 5% mana. No manual draw at all.
- The order of the 4 slots is random within each minute, but they will overwrite if I am still holding a card the moment it re-draws. Meaning that if in minute #1 I draw Spear on the fourth draw, I can 15s later in theory get Balance drawn on the first draw of minute #2, so no stacking cards for burst windows at all any more.
- Cards still draw from the Astral set in odd minutes and Umbral set in even minutes. No randomness in cards drawn or on what slot.
- However, the randomness comes from the draw-order, and hence the inability to predict when a slot will be refilled respectively overwritten.

Visually, add a moving effect to the outer ring of our UI element akin to the glean on the White Mage UI. Every time it moves all the way across (15s) a card is drawn. Every 4 draws the color of the glean swaps to indicate whether it will be drawing Umbral or Astral cards.

This would be both reliable (each "slot" has a predetermined effect that'll go into it next) and random (you don't know when said predetermined effect will be available exactly). One big upside of this is also that it frees up a hotbar slot, as no manual draws are needed at all!

[Ramiee]

snip.

Id prefer if the decks didn't exist and it was instead just separated into damage buff and utility. Drawing automatically is fine but even and odd minutes is still too linear, in the end you'll still just be putting all your utility cards on the tank 90% of the time, at least not knowing what utility card you'll get will make it more interesting. if anything at most to appeal to the people who want the linearity I'd have the ability to hold a card for one minute or so in a separate slot and use it later, so if you have a card you want to use for an upcoming mechanic you can.
Most of AST is planning ahead and predicting what's coming up the EW cards were boring in their effects but they were useful in making it engaging because it made you have to adapt your planning around it, with the current utility cards if they were random the same effect would happen but with more variables.