Why is the healer class basically a one spell dps class?

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Originally Posted by Lyth

There will always be a relative shortage of tanks and healers. These are team-focused support roles. People pick these roles so that they can have an impact.

You don't need incentives to get people to play DPS. There's just less hassle, and you can play it like it's a single player game. The problem is that because the majority of the playerbase plays DPS, that's where the majority of the focus and effort goes. You want to have impact? Play DPS. You want to have first dibs on gear upgrades? Play DPS. You want job variety? Play DPS.

You're not really giving up that much control over how the fight pans out, either. Bosses move and position themselves, so tanks don't really tank anything. Outgoing damage completely scripted, so your healers aren't reacting and making critical saves so much as they are following a set of timestamps. Anything interesting in gameplay just comes down to dps, and as we've seen in the past two expansions, there's a widening gulf between 'support' roles and the main stars of the show. Why wouldn't you play DPS? It seems obvious, in retrospect.

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Tangent supporting point: I played a terrible pay to win MMO long ago that followed this pattern exactly. As time moved forward, classes became stronger and less reliant on one another. You could play it like a single player game for the most part. Shockingly, it meant fewer people played tanks or healers. The problem here is that healers could heal through harder stuff and had 6+ massive stat buffs that lasted half an hour that provided a significant boost to performance. Players started to complain that they couldn't get steady access to healer buffs or a healslave. They had to roll alts and level them up just so they could log, buff a friend, then have that friend do the same. The solution? The game added pets with more powerful heal spells than the healer classes and dropped NPCs in major towns that would just put all of the support class buffs on you for a minimal fee. No I'm not kidding. To hell with making healers and tanks relevant or fun to play, just reduce their jobs to NPCs. Trusts are a less-offensive extension of the same thing after all.

DPS are always center stage in the end.

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Originally Posted by Cidel

I have to wonder, are we playing the same game or do I just have (bad) luck? I see this assertion get thrown around here and there, and it seems like hyperbole. Oftentimes in current content, healers are everywhere. It is not uncommon to get invited into parties with 3+ healers out in Bozja, get matched with parties with 4+ healers in DR, and in the active weeks following a new EX trial's release, it can be an actual race to join a PF with a free healer spot... The only place I actively see people avoid healer like the plague is in PvP.

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They're often baseless statements, but they sound good for trying to prove a point.

People will play what is the most effective in given content. Bozja is a strange example, because due to the way healers are balanced, and how lost actions function and interact, they are among your highest DPS options with minimal lost action investment. Aetherweaver + Lost Seraph + Burst is an AoE option that is more powerful than Black Mage's single target, outside Delibrum Essence, Chain Spell, and Lost Font. Some of these actions are far easier to get than the others, and one job still has access to a full suite of a healing toolkit, and the other is still among the least able to support the party in the game.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

There will always be a relative shortage of tanks and healers. These are team-focused support roles. People pick these roles so that they can have an impact.

You don't need incentives to get people to play DPS. There's just less hassle, and you can play it like it's a single player game. The problem is that because the majority of the playerbase plays DPS, that's where the majority of the focus and effort goes. You want to have impact? Play DPS. You want to have first dibs on gear upgrades? Play DPS. You want job variety? Play DPS.

You're not really giving up that much control over how the fight pans out, either. Bosses move and position themselves, so tanks don't really tank anything. Outgoing damage completely scripted, so your healers aren't reacting and making critical saves so much as they are following a set of timestamps. Anything interesting in gameplay just comes down to dps, and as we've seen in the past two expansions, there's a widening gulf between 'support' roles and the main stars of the show. Why wouldn't you play DPS? It seems obvious, in retrospect.

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I play DPS. I enjoy it but I avoid playing as dps because of long queues. Not to mention, dps players have no say in how much the tank should pull, if both the healer and tanks want to do baby pulls they can only leave, while if I am a healer I can pressure the tank into doing his job.

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

I play DPS. I enjoy it but I avoid playing as dps because of long queues. Not to mention, dps players have no say in how much the tank should pull, if both the healer and tanks want to do baby pulls they can only leave, while if I am a healer I can pressure the tank into doing his job.

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First of all the fact that you play healer for faster queue times is clearly an ongoing group problem in this game because of homogenization and accessibility. Second if all it damn right does matter how the dps performs because if they can barely down 3 efficiently then maybe pulling 15 is dumb. I'm going to assume you're already on my blacklist.

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Originally Posted by RinaB

First of all the fact that you play healer for faster queue times is clearly an ongoing group problem in this game because of homogenization and accessibility. Second if all it damn right does matter how the dps performs because if they can barely down 3 efficiently then maybe pulling 15 is dumb. I'm going to assume you're already on my blacklist.

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I never said that it doesn't matter how the dps performs. Of course it does but they really can't tell the healer or the tank to pull more. It could be literally beyond their skills to survive wall to wall pull. Some players are just not good enough. My dps as a healer is stronger than that of the dps in dungeons pulls when playing sch or whm in the majority of cases if the tank lets me DPS and uses their cds because most players don't actually know how to play their roles properly. While I was levelling my ast I got these funny dps players that wanted to do big pulls in dohn mheg when the tank was first-timer. He was not using the blackest night and was scarcely using his other cds. The tank was one thing, the dps of the dps players was just not good enough. It became visible at the last boss, where I used 3 divinations. Needless to say, I didn't suffer their lack of skills and we did small pulls after the second one cuz I let them wipe. I am not ever entering into benefic II spamming phase because you can't play but you want to do big pulls. I do that because I don't want my party members to be left with the wrong impression that they played well because everyone survived. It encourages bad play.

Also, thanks for the preemptive measures, never seeing each other in df is for the best.

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

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No. The fact that there is always fewer players willing to play tank or healer than are needed in an MMO is essentially a tautology. People don't go out of their way to prove the obvious. Any official census numbers that we've gotten to date support the fact that we're not at the desired 1:1:2 ratio, which is what translates into your queue times. And that's going to be true even when you're encouraging players to pick those roles.

People will play what they find most personally rewarding. DPS is the lowest commitment role. Find 3-7 other players, jump in, and play your single player game. It will always be high value in terms of reward vs. effort. Healing and tanking can be extremely rewarding, both from a skill and community perspective, but the dev team has to give value to the odd player who goes looking for that sort of supportive playstyle with their game design.

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

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It's amusing that the greatest variability in tank/healer performance comes out in dungeons. Even this seems to be more standardized than ever, given that they won't even let you pull more than two sets before you hit a wall. I daresay you could contribute just as much if not more on DPS by simply being able to burn things down faster than the average player. If not, you could always run a tank for your roulettes and then main whatever you like for content that matters.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

No. The fact that there is always fewer players willing to play tank or healer than are needed in an MMO is essentially a tautology.

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Then you'd have absolutely no issue just posting a few sources to back up your claim. An updated Lucky Bancho perhaps? Been a while since I had some numbers to crawl through.

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Originally Posted by Gula

I remember playing Aion, a PVP game, and getting shrekt on the field by clerics. Healers can be fun to play, if they're allowed to play the game. Someone compared XIV's combat to an ATB system and with that outlook I think healer could be really fun if allowed to do more than press a button when anyone's HP dips below 70%. Have healing phases such as that part against High Seraph Ultima where the entire alliance's HP is plummeting but also DPS checks where little healing is required and it's all about slapping that HP bar.

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That takes me back- I wish healers some of the love from the devs that cleric had in that game. I played from closed beta until 2020- so 11 years - clerics actually had 2 skills trees, and could even run a hybrid spec. In healing spec, they couldn't kill a fly- this is what AST and the SCH feel like, and solo questing feels pretty miserable, I find WHM is more tolerable. In that spec, cleric have tons of heals to support a team in PVP or the hardest PVE content.

However, in their DPS or even hybrid content, clerics could solo in PVP and easily solo in PVE- depending upon the release, they were one of the few classes (jobs) that could solo bosses. They were decent backup healers and very decent as PVE DPS.

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Originally Posted by Cidel

I have to wonder, are we playing the same game or do I just have (bad) luck? I see this assertion get thrown around here and there, and it seems like hyperbole. Oftentimes in current content, healers are everywhere. It is not uncommon to get invited into parties with 3+ healers out in Bozja, get matched with parties with 4+ healers in DR, and in the active weeks following a new EX trial's release, it can be an actual race to join a PF with a free healer spot... The only place I actively see people avoid healer like the plague is in PvP.

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The healer player base is definitely smaller than it ever has been youncan see this just by looking at the AIN in roulettes. 2.0 3.0 4.0 nearly always tanks. Known as the insta queue jobs. Where healers would often be queuing alongside dps.

5.0 its not uncommon to queue expert or something on your tank and be told your 15th in the queue. Because so many people have dropped healers since 5.0. They've become the insta queue job because noone wants to play them since they got butchered to hell.

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Originally Posted by Duskane

nothing you've said here is correct

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I been playing this game since the beginning. I saw lots and heard lots. So don’t tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m not saying everyone was like this but for the most part it was extremely toxic. I’m not here to convince you or anyone else otherwise. I know what I observed.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

The healer player base is definitely smaller than it ever has been youncan see this just by looking at the AIN in roulettes. 2.0 3.0 4.0 nearly always tanks. Known as the insta queue jobs. Where healers would often be queuing alongside dps.

5.0 its not uncommon to queue expert or something on your tank and be told your 15th in the queue. Because so many people have dropped healers since 5.0. They've become the insta queue job because noone wants to play them since they got butchered to hell.

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On my datacenter at least, it has been TANKs as the AIN consistently. Sometimes healers, very rarely DPS (only for raids). So one can't assume that the playerbase is uniform in their preferences. (I play on JP servers).

I'm probably the perfect candidate for these class changes as I am new to the game, I play tanks & healers as I like to see both sides of the coin.. When healing, the simple dps "rotation" is great as it makes it easy to contribute dmg while still healing everyone. I can see how it would be very boring end-game as you spend less time healing and more time dpsing though, but this is a flaw of the encounter design. They could easily change it to require more constant healing but then I'd imagine many players will then complain they can't dps anymore as healers.

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Originally Posted by Rilifane

Sure. The fact that they butchered every single healer had nothing to do with it. It's not like the forums and balance discord was on fire or something. Or that healers have been non-stop complaing ever since ShB release. And nobody ever admitted to quitting healing because of their terrible design choices for ShB.
Nah.
It was just because there was a new tank and it was only healer mains suddenly interested in tanking.
Man, how come I never realised this?

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when is the balance not on fire.

I do hope they bring some semblance of a rotation to healers in Endwalker. While I do agree that a healer's priority SHOULD be healing, making their rotation just upkeeping a DoT and spamming the same spell over and over again is quite, quite boring.

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Originally Posted by Duskane

when is the balance not on fire.

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Rarely.
Healer channels are very civilised. People ask questions, people get answers. On some rare occasions a feelycrafter pops up and gives bad advice, gets corrected by more knowledgable people and that's that. I don't read other channels too often but they're pretty much the same.
Only time Balance is on fire is when they make changes to pander to people that don't care about something while angering people that do, e.g. ShB healer change overall, initial removal of ED, SD change etc.
So no, Balance is not constantly on fire. When it is, it has a very good reason to be.

The main issue is, as always, The Developers vs The Players.

The developers want healers to be as the traditional Healer role. Maximize healing, minimize damage with JUST enough personal damage (DPS) to do complete the MSQ. The problem with this, as has been stated NUMEROUS times, is that they're not developing the game that justifies what they want to achieve. Mobs don't hit hard enough to warrant the kind of healing they're advocating for so good healers are DPSing 85+ percent of the time weaving in OGCD heals.

The players want healers to be more of a Support role and I think it would be healthy for the game to actually embrace that.

Support means buffing allies when they're healed. Support means debuffing enemies.

If a healer was allowed to spend GCDs on buffing allies instead of personal DPS they wouldn't need to be spending 85% of their time spamming a filler spell.

We shouldn’t complain about only having 1 DPS button, if SE catches wind of our complaints instead of giving us more buttons to use they’ll think they need to take it away instead. I’m scared guys.

So what is the desired state truly? Hypothetically if there is extra dps that can only be attained by "doing healer role well", I will leave that definition to all whom it concerns, that gets snitched from [The basic damage spell of each healer job] right? Because I doubt Unit 3 was healers as a role to do more dps than they are currently doing, taking away "damage market share" from the rest in the full party, dps checks staying zero sum. Overhealing leads to lack of slack, lack of slack leads to no time to dps. That would be like reallocation of dps behind a skill barrier. You could throw dice to predict if that would boost healing popularity or snub it further.

And considering the party sizes that are inherent to FFXIV, healers (just like tanks and DPS) are forever meant to be super interchangeable with each other so truly decisive unique specializations are not going to happen anymore, especially with Sage bringing the count to four.

How embarrassing does it get for these class designers? A month+ old player already sees the flaw yet these veteran designers can't seem to figure it out.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

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There's tends to be a fairly narrow perception of what 'buffs' and 'utility' entail. Buffs are really only interesting when there's some element of prioritization to them. Systematically clicking on players and applying 'damage up' is about as interesting as throwing rocks at the boss.

I think that buffs are most interesting when you're dealing with mutually exclusive ones which cannot directly be compared in terms of effectiveness (i.e. movement speed vs. regen). This works especially well with an aura or totem system, but none of the present healers have anything resembling this. It doesn't have to be particularly complex or involve lots of choices, as long as you're constantly required to re-evaluate what you have up.

The state of healers has been incredibly depressing since Heavensward, if we count hindsight. The overabundance and attention the other two classes get, especially DPS, in favor over healer could be advocated on the mere fact that there has been two major and paid expansions without a healer in sight while the promised "balancing concerns" turned out to be little more than gutting and homogenization of an already tenuous class.

I actually used to be a dedicated AST. As in, aside from DoH/DoL, I would exclusively play Astrologian as it was the only class I found fun, let alone out of the healer pool. After the ripping out of our identity (the cards) and a complete purge of any time magic, I can safely say I'm far more of a tank main, though even then that's during the rare times I'm not just plain crafting. WHM seemed unappealing and SCH felt like a crawl, many an expectation of mine let down because it turns out the fairies mean bugger all when it comes to strategic intrigue.

I honestly hate the notion of a "healer" class anyways. I've always advocated taking more of a "support" stance on it as that is what'll give us more options. With the introduction of Sage, however, it's becoming pretty apparent that healers are once again pigeonholed to healing and token DPSing, despite the fact that the introduction of Viera's made me hopeful that we would eventually see Green Mages that could shake up the healer role. However, it's just plain not going to happen. Despite the healing community regularly being on fire with obvious rejection (If anyone remembers the "Class Rework Satisfaction" poll from Stormblood days) of these decisions from the devs, the latter seem content to shove what they think is right down our throats. It's hard not to feel like there's just constant contempt for us, or at least me, when I identified strongly with the healing niche. Of course this results in further dwindling populations for healers. Who wants to play the class that feels like the devs hate anyone who tries to be more than a healbot.

The trust system, in my opinion really only asserted this further. They'd rather fix the queue times by just replacing players by what's essentially just legal bots instead of fixing the core issue which is the large majority disagreeing with how balancing is being done for healers and even tanks. DPS' simply run the show in their eyes and they get all the focus, yet even DPS mains aren't thrilled considering the poor queue times this results and, let's be real, I don't play an MMO to play with bots. I can't imagine they do either.

More of a rant than a tackling of the actual question, but the point is that: In my opinion, the devs simply don't care about healers. Sage exists because it's been since Heavensward since we've received a healer and even by neglectful standards, that's utterly ridiculous.

God bless those who still enjoy healing. They're better people than I.

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Originally Posted by Duskane

nothing you've said here is correct

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Clearly, SweetPete is quite correct as SE responded to the situation that SweetPete illustrated. SE will absolutely move towards reducing toxicity in order to increase accessibility. SE is hostile towards elitism to the point where they are okay with dismantling fun in the process.

See: healer gameplay changes over time & persistent ban on DPS addons.

Reality agrees with SweetPete.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

AFK Netflixing DPS moonlighters replacing the ones sick of it? Trick of the light. Not happening.

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I enjoyed that ;)

Does utility even work in ffxiv? like speed buffs and cc. I've only started late stormblood so was there ever a use for them?

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Originally Posted by Acece

Does utility even work in ffxiv? like speed buffs and cc. I've only started late stormblood so was there ever a use for them?

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Sure they "work" but with the engine and netcode being the way they are you can probably expect some delay on certain utility. Best example for what I mean would be Rescue where it takes about a second for the ability to actually register after you pressed it.


CC did have a place for a very very short time in early ARR dungeons, then SE nerfed them into the ground because people kept complaining about the difficulty and it simply became "pull everything and aoe it down" and consequently crowd control lost it's purpose.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

Sure they "work" but with the engine and netcode being the way they are you can probably expect some delay on certain utility. Best example for what I mean would be Rescue where it takes about a second for the ability to actually register after you pressed it.


CC did have a place for a very very short time in early ARR dungeons, then SE nerfed them into the ground because people kept complaining about the difficulty and it simply became "pull everything and aoe it down" and consequently crowd control lost it's purpose.

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The sad thing is I feel like Utility and CC added a bit of character to the healers, even if it wasn't always important. And the thing is, we do still have some instances of utility that is useful without 'making things too difficult' such as the Stun on Holy. It's nice and useful against large pulls because you can delay their ability to damage the party. I miss having access to Miasma as a SCH that also inflicted Disease that reduced the healing enemies received. Sure, barely any enemies actually heal themselves, but it was piggybacked onto the DoT, so it wasn't just an empty button that never gets pressed *cough* Fluid Aura *cough*. There was no harm in just having that there and reaping the benefits for the few fights where it did matter, like Garuda EX.

I'd love to see some of that come back. There are a bunch of status effects I think would be nice to piggyback onto other, more consistent tools for the fun factor. Add in Confuse, Toad, Disease, Slow, and Blind. Attach them to tools that already function, and let us think about applying those things to enemies in Bozja or Fates while still getting to find value in those abilities during more regulated content.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

CC did have a place for a very very short time in early ARR dungeons, then SE nerfed them into the ground because people kept complaining about the difficulty and it simply became "pull everything and aoe it down" and consequently crowd control lost it's purpose.

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CC got removed because people were sleep-gating mobs. That in turn evolved into the standard two pack gates we see now.

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

CC got removed because people were sleep-gating mobs. That in turn evolved into the standard two pack gates we see now.

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Partly true but the person you quoted was also right. People were complaining about cc being too difficult in a ton of early content..

coil for example, with having to silence high voltage in turn 1 to having to heavy / bind the golem thing in t7 and sleep /repose something somewhere (its been so long.)

Some of the primal to If I recall. Having to bind or heavy certain moogles to keep them away from the king.

Even LotA where you had to silence ancient quakes, heavy those slime thingies to stop them reaching the boss. And various other stuff that alot of the early content had.

Sleeping trash in dungeons was just a tiny part of the reason.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

Partly true but the person you quoted was also right. People were complaining about cc being too difficult in a ton of early content..

coil for example, with having to silence high voltage in turn 1 to having to heavy / bind the golem thing in t7 and sleep /repose something somewhere (its been so long.)

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T1 ADS was a case of needing at least 2 jobs with silences in party when only 3 jobs had usable silences at that time. Future fights were designed so that such a situation would not happen again.

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Some of the primal to If I recall. Having to bind or heavy certain moogles to keep them away from the king.

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You never needed to do that versus Moogle Mog. The Primal CC problem was that Shield Bash allowed you to pretty much stun lock Ifrit HM forcing them to alter the way status effect resistance worked.

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Even LotA where you had to silence ancient quakes, heavy those slime thingies to stop them reaching the boss. And various other stuff that alot of the early content had.

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Ancient Quake was only silencable during the WoD trash fight with Xande's Clone (pretty much party just healed through it because no one knew that i could be silenced). You are more likely thinking of the Succubus trash mobs in LotA who turn out to have a silencable Fire II cast than no one ever messed with because it was easier to just dodge.

The Spells that could be silenced used to be a mystery and for the most part handled by dodging or healing until they updated the UI to identify interruptible Spells and gave all of the tanks Interject and the ranged dps Head Graze.

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Sleeping trash in dungeons was just a tiny part of the reason.

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Sleeping trash was pretty much counter productive from the start. The most use it had in active content was in Wanderer's Palace where you would delay the fist Tonberry Stalker from spawning by sleeping the NPCs fighting at the start.

So essentially CC was removed because it allowed players to manipulate the scripted battle events allowing them to control the pace of the battle to the point they could "cheese" mechanics. Same with SCH shields. Critlo-deployment could allow a raid to survive certain mechanics, so in order for players to "respect" the content they need their tools to be just strong enough to just jump through the hoops.

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Originally Posted by GrimGale

So essentially CC was removed because it allowed players to manipulate the scripted battle events allowing them to control the pace of the battle to the point they could "cheese" mechanics. Same with SCH shields. Critlo-deployment could allow a raid to survive certain mechanics, so in order for players to "respect" the content they need their tools to be just strong enough to just jump through the hoops.

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pretty sure thats just the fault of the level designers. Even classeic final fantasy games encounters and boss battles arent that scripted.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

Sure they "work" but with the engine and netcode being the way they are you can probably expect some delay on certain utility. Best example for what I mean would be Rescue where it takes about a second for the ability to actually register after you pressed it.


CC did have a place for a very very short time in early ARR dungeons, then SE nerfed them into the ground because people kept complaining about the difficulty and it simply became "pull everything and aoe it down" and consequently crowd control lost it's purpose.

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Did you forget Presence of Mind? Actually, making that as an aoe ability might be something they could look into as an upgrade to it. Also tanks and ranged dps have a slow in arm's length.

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Originally Posted by SweetPete

Because when healers had many dps skills it created a very toxic player base. If you healed more then dps then you’d be kicked. If the group thought you didn’t contribute enough dps they would bash you and kick you. The toxicity was all to real. Then some healers just dps and didn’t heal much. There was so much mess going on.

New players were horrified to play healers because the veterans created this healer dps toxic community.

Since healer dps changes. The community isn’t very toxic anymore. People don’t care to jump down a healers throat for dps anymore.

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This right here was a big problem for while. And then we can add on all the other elitist type things players did that led to utility removal. Enough people were requiring players switch classes to X that there were complaints all the time. So we lost utility and had nerfs to what stayed. I mean for all the complaints of AST card changes most AST just balance fished anyway. So this new system is now all balance cards.

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Originally Posted by Feidam

I mean for all the complaints of AST card changes most AST just balance fished anyway. So this new system is now all balance cards.

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This is true to an extent, but only because the other cards were really just not very good most of the time. Balance and Spear (after it was changed to crit) were just straight-up better than the other choices. Spire was basically a dead draw (Royal Road/Minor Arcana fodder only), Ewer was only very situationally useful (making it also Royal Road/Minor Arcana fodder), Bole was not possible to intelligently play around (because if you need mitigation you need it on-demand, not RNG), and Arrow was actively bad for most classes other than BLM because it resulted in misaligned burst windows. AST players weren't Balance/Spear fishing because of "elitism" (whatever that means), but because it was the only choice that made sense 99% of the time.

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Originally Posted by Rosa_Frandlia

Did you forget Presence of Mind? Actually, making that as an aoe ability might be something they could look into as an upgrade to it. Also tanks and ranged dps have a slow in arm's length.

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I didn't list PoM because I said "certain" utility is clunky. Presence simply buffs your own spellspeed and just like AST cards (when they originally buffed more than your damage) it works completely fine.

The clunky utility is mostly related to player movement or altering enemy behaviour. You can best see this in pvp where some abilities are actually frustrating to use because most of the time they have such a huge delay that they don't actually prevent what they were supposed to prevent.

Trying to rescue a low hp player out of a zerg? They'll probably die before it activates and you just end up pulling their corpse.
Trying to use an instant heal on a critically low hp player? They're probably dead before the heal registers. This is less of an issue in pve because incoming damage is easily predictable there.
Trying to stun or silence a healer while they're casting a big GCD heal? They'll probably get the heal off before your CC registers, even if you pressed it as soon as they started casting, so you just wasted your 2 second stun for nothing and they sit comfortably at full hp now while also being stun immune.

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Originally Posted by Azbroolah

This is true to an extent, but only because the other cards were really just not very good most of the time. Balance and Spear (after it was changed to crit) were just straight-up better than the other choices. Spire was basically a dead draw (Royal Road/Minor Arcana fodder only), Ewer was only very situationally useful (making it also Royal Road/Minor Arcana fodder), Bole was not possible to intelligently play around (because if you need mitigation you need it on-demand, not RNG), and Arrow was actively bad for most classes other than BLM because it resulted in misaligned burst windows. AST players weren't Balance/Spear fishing because of "elitism" (whatever that means), but because it was the only choice that made sense 99% of the time.

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Your right about Balance and Spear being the notable choice form HW to SB. Was I fishing for them? Not particularly. I kind of dealt with w/e ever was thrown at me as a HW, SB astro. It wasn't ideal to wait for redraw cooldowns to play certain cards. I would royal the best fit 99% of the time and that was usually for Ewer/Spire for AOE.

For Plays? Balance was usually the go to. Spear right behind that. And then arrow. Bole was pretty useless and highly situational.

Astro's skill ceiling in HW and SB (especially SB) was so high that most just threw out Balance/AOE so to avoid Draw drift. You had to be fast as an AST or you would lose your place and maybe forget to look at the Party list HP values.

I took a different approach to ASTRO. I would build my royals and plays to the team specifically. SAM or DRG Arrow/Time extend + Time dilation. BLM, SMN, RDM Balance/potency buff + time dilation. MNK, NIN, Spear/Time extend + Time dilation.
The key here was watching the battle also.
DRG used Left eye/right eye. Play on DRG.
SMN popped Bahamut. Play on SMN
NIN used Trick Attack. Play on NIN or other heavy DPS.

Follow up with arcana if RNG is bad after play.

I was surprised how well things would line up and my cards would be ready for the next burst phase after I started playing that way.

The current AST is literally a 50/50 hip fire playstyle now which is due to the previous expansions building up DPS as the main focus, and SHB doubling down on DPS hard.

AST now only cares about Ranged DPS or Melee DPS as it's quite literally all the same now card wise. 1 Draw/Play, 1 Draw,Redraw,Play, Sleeve Draw, Divination. Rinse repeat. No thinking...No strat....just DPS leading up to more AOE dps buff.

I miss Split and Royal Road as it really added a lot to the class, AST is still insanely easy to play, but now I don't have to think on my feet as much. Sad

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Originally Posted by Azbroolah

This is true to an extent, but only because the other cards were really just not very good most of the time. Balance and Spear (after it was changed to crit) were just straight-up better than the other choices. Spire was basically a dead draw (Royal Road/Minor Arcana fodder only), Ewer was only very situationally useful (making it also Royal Road/Minor Arcana fodder), Bole was not possible to intelligently play around (because if you need mitigation you need it on-demand, not RNG), and Arrow was actively bad for most classes other than BLM because it resulted in misaligned burst windows. AST players weren't Balance/Spear fishing because of "elitism" (whatever that means), but because it was the only choice that made sense 99% of the time.

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Was speaking about the idea of specific buffs leading to the exclusive practice of those or else. Not anything specific within the AST community. While the other AST buffs were niche it does not change the fact that balance and to a lesser extent spear fishing contributed to the “X” or go home attitudes that part of the ffxiv community held in terms of stacking utility.

Personally I liked the original AST card system. Was really enjoyable. But it was a bit over powered in comparison to others. I wish they had taken the utility and spread it around but unless everyone had the same potential for utility as their role counterparts it wouldn’t have fixed the issue.

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Originally Posted by Azbroolah

This is true to an extent, but only because the other cards were really just not very good most of the time. Balance and Spear (after it was changed to crit) were just straight-up better than the other choices. Spire was basically a dead draw (Royal Road/Minor Arcana fodder only), Ewer was only very situationally useful (making it also Royal Road/Minor Arcana fodder), Bole was not possible to intelligently play around (because if you need mitigation you need it on-demand, not RNG), and Arrow was actively bad for most classes other than BLM because it resulted in misaligned burst windows. AST players weren't Balance/Spear fishing because of "elitism" (whatever that means), but because it was the only choice that made sense 99% of the time.

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Ewer wasn't a bad card. It just didn't work on the jobs that could have used it..

Had no affect on blackmages in astral stance for example. Or even darks if I recall. That's a card that could potentially have had a nice impact on a blm letting them squeeze out an extra fire 4 and getting some extra oomph with that extra mp. Something similar with drks. I cant remember what exactly all I remember is being told my ewers didn't work on dark knights when I tried.

Bole had the same problem all defensive stuff has in that defence is a joke everything is deliberately
so incredibly forgiving that it makes defence useless.

Spire could have been decent but again resource management was almost a non issue at that point with all the changes they'd made you literally never ran out of tp outside of aoe..

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Originally Posted by Dzian

Ewer wasn't a bad card. It just didn't work on the jobs that could have used it..

Had no affect on blackmages in astral stance for example. Or even darks if I recall. That's a card that could potentially have had a nice impact on a blm letting them squeeze out an extra fire 4 and getting some extra oomph with that extra mp. Something similar with drks. I cant remember what exactly all I remember is being told my ewers didn't work on dark knights when I tried.

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Yeah, didn't work on Dark Knight. The tooltip for Darkside was:

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Increases damage dealt by 20%. MP regeneration stops during battle and Refresh statuses granted by others have no effect.

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Ewer did nothing for them, sadly.

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Originally Posted by Feidam

Personally I liked the original AST card system. Was really enjoyable. But it was a bit over powered in comparison to others. I wish they had taken the utility and spread it around but unless everyone had the same potential for utility as their role counterparts it wouldn’t have fixed the issue.

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I liked it too. It definitely felt nice being able to put out a spread Balance at the right times, and it was fun to try to put one together. I really liked Time Dilation and Celestial Opposition as well. But, I think it's easy to see why they changed it. The design philosophy in this game doesn't really lend itself to utility options besides Damage Up or Vulnerability Down buffs, which is sad. I still like playing AST (though mostly because SCH and WHM just feel kind of bad...) but it's definitely not as interesting as it used to be. Can only hope they have some nice changes up their sleeves for healers in Endwalker.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

Ewer wasn't a bad card. It just didn't work on the jobs that could have used it..

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I mean, in the end that's kind of why it was bad, right? It was designed with some pretty big limitations in mind that made it really situational.

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Originally Posted by Beddict

Yeah, didn't work on Dark Knight. The tooltip for Darkside was:



Ewer did nothing for them, sadly.

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Yeah it would have been a great card if it did. But alas..