AST Adjustments 6.2

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Originally Posted by SieyaM

I would like to be hopeful but history doesn't indicate that they will make meaningful or positive changes to the job. Since the card system seems to be giving them so much trouble they may opt to remove it all together and just increase AST attack potencies to compensate, then add in even more oGCD heals because sure why not. I don't know why AST is the one getting major adjustments though. There are complaints sure, but of the healers AST isn't the one that has the most complaints. WHM seems to be the one that needs some kind of major adjustment.

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If they remove cards from AST they may as well remove the job as a whole and rebrand it as Time Mage the healer.

AST's decline in popularity stems from SE's unwillingness to revert their homogenization of AST's cards. It has been very clear at least to me when I started in Shadowbringers AST mains do not give a single wit to how powerful we are. We just want fun (like the rest of the healers admittedly) and our damn cards back.

The PvP team made it work there. It's clear the PvE team can make it work here.

Maybe they are afraid to give AST that much power back from their cards. Maybe they are afraid of AST becoming a guaranteed spot for hardcore content again. They did say they don’t want any jobs like that. Maybe that’s why they gutted it so much.

But you guys are also right. AST is not getting enough love at all and it’s so sad. I miss old ast so much.

I think this highlights the downside to using popularity as your primary metric for balancing decisions. I see Square falling into this trap as often as they avoid it. They're pretty good at sprinkling universal rewards around all content to encourage playing for fun over reward grinding, but they're at the same time real quick to declare things good or bad based on participation. You're never going to bust the WHM supremacy with some ultra clever reworked design, nor I would argue should they try. WHM isn't primarily popular because it's GOOD. And if you dethrone its popularity through design I'd suspect it'd be more a comment on just how sewage-like WHM's design is for that theoretical patch. Square doesn't strike me as understanding that, in a landscape where all the jobs are flowing and fun and flavorful and intuitively designed to roughly equal satisfaction, WHM will be the breakaway hit among the playerbase. And that isn't a bad thing.

Balancing based on popularity only keeps WHM designed like doodoo for some misguided aim at balancing our job popularity instead of just making them all fricken' FUN FFS.

For me, I would like to see:
-Draw and Play be the same button.
-Astrodyne and Divination combined. Divination would still be cost free seal-wise but if you do have seals, they will be used up to grant you the Astrodyne effects. With this Astrodyne will be in your Divinaiton window (as appose to right now, where you'd theoretically get Astrodyne 30 seconds before Divination) and would give you more time to collect different seals.
-Minor Arcana reverted back to its ShB version. This will allow you to use up cards with seals you don't need and is far more useful then a 50/50 damage-or-heal effect.
-Sleeve Draw returned but with a 120 second cooldown to align with Divination. This would help with getting Seals for Astrodyne.
-Lightspeed have its cooldown reduced to 60 seconds, it grant 3 stacks instead of being timed, and for it to have 2 charges. I think this will make it more user-friendly and it would fit into the Divination burst window.

Remove Minor Arcana/Crown Play. I don't mind the idea of AST having a "coin flip" ability, but the flavor and effect of this is terrible for how little it does. The idea that we can draw *fewer* minor arcana cards than major arcana cards has always been incredibly dumb.

I also suspect that based on the PvP card abilities, that over the years they have had more time to think through the possibility space of card abilities. So there is a small chance they might revamp cards.

Ideally, remove seals as well. Or remove Monk's Solar/Lunar Nadi. It mildly bothers me that the devs reuse motifs when they generally don't need to.

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Originally Posted by ASkellington

If they remove cards from AST they may as well remove the job as a whole and rebrand it as Time Mage the healer.

AST's decline in popularity stems from SE's unwillingness to revert their homogenization of AST's cards. It has been very clear at least to me when I started in Shadowbringers AST mains do not give a single wit to how powerful we are. We just want fun (like the rest of the healers admittedly) and our damn cards back.

The PvP team made it work there. It's clear the PvE team can make it work here.

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Legit, after Shadowbringers and 6.0 I settled back nicely into AST. It was so nice to be able to flick cards around for fun and just occupy my time. People sometimes yelled at me for not healing right but like. Only time they ever died was when people yelled at me for not healing right. :v

I took a peek at ast pvp cards and laugh as I see the balance and ewer is old stormblood effects minus spire which is still good that it increase limit gauge. It seem under the quiet SE admits that storm blood cards was the best even if some was nitche so jist give us back for pve already!! lol

I'm guessing it won't be major/minor arcana as theres nothing busy about that.

The only thing busy about AST is weaving the targetting of a party member and playing on them.

We literally do that as often as casting combust. If theres anything to be considered "busy" about AST what else could it possibly mean?

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Originally Posted by DanielNegreanu_Adamantoise

I'm guessing it won't be major/minor arcana as theres nothing busy about that.

The only thing busy about AST is weaving the targetting of a party member and playing on them.

We literally do that as often as casting combust. If theres anything to be considered "busy" about AST what else could it possibly mean?

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the burst windows? theyre like 6 double weaves in a row and they hog up all the uses of lightspeed. i really disliked the trick attack change because before i could give an extra card at the 1 minute mark to someone to make the reopener a bit easier on myself without it being too big of a dps loss, but now im pretty much obligated to save all 3 cards for the 2 min burst. i really dislike draw having charges because of this side-effect.

and lightspeed could use a cd reduction + charges since divination hoards up all the uses anyways

Yeah but the targetting too, if you factor that in, can be very busy.
Personally I have macro keys that auto-target last enemy before casting dot/nuke (not ingame macros), and have 8 play macros that cast on party slots without targetting them.
IF someone were to play ast without any assistance, it can be very very busy when factoring in manual targetting, just looking at actions user has to perform.

That’s what I mean by draw/play being what is truly busy

Nuke
Draw
Look at card
Nuke
Target correct dps
Play
Target last enemy
Nuke