Why I Am Against Heavy RNG in Job Design

[Valence]

RNG only creates mastery when it creates meaningful decisions. If the correct answer is almost always obvious, then what you're testing is reaction, not decision making.

Take Dancer for example. When a proc appears, the vast majority of the time the answer is simply to press the proc. The gameplay changed, but the decision didn't. The game rolled the dice, then told you what button to press.

While we're onto Dancer, the filler is a laughable version of rng. It has zero depth.

But you could equally talk about the priority generated in the burst segment—when do I use my static nukes without overwriting Last Dance or drifting Finishing Move, and where do I dump gauge depending on how randomly it fills up—and how it relates to Tillana use as a second layer of constraints to play around.
It's surprisingly deep and has no clear cut right or wrong answer. There is always an optimal thing you could do, but the trick is it's actually only easy to tell which after the burst, but less so when you're still executing it for the simple reason you can't know what is going to proc and how fast the gauge is going to fill until it happens.

And it can change everything.

What made old AST more interesting wasn't the randomness by itself. It was the tools surrounding the randomness: Royal Road, Spread, card management, and planning around imperfect hands. In other words, the interesting part was the decision-making layer built around the RNG.

You're aware that those imperfect hands actually came from rng right? That was the whole point of those decision making tools, in order to manage and correct bad outcomes, while taking advantage of good outcomes.

If you remove RNG from HW/SB AST, then all of those tools fall flat.
You could argue that with changing encounters they'd still allow for decision making, which is true, but you're still missing a fundamental part which is "dealing with the hand you have at any time".

Honestly, you've been advocating to have an encounter model that is "dealing with the situation presented by the enemy at any time", which I also do want in the game.
So why is "dealing with the hand your job gives you at any time" suddenly a problem?

Why pitting them against each other? They can work fine on their own, and they can also work great in conjunction to each other.

For example, imagine if AST didn't simply draw a random card. Instead, pressing Play could start cycling cards above the target every second, and pressing Play again would lock in the current card.

Now the question is no longer “what card did RNG give me?”

The question becomes:

Do I take this decent card now because the burst window is about to start?

Do I wait another second and risk losing timing?

Do I settle because mechanics are coming?

Do I delay for the specific card I want, knowing there is a cost to waiting?

To me, that is far more interesting than a pure random draw, because the variation still exists, but the outcome is tied to timing, awareness, and player decision making.

So your solution is essentially turning the rng into a tedious scroll until you get the correct card?
Why not just have different buttons corresponding to each card? That sounds a lot more convenient, and you'd still making the same choice.
If the problem is that we'd miss your idea of losing time parsing through the whole deck, then i'm sorry but I see where you're coming from, but that's just extremely off putting to me. Tedium for the sake of it.