My issues with AST rework

I said it before, I was waiting to word any concerns on AST (or the other healers) and wanted to wait until launch and getting all healers to 100 so that SE and other players could not gaslight me about the state of healers, but I’ve been finding it difficult to hold my tongue. Now, after seeing the media tour notes, there are just so many issues with AST that are going unnoticed that, of course, only healer mains are seeing while the voices of DPS and tank mains who don’t play AST, less yet healer, are present louder in the room praising these changes. I cannot go on in good conscience letting arguments I feel are fallacious or made in bad faith represent the position of the class or role I play. I’m glad I waited a little to have some of my questions answered with the media tour, but before I get into the negative, I’d like to point out the major positive in what I see.

Short version:
SE is showing that they're listening by getting rid of card RNG, making cards unique again, getting rid of weaving and targeting issues during burst windows... I see the nods to giving us Nocturnal Sect back with the Neutral Sect follow up and some of the card actions. I do see how they are catering to the complaints... However... The idea of changing it so that 5 of the 8 cards will now deal with healing cooldowns is unneccessary and redundant especially considering the powerful healing and mitigation kits of tanks and DPS which are being buffed for a second expansion in a row. (If I can be honest, I don't care how much more I have to heal as is implied by buffing everyone's mitigations; single target card buffs aren't going to make a break raid healing.) These redundant cards, a mitigation, a shield, a regen, a reception to healing, are all likely to sit in my hotbar unused because my other ST cooldowns are already more useful. This will therefore contribute to healers overcapping their resources which quite frankly is a little upsetting since all the other jobs are getting changes so that they avoid overcapping their own gauges and resources giving them more gauge efficiency and more agency, while keeping healers somewhat infantilized. It didn't appear that any compensation is being made for AST's personal DPS or its MP management either considering the loss of so many ST buffs going out and the loss of Astrodyne. I would have loved to keep Astrodyne or seals as a means to access Royal Road again and give some use to the cards I know will eventually sit on my hotbar, ignored, as we progress and take less damage and they become less necessary than I already perceive them. Lightspeed still isn't enough to be competitive for movement considering SGE and SCH getting Expedient and Icarus in EW and WHM getting its dash in DT. All of that atop the fact that each of those healers already has other means to move efficiently. Now that cards are static 60s cooldowns with 1 damage buff per cycle, this will either lock ranged out of the raid buff window because ranged cards will never line up with Divination, or it will be standard practice to always hold the ranged card so you can get both damage buffs out in the raid buff window -- for some people, this may mean they still hold Lightspeed for raid buffs anyway. And to top it all off--and I know it's silly--I just find it plain boring to name the buttons Play I, II and III.

Long version:

SE listened to feedback. Whether it was feedback you agreed with or not, a lot of changes were made by following takes that were present from healers here on the forums or elsewhere. I would argue that DT changes were the most evidenced in their alignment for things that have been asked for by healers, a stark contrast to previous expansions where it felt as if changes were made because other roles claimed healers could not play their role or would “forgo healing and let the party die” if they had DPS to spend their gauge on. With that said: More DPS buttons were asked for on all healers. They were received. SCHs wanted Chain Stratagem to have more interaction. Received. SCHs wanted a return to additional DOTs. Received. SCHs wanted a more compelling capstone than Expedient. Received. WHMs wanted a movement tool that isn’t overheal. Received. WHMs wanted an AOE shield. Received. SGEs wanted an AOE Kardia. Received. ASTs wanted less card RNG. Received. ASTs wanted a return of Nocturnal Sect functions. Received. ASTs wanted a return of unique card buffs. Received. ASTs asked for a less busy burst window. Received.

So, thank you SE for making a clear and measurable effort to accommodate a million voices in your ear. Even naming that big (and only) positive I can make from the information I have so far, that same positive contributes to many of the negative I have to say with the AST rework:

SE listened to what people wanted, but not how people wanted it or what they really meant. It’s like those memes about weaponized incompetence, where the wife asks the husband to put something in a pot on the stove for dinner and he puts the literal package of that item in a pot on the stove and leaves it there. We all know what she actually was implying was that he needs to start cooking it. AST changes, and healer changes overall, are just that. Healers are finally listened to and it feels pleasant, and I feel seen, but all the while we were heard for what we said and not what we meant, heard for our prose and not our premise. Healers did in fact more damage buttons or utility buttons to break up the 1-1-1-and-sometimes-2 monotony when no healing is needed, but no one with a serious opinion or extended time on the role ever said putting new attacks on a 2-minute cooldown for just a single press, (3 presses if you are as lucky as WHM), was the desired outcome. Likewise, some other AST changes are places where we were heard but the mark was missed. Many ASTs asked for the return of Nocturnal Sect because there is an argument to be made that release of the eventual next healer will undermine this controversial pure-barrier split anyway. A shield card, a damage mitigation card and a Neutral Sect follow-up are not quite what people had in mind for a return to barrier AST but I also don’t think the corner this pure-barrier split has pushed healer design into will not be acknowledged until that day, 3 expansions from now, a new healer ever comes. When people asked for less RNG and unique card buffs, they had no idea that to SE it meant to make 5 of the 8 cards heals and mitigations; they had no idea there would be a predetermined order of a single melee card on the even minute and a single ranged on the odd. How these card changes both meet and miss the mark is the foundation of many of my following gripes:

The curative and defensive cards are redundant and reductive. Disregarding the Lady of Crowns which already existed as a heal, 4 other cards will be changed to an increased healing received, a regen, a shield and a damage reduction respectively. I understand that you are likely to learn these all at level 30, giving us 70 levels of differing gameplay to necessitate the use of these cards differently. However, we must at some point reconcile with the fact that a primary drive for job changes has always been the place where the majority of the playerbase exists; the current expansion we are entering and the 90-100 content it presents us with. The problem with heals, regens, shields and damage reduction cards, (some of these attributes more vulnerable to the following problem than others), is that their necessity scales negatively as players learn mechanics, as they take less avoidable damage, and as we begin to outgear content thereby taking less damage from all sources. This problem is only compounded by the fact that during this 90-100 level interval DPS and tanks are getting their own heals and mitigations buffed for the second expansion in a row. It will therefore be redundant, for example, to add a damage reduction card or a regen card on a WAR whose Vengeance is being upgraded to already incorporate both those effects. This brings into question how useful in actual practice these cards will be. The regen card has a competitive purpose in that it's an oGCD regen versus Aspected Benefic’s GCD cast, however both the shield and damage reduction card, will be outshined by Celestial Intersection and Exaltation without having their own unique or competitive niche. This idea that some of these cards will naturally see less and less usage as we progress through the current content where the majority of the playerbase exists meaningfully, leads me to my next issue:

AST (and the other healers) have still not been given anything to dump their excess gauge. WHM is an exception, but only a slight exception, in that they have the option to overheal to nourish the Blood Lily no longer at any damage loss, (although that overhealing design is problematic in my opinion), and AST itself didn’t have a reason to overcap gauge in EW. But SGE’s Addersgall and SCH’s Faerie Gauge do often overcap, and now DT AST will join those two healers' gauge issues without any useful, zero-waste, non-overheal gauge dump options. And I think that this is the usual, wonton oversite from a “development team that does not main healers” because I find it so suspiciously odd that we are witnessing another era of homogenization where the other roles have had their gauge-filling actions united to let them perform their gauge combos without further filling the gauge, and yet the entire healer role is overlooked for this very same wastefulness of overcapping their gauges. Why really was this overlooked and unaccounted for? What is being done or will ever be done about healers overcapping their gauge or only having excess, unnecessary heals for use to dump them? Why has, for example, SCH been forced to sit on 100% Faerie gauge for 99% of content for 6 years with nothing to show for it? In AST’s case, I do truly foresee so many of its cards going to waste on a seasoned healer but I also see what could have been the perfect card dump for them sitting right there in the same place for years: healer suggestions. I honestly could have seen keeping Astrodyne to mitigate overcapping by giving AST back an access to Royal Road but yet:

We still have no Royal Road or other (nonhealing) time effects back. Not having Royal Road or time effects back aren’t an issue in and of themselves, but they would have definitively added some flavor to AST that have been asked for that this new iteration is especially missing. For those who don’t know, Royal Road was a mechanic that let you use a(n unwanted) card to buff another card to make that second card AOE, more potency or more duration; bigger, stronger or longer. I think Astrodyne could have worked for this. Since I believe cards will naturally go unused based on the inherent play cycle of the game and its mechanics, I argue these unused cards, rather than being doing nothing in your gauge, could instead generate seals when we Draw the next cycle of cards with them still in our hand. These seals would be used when we press Astrodyne, and Astrodyne would use those stored seal combinations to determine what buffs the next card we play will receive. This could even be done in a way to limit the knowledge or memorization the player has to maintain about seals, as was necessary in HW and SB, by making the seals always appear in the same order regardless of which card was eaten by Draw. The first seal could always increase duration, the second strength, and the third make it AOE; longer, stronger, bigger. To be honest, despite its static and predetermined nature, this would be the one saving grace to make the new cards interesting for me while it would also maintain the rework themes of elimination of RNG and return to unique card effects, and it would also give us back a form of something else we asked for: HW/SB card agency. Potentially the best parts of all card iterations. (I thought a similar mechanic could function on Collective Unconscious or Celestial Opposition—CO of which used to extend buffs you placed on the party and both of which some ASTs have asked to be removed.) But instead of any kind of strategy to be made through player choice:

DT AST has been stripped of card agency concerning who to play cards on and is now just a worse DNC. Now, what I mean is that the dominant strategy will now be to give your 1 melee card you can play every even minute to the one highest melee DPS, and likewise the one ranged card to the highest ranged. This makes AST not only a DNC by proxy, but worse, a DNC who can make the mistake of buffing the wrong player because AST can misclick a target to buff whereas DNC cannot, and even further DNC’s single target buff lasts the entire instance whereas ASTs does not. This strips AST of any agency we had in ALL previous iterations of cards. HW/SB AST had the agency to put their differing damage buffs on who did the most damage or who we assumed would benefit from crits, or TP, or MP, or haste the most. ShB/EW AST had only DPS buffs but had multiple stacks of cards on a 30s cooldown so it was able to make decisions about who to throw those buffs on, when to throw them, and how many to throw. DT AST will have no stacks, will be chained to a melee-then-ranged rotation, and will have a 60-second cooldown which we all can agree is the far cry from RNG cards as promised, we can all agree will simplify the burst window, but we must also admit that this limits cards insofar as to question why to ever throw your buff on anyone other than, say, the SAM or BLM. (And would you be perceived to be actively griefing to do so?) And speaking of how a sort of dominant strategy may already be formed from this:

There will be no agency concerning when to play the DPS card as there is already a logical dominant strategy. We already discussed which player is the dominant strategy to give your single buff to, but there is also a foreseeable dominant strategy about when to play cards. At first, admittedly, I thought the strategy would be that ASTs would ask for a 1 min pull timer so that they could get Draw off cooldown and be able to throw two cards in the opener. I had flashbacks of PLDs needing 1-min cooldowns. I was beginning to relive the war. I don’t think this is the case after seeing the media tour anymore. What I foresee happening is that AST will only buff the highest burst melee in the opener and will hold, not throw, all the odd-minute ranged cards to be able to buff 1 ranged and 1 melee during every raid buff window. As mentioned before, EW AST had enough cards to choose to buff some players on the off minute without necessarily losing out on much. EW AST could, for example, buff the BRD who needed to refresh their DOTs. DT AST will still have the choice to help the BRD, yes, but it is at the expense of being able to throw an additional card to someone other than the melee during the party’s burst window. Moving on from how cards force AST to interact with the party, and instead concerning just how these changes affect AST itself:

It does not appear as if AST attack potencies have been buffed to compensate for throwing out less DPS buffs. This one is silly, almost as silly as deleting Energy Drain, and doesn’t feel like it merits an entire paragraph to explain. EW AST has access to ONLY damage buffs and they are on a 30s cooldown with multiple draw stacks, and DT AST has damage buffs on a 60s cooldown with 1 draw stack. AST is mathematically throwing out fewer buffs and it’s not difficult to see. So, are AST's Malefic and/or Combust potencies buffed from 30-100 to make up for the loss of so much of its rDPS? AST needs it. EW AST is already behind the other healers in its personal DPS because of its card utility. With that very excuse no longer as convincing, there’s not much reason to keep its potencies as low as they are. And it’snot just the pre 90 potencies, what about the potencies of all damaging buttons after the 94 trait like Macrocosmos and Lord of Crowns? The idea of how throwing fewer buffs effects the rest of its gameplay is brings me to my next two issues as well:

MP economy has not been adjusted. Again, not much needs to be said here. EW AST had 500 MP every 30s plus then guaranteed MP regen from the lowest tier of Astrodyne. DT has 500 MP every 60s. This is the same issue as not compensating its Malefic potencies for the card changes. Compensation needs to be made for parts of a kit that remain which are affected by removing other pieces of the kit. Fix this, SE.

Lightspeed needs to officially be a movement tool now. Lightspeed was used as a weaving utility to get all cards out during raid buffs in EW. This will no longer be necessary. So, since SCHs can move freely with Ruin II but they also have a second Sprint button and can even add Art of War as a movement positive button in AOE situations… since WHMs have 3 stacks of Lilies, 1 Blood Lily and are annexing SGE’s dash... since SGEs have a dash, Phlegma, Toxikon and Eukrasian Diagnosis to create that Toxikon, and can add Dyskrasia for AOE… why can’t ASTs have Lightspeed as movement tool if many aren’t asking for more? Many ASTs aren’t asking for a dash to further homogenize the role. Many ASTs just want Lightspeed to have a shorter cooldown, or stacks, or both since the other healers have so much to offer with movement with only 20s charge times (Lilies) or free available tools (Ruin II). If potencies must be reduced during Lightspeed “for balance,” then so be it. I don’t want another P7S where my movement tools last for only one-third of a mechanic where the party is forced to run back and fourth for 2 minutes while the other healer laughs in Ikarus completely oblivious to why I want to switch our static positions because they have the shorter distance position in the back-and-forth mechanic—and this happened between TWO raid buff windows I add, where we couldn’t use Lightspeed for cards if we wanted to use it for movement. Player agency is nice. The choice to save a cooldown so I can participate by casting while moving in combat or alternatively to use it for the raid buff window but be forced to do nothing moving or risk it all slidecasting isn't the kind of agency I particularly enjoyed there.

Why are the buttons called Play I, II and III? This one is the silliest gripe because it's entirely about flavor and is otherwise meaningless. Why name the play buttons this way? Why not Offensive Play, Defensive Arcana or Curative Card? Why not Solar Suit, Celestial Hand and Lunar Deck? There are so many card-, celestial-, time- and oracle-related words at play within AST’s theme that I question why stop our creativity here. But also, a better naming convention may leave nothing to the imagination and will always let players know where their healing card is on their hotkeys.

And that's all I have time for today.

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR ARTICULATING WHAT IS WRONG WITH NEW AST.

My only point to add is that I really love RNG on AST. It is extremely in theme with cards and receiving a fate that you wish to change.

"We can accept this fate or defy it, but we can not deny it."

It just feels wrong to remove AST RNG and I feel like it is a core part of their identity along with delayed heals as if you are seeing the future of the fight's mechanics. I feel like CBU3 threw in the towel rather than try and make it work.

I think a lot of people don't understand that Endwalker AST's RNG hardly mattered as 2 seals is pretty much guaranteed and the final damage bonus from all 3 seals was not significant enough of a damage boost to worry over.
That being said, Minor Arcana RNG was truly awful and definitely needing a rework, as receiving a heal or free malefic was more impactful but you could never plan around the free heal either.
I think something closer to the end of Shadowbringers AST would have been a great base to build off of.

I think ultimately I just feel disappointed this was the best system CBU3 could think of as it feels incredibly lazy and uninspired.

I'd love some time manipulation and card interactions ala royal road. The cards and time mechanics were always what I enjoyed most. Interacting and manipulating the cards to best suit the moment. SB AST remains my most beloved job in the game.

My concern outside of that for AST in DT is that SCH looks so busted and SGE already being so strong.. well we might see more groups skipping a pure healer. We shall see! And ofc that healers can still be safely removed from parties in dungeons, that's sad to see. Xeno already did the DT first dungeon with no healer, not surprised but I do not like to see healers being redundant in any content.

The thing about Play 1/2/3 really does just sum it up, though. It feels like so little thought was put towards AST that we don't even get themed names.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zrei

Snip.

I couldn't agree more. I have had to argue with people who didn't play AST all EW as I did and explain that not getting all the seals was negligible. It felt as if you'd get them all 80% of the time if you took the time to redraw during those chaotic weaving windows but also since they only effected yourself, it didn't ultimately matter.

Quote:

Originally Posted by bitofabother

The thing about Play 1/2/3 really does just sum it up, though. It feels like so little thought was put towards AST that we don't even get themed names.

I may need to make this my sig, lol

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aelin_Ashryver

Snip.

SCH's capstone seems absolutely bonkers busted and SGE's is the second most powerful to me because of what else is already in its kit and how it reacts from both attack and healing actions. I worry about WHM more than AST because AST already had other mits and Sun Sign just make AST more powerful but WHM's two mits are the same button and follow ups to each other. It's a bit odd. To be honest, I wonder why anyone would NOT have a SCH in their party in EW. It has the best mitigation in Spreadlo already and Seraphism just makes that so much more out of reach for the competition of WHM, SGE and AST with the bonus that SCH can now Cure III spam atop a regen which stacks with its other regens. Pure/barrier split who?