New AST cards feel so boring to use now

I thought I would enjoy them after spending more time, but I just don't. They're very unsatisfying and even if they are or are not better or more consistent than the previous cards, they're simply not as fun to use. Giving BLMs Enhanced Arrows or BRDs/MNKs extended Spears was very enjoyable when you weren't just fishing for AoE Balance non-stop, which was never necessary even in Ultimate difficulty. Getting a 2% bonus for achieving three different seals feels incredibly lackluster, and the seal order is annoying because despite lore reasons, the old Royal Road combinations make me think Balance/Bole, Arrow/Spear, and Ewer/Spire. Even how the seals come in from right to left is annoying.

I really miss the old cards. AST was a lot more fun then.

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Originally Posted by Mithron

Getting a 2% bonus for achieving three different seals feels incredibly lackluster, and the seal order is annoying because despite lore reasons, the old Royal Road combinations make me think Balance/Bole, Arrow/Spear, and Ewer/Spire.

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It's an issue for me too. I'm not saying they should have based it on the old royal road effects, because making new systems replicate the idiosyncratic conventions of old systems makes new users learn a whole obsolete paradigm before they can start on the current one. But I do think if nothing else they should have gone the whole way and based the cards more firmly on the elemental lore.

First, match the colors to the shard/crystal colors for the corresponding element. Balance is red-orange, bole yellow, arrow green, spear cyan, ewer blue, and spire pinkish-purple. (Having three blue ones always annoyed me anyway.)

Then have astral (balance/arrow/spire) be ranged and umbral (bole/spear/ewer) be melee.

For the seals, obviously the balance has to produce a solar seal because of Azeyma and the spear a lunar one because of Menphina, but beyond that I'm not sure. Maybe here we might as well use the old royal road effects, since we have no better option, and just have balance/bole be solar, arrow/spear lunar, and ewer/spire celestial.

It would have made more sense to me that way, anyway.

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Originally Posted by Mithron

Even how the seals come in from right to left is annoying.

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That also bothers me. In my case it would have been just as bad to go left-to-right, as I just can't keep left and right straight under any circumstances. Top-to-bottom or bottom-to-top would have been preferable.

Or just make it like samurai, where you either have or don't have a given seal, and can't have multiple copies of one.

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Originally Posted by Wawachume

It's an issue for me too. I'm not saying they should have based it on the old royal road effects, because making new systems replicate the idiosyncratic conventions of old systems makes new users learn a whole obsolete paradigm before they can start on the current one. But I do think if nothing else they should have gone the whole way and based the cards more firmly on the elemental lore.

First, match the colors to the shard/crystal colors for the corresponding element. Balance is red-orange, bole yellow, arrow green, spear cyan, ewer blue, and spire pinkish-purple. (Having three blue ones always annoyed me anyway.)

Then have astral (balance/arrow/spire) be ranged and umbral (bole/spear/ewer) be melee.

For the seals, obviously the balance has to produce a solar seal because of Azeyma and the spear a lunar one because of Menphina, but beyond that I'm not sure. Maybe here we might as well use the old royal road effects, since we have no better option, and just have balance/bole be solar, arrow/spear lunar, and ewer/spire celestial.

It would have made more sense to me that way, anyway.


That also bothers me. In my case it would have been just as bad to go left-to-right, as I just can't keep left and right straight under any circumstances. Top-to-bottom or bottom-to-top would have been preferable.

Or just make it like samurai, where you either have or don't have a given seal, and can't have multiple copies of one.

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Keep in mind that the cards are always connected to constellations and what they represented rather then elements. So changing Bole, which is a Tree, to Yellow does not make sense. Furthermore all of ASTs magic is Astral polarity based unaspected to any individual element. So you would not have Astral and Umbral cards because they draw upon the Astral energies of the heavens.

The one that would be based on conventional elemental lore would be geomancer which draws upon the power of the star they are on rather then the stars in the heavens.

Something something balance fishing.

Something Something RNG removed.

Seems to me like cards feel less impactful because we're using them so much more often. Every 30s, PLUS Divination, instead of RRing a card, spreading a card, and then using one maybe every 60s if not 90s with bad draws.
You're no longer choosing between single targets or expanding cards, you're getting both, consistently.

I think if they removed the effect of Minor Arcana, and instead had Minor Arcana apply a Seal instead, then you have a significant choice to make.
Do you want to give a (more effective) DPS boost to one player, or do you want to save that card to generate a Seal, so you can use an AoE effect after you've got three.

E.g.
Balance: 10/5% Damage up to Melee/Ranged. Minor Arcana's into Lord.
Lord of Crowns: Generates a Solar Seal.
Divination: 6/8/10% AoE damage up.
Add in a third Minor Arcana to make up for three seals.

Although at that point I guess the Minor Arcana are a needles step, and could just automatically burn a card for its seal without any Minor Arcana being involved.
Which, I really wouldn't mind.

Perhaps Minor Arcana could be an effect you gain when you burn a card for its seal.
Lady of Crowns: Increases the potency of your regens by 10% for 30s.
Lord of Crowns: Increases the potency of your shields by 10% for 30s.
And which one you get is random.

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Originally Posted by TankHunter678

Keep in mind that the cards are always connected to constellations and what they represented rather then elements. So changing Bole, which is a Tree, to Yellow does not make sense. Furthermore all of ASTs magic is Astral polarity based unaspected to any individual element. So you would not have Astral and Umbral cards because they draw upon the Astral energies of the heavens.

The one that would be based on conventional elemental lore would be geomancer which draws upon the power of the star they are on rather then the stars in the heavens.

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Oh, no, I know. I actually agree with almost all of that. I guess I'm talking more about cultural interpretations of the magic than about the magic itself.

Basically, I'm not saying the constellations or the magic based on them would have any real connection to the elements. I just think the people who made the card deck might have associated them with the elements after the fact, almost as a mnemonic device.

Maybe I'm thinking too much about, not geomancers, but real-world Chinese cosmology, where anytime there's five of anything, each one tends to get associated with one of the five elements, even if it's stuff like cardinal directions where the association is largely arbitrary. It's not that there's any real connection between north and water; it's just that five is the magic number in Chinese culture---just like six and twelve in Eorzean culture---so every set of five things gets mapped onto every other set of five things because the human brain likes to make associations.

In a sense, the card-element associations would be nonsense both in-universe and out. But they'd be the kind of nonsense a civilization would realistically come up with.

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Originally Posted by Mithron

I really miss the old cards. AST was a lot more fun then.

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it was also too much, to the point that you wouldn't not want to bring one
if they reduced it, you probably wouldn't want to bring one

now they can balance it
.............. but they also failed to do so...... miserably

this is almost making me want to not play the game at all at this point, but they auto-sucked my crysta from my account so now i have 18 days left and i never even played the past 12
it's disgusting

and what happens the first time i turn the game on in those 12 days?
the first expert roulette of the day?

BALANCE
SPEAR
BALANCE
SPEAR
ARROW

~with two ranged DPS

what the actual trash is this

this happened the entire freaking dungeon

it's not just "boring because the old cards were more fun"

this is absolute garbage