AST fix ever?

Well, title telling all.
AST card system will be ever fixed?

Difficult to say. I don't have a crystal ball, I'm afraid.

My own conclusion that I have arrived at is that this mechanic does not work in this style of mmo, and now they are stuck because they can't just delete it, or AST. I know very little of pre ShB MCH, but that particular job's rework has been well received. AST might be more difficult due to the lore surrounding, and identity tied to those damn cards. I don't think the devs have the same luxury as they did with MCH when it comes to a complete overhaul.

Basically, the job needs Yoshi-P to pull out another rabbit. If it does ever get fixed, it will be entirely different that what we've currently known it to be. That is for certain.

No, probably not. They wanted to simplify the cards to make them easier for people to use quickly without much thought so that the lowest common denominator of player would perform closer to the upper crust. The current system has ultimately succeeded in doing that, compared to the older system, regardless of our views on it as players. Even with all the hub-ub about it, I see them letting it stew for the rest of this expansion and the next, and they might even go as far as just eliminating the crest idea so you don't have to care about redraws all that much.

I know I would love for the old system or something like it to come back, but with the changes they've made to the game, they'd have to delete Spire or change its effect. Hehe, an easy change if they did go back to how things were would be to make Spire enact a buff that makes gauge depleting abilities/weaponskills cost half of what they normally would.

The old Astro was perfect. Why even needed to bother something that perfect?... Story matched to it, royal road was easy and understandable in every way and it was the best thing in the whole game. Combining the cards into greater effects was the real control over fate as a "fortuneteller" style of story matched to it perfectly. Every card had its uses even if just a filler pulling a greater crit or aoe crit buff or simply just helping out the other heal with mp regen or help survive a whole aoe mechanic of bosses through aoe Bole (dmg reduction buff was back in that time) for whole group. Its ways of use was endless. Yes, needed to feel the character to use it cause you needed creativity for it. Even if you pulled a card that had no use in the moment, you could keep it for later use or royal road it for more effects. It was so perfect.

Now cards and the whole card system is simply meaningless. Cards have no effects, have no uses. Gives dmg... oh my... ah wait! All gives only dmg and nothing useful. No need to rework astrogian. Need simply restore it, nothing more. Only one change would afect the old astro. The overall remake that every class now use only MP, even the Disciple of War classes. But that is easily solvable by makeing The Spire card gives MP instead of TP like in stormblood. And like this, you still only have 2 card what do the same effect, not 6...
And astro become useful again. Thousands of player gived up healing cause of the broke of asto.

Btw, i never understanded why need to try to upgrade what is perfect already...

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Originally Posted by Vyrerus

No, probably not. They wanted to simplify the cards to make them easier for people to use quickly without much thought so that the lowest common denominator of player would perform closer to the upper crust. The current system has ultimately succeeded in doing that, compared to the older system, regardless of our views on it as players. Even with all the hub-ub about it, I see them letting it stew for the rest of this expansion and the next, and they might even go as far as just eliminating the crest idea so you don't have to care about redraws all that much.

I know I would love for the old system or something like it to come back, but with the changes they've made to the game, they'd have to delete Spire or change its effect. Hehe, an easy change if they did go back to how things were would be to make Spire enact a buff that makes gauge depleting abilities/weaponskills cost half of what they normally would.

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I dont know, astro is becomed far more complicated than the old one was... Cards are useless and if you have only one type of dps in your group, you cant do anything. 3 reroll simply not enough to roll a card for only ranged dps or only melee dps with the right seal. Maybe in raids have some uses but even that is just dmg so nothing useful. Many astro (when i rarely met one) not even use the cards cause simply no meaning for them and very much more trouble to pick the right one. Meanwhile the tank or the whole team dies. Me just roll the 3 card skill on the tank and like that i can heal too, the buff the cards gives entirely meaningless so no matter if you put all 3 on the tank. And you get an instant aoe dmg boost what is still not realy worthy but well, more than nothing. But still just dmg boost, so not realy have matter if you use it or not.

So basicaly astro becomed a pure heal class, or as many calls nowadays WHM2, but not realy cause whm still have far more heal capacity.
Shorten it up, they made astro far more overcomplicated that it ever was meanwhile they nerf it to ground and i simply dont see any logic in this.
(btw i was main astro before shb, now i still use it but its a heavy struggle compared to the other 2 heals)

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Originally Posted by Nhala_Levee

The old Astro was perfect. Why even needed to bother something that perfect?... Story matched to it, royal road was easy and understandable in every way and it was the best thing in the whole game. Combining the cards into greater effects was the real control over fate as a "fortuneteller" style of story matched to it perfectly. Every card had its uses even if just a filler pulling a greater crit or aoe crit buff or simply just helping out the other heal with mp regen or help survive a whole aoe mechanic of bosses through aoe Bole (dmg reduction buff was back in that time) for whole group. Its ways of use was endless. Yes, needed to feel the character to use it cause you needed creativity for it. Even if you pulled a card that had no use in the moment, you could keep it for later use or royal road it for more effects. It was so perfect.

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It was not perfect. It was broken AF. It was a convoluted mess of RNG, and methods to shave away the layers of it. If that does not convince you, then you need to look no further than the Spire. A card that already had been changed once, only to be turned into a fodder card because there was literally no other use for it. Like the TP it used to refresh, it went away entirely. Similar mentions could be made for all the other cards except for the Balance. That was the only card your party members ever desired. Your enjoyment from the mechanic exists through the illusion of choice. Players accepted your Boles, Ewers, Arrows, and Spears because they knew that sometimes, after all the damn fishing, you still somehow did not end up with the Balance.

The system as it is now is closer to perfection than the previous by far. It just isn't fun. But for the purpose the mechanic serves and always has due to the meta, it works just fine. I know as a DPS, I love having the consistent buffs an AST provides, but as an AST I simply cannot stand being a dmg buff turret.

I don't want you think that I am dismissing your enjoyment with the old mechanic. I understand fully that many AST really enjoyed this system, but you can still play board games with missing pieces. To think it was perfect and did not warrant changes is erroneous thinking. Hopefully if/when they rework it, they can find a way to incorporate some of the things that really made it enjoyable; but if the only way you feel this can happen is by reverting back to the old system, then you are going to be disappointed going forward.

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Originally Posted by Gemina

My own conclusion that I have arrived at is that this mechanic does not work in this style of mmo

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As much as I absolutely loved the old system with all of my heart, I think this is the real issue. Wish it weren't the case but it's a problem bigger than just AST itself.

I have to say though while the new system is nowhere close as cool and full of depth and decision making as the old one was, it's less "bad" than I expeted it to be.
You still have to choose between different cards for different roles (ranged/melee), you can "play" with gathering 3 different symbols for the full party power up, and then you have a Powered up version of each card that doesn't give you the just mentioned symbols.
I mean of course I liked the old system better, but I was honestly expecting much worse when they announced a homogeneization.
Maybe it's because of my extremely low expectations that in the end I'm not too pissed off about this new, inferior system.

AST cards were not perfect.

Their goal this expac was to better balance the three healer kits. The problem here is that AST had a pretty decent mitigation tool within it's RNG card buff system.
They couldn't balance for the possibility of having the Bole available.

Additionally, large scale Crit and Speed buffs are hard to balance, not least because of how Crit scales making it progressively more powerful the further into the current expansion we are. This is why BRD lost it's crit procs, and partly why Wildfire was changed so as not to double up on crits.

Overall the buffs were scaled back to reduce the amount of burst rdps AST kicks out, and make it a bit more consistent.

NINs Trick Attack got a similar treatment.

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Originally Posted by Seraphor

AST cards were not perfect.

Their goal this expac was to better balance the three healer kits. The problem here is that AST had a pretty decent mitigation tool within it's RNG card buff system.
They couldn't balance for the possibility of having the Bole available.

Additionally, large scale Crit and Speed buffs are hard to balance, not least because of how Crit scales making it progressively more powerful the further into the current expansion we are. This is why BRD lost it's crit procs, and partly why Wildfire was changed so as not to double up on crits.

Overall the buffs were scaled back to reduce the amount of burst rdps AST kicks out, and make it a bit more consistent.

NINs Trick Attack got a similar treatment.

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the bole was fine. on aoe it was the same as sacred soil which scholar can put out every 30 seconds or fey covenant too, and on single target its basically pld's intervention.

besides bole really only shone in prog and almost everyone progged with white mage, to the point whm was called the prog healer.

the old systems weakness was its unreliability and the huge disparity between buffs, mostly that balance was overtuned. there was also the issue that if you wanted to use the utility cards, you had to sacrifice your royal road you might've been saving for balance/spear.

but instead of finding ways to increase consistency, to make other cards more usable and the balance not straight up broken, they just made everything the most boring iteration possible next to PvP cards.

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Originally Posted by QooEr

the bole was fine. on aoe it was the same as sacred soil which scholar can put out every 30 seconds or fey covenant too, and on single target its basically pld's intervention.

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Precisely the point.
SCHs Sacred Soil is a regular cooldown. Bole was RNG. You can't balance around having it, you can't balance around not having it.
Imagine if Sacred Soil just occasionally didn't work.

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Originally Posted by Seraphor

Precisely the point.
SCHs Sacred Soil is a regular cooldown. Bole was RNG. You can't balance around having it, you can't balance around not having it.
Imagine if Sacred Soil just occasionally didn't work.

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Wasn't there a time period where it didn't actually give the buff until a second or so after it was activated?

As far as card effect variety goes, what we have now is also a result of player feedback. Devs have consistently been told that a player does not like having to choose between a damage buff and a utility buff.

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Originally Posted by Monsalvato

As much as I absolutely loved the old system with all of my heart, I think this is the real issue. Wish it weren't the case but it's a problem bigger than just AST itself.

I have to say though while the new system is nowhere close as cool and full of depth and decision making as the old one was, it's less "bad" than I expeted it to be.
You still have to choose between different cards for different roles (ranged/melee), you can "play" with gathering 3 different symbols for the full party power up, and then you have a Powered up version of each card that doesn't give you the just mentioned symbols.
I mean of course I liked the old system better, but I was honestly expecting much worse when they announced a homogeneization.
Maybe it's because of my extremely low expectations that in the end I'm not too pissed off about this new, inferior system.

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I agree. My gripes with the current card system is not that it's bad; it just isn't fun. Yet, it's the closest to what I consider a true functioning job gauge. Especially in comparison to the other two healers. The jobs I enjoy playing the most right now have interactive gauges that feel rewarding to build up and use. Consideration has to be taken with these job gauges as making the wrong decision with how to use the resource will result in a loss to DPS.

Therein lies the difference. It is why I call ASTs the guys who load the catapults, while the guys who pull the levers get to have all the fun causing the damage. They build up this resource throughout the fight. This resource has one sole use: Divination. There is no decision making process with it. Sure it boosts your damage too, so have fun with that Malefic spam throughout its duration. Could use Lightspeed to ensure you get in all the GCDs inside of its window, but 'bloody 'ell'; you used it during your opener.

What I am getting at is there is no reason why a healer's job gauge cannot enable them to do more damage just like EVERY OTHER ROLE AND JOB IN THE GAME. Misery has been given to WHM, and despite having an entirely passive job gauge that they don't have to do anything to build up other than stay alive; it feels one hundred times more rewarding. If AST card mechanic let them launch some cool skill that does damage, I guarantee this wretched mechanic would immediately feel so much better.

While normally I am on the side of healers being more focused on healing and the devs need to find more ways to engage them as such; I am also aware that it is a bad, very bad idea concept to try and reward healers with more heals when they do good. You reward players in general (regardless of their role) with flashy cool skills that hit hard. This shouldn't be a difficult concept for the devs to grasp; this is quite literally how video game players have been rewarded as long as game's have been around.

If there is going to be a change it will be 6.0 and only 6.0 that'll do it. There has been plenty of feedback over the current card system, some good some bad, 6.0 will determine whether the system will remain in place and no one other than the devs can say with certainty whether this system is here to stay or a 1 and done expansion, like bow mage was.

Yeah, devs already mentioned there is no plan for any major card changes, theyre fairly content with how they are now, next patch changes are primarily mp changes. As for the boring-ness, pretty much all job got reduced to a dull, barebone standard, but this at least gives them a balanced platform to expand on the jobs so well shall see next expac.

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Originally Posted by Gemina

It was not perfect. It was broken AF. It was a convoluted mess of RNG, and methods to shave away the layers of it.

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It was only broken for those, who didnt had creativity to use the other side of the cards. 1 single card had 3 diferent effect to use it. If you couldnt think out of anything from them, it is only your fault and not the games fault.
I always could used every of the old cards. Every one of them had they own uses and they combinations. TP was useless, maybe yes. But you forgot that The Spire card had 2 other side to use. If you cant come up anything with 3 diferent effect, than this game is not for you, sorry.

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Originally Posted by Nhala_Levee

It was only broken for those, who didnt had creativity to use the other side of the cards. 1 single card had 3 diferent effect to use it. If you couldnt think out of anything from them, it is only your fault and not the games fault.
I always could used every of the old cards. Every one of them had they own uses and they combinations. TP was useless, maybe yes. But you forgot that The Spire card had 2 other side to use. If you cant come up anything with 3 diferent effect, than this game is not for you, sorry.

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Your spire example is exactly what people here are talking about, the fact is the card was so bad it's only use was to buff the one good card, or the two acceptable but not as good cards, or toss it away for a minor arcana

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Originally Posted by Nhala_Levee

It was only broken for those, who didnt had creativity to use the other side of the cards. 1 single card had 3 diferent effect to use it. If you couldnt think out of anything from them, it is only your fault and not the games fault.
I always could used every of the old cards. Every one of them had they own uses and they combinations. TP was useless, maybe yes. But you forgot that The Spire card had 2 other side to use. If you cant come up anything with 3 diferent effect, than this game is not for you, sorry.

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Lack of creativity is what has caused issues for AST in the first place. Instead of creating a true third healer, they decided to make AST a job that could fill in for whatever the group needed. Since this was done poorly, AST were left in the dust for prog raid content. In order to get more players to use AST, they once again showed a lack of creativity and just overtuned it to the stratosphere.

No, no. If you want use creativity as your angle, then I would trace it all the way back to the roots. Players have always shown an exceptional amount of creativity in mmos, and because most follow the path of least resistance; if there is an exploit to be found, they will find it. Yet, AST card mechanic remained, and basically remains the same: Draw the right three cards in order to boost everyone's damage. Any, and I do mean any utility from the cards other than DMG boosts was not desired by your party members. If your fishing resulted in something other than the Balance, then you use it if the situation warrants it, and if not then you just used minor arcana instead. Another broken ability back then because you did not always need the heal.

I am also not sure what you're talking about with each card having three different effects. Each card had one effect that could be augmented three different ways, but those augments were the same for every card: 50%potency+AoE, 200% duration, or 150% potency iirc. From those, you would always aim to get the AoE, despite how nice the other ones were.

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Originally Posted by Gemina

Lack of creativity is what has caused issues for AST in the first place. Instead of creating a true third healer, they decided to make AST a job that could fill in for whatever the group needed. Since this was done poorly, AST were left in the dust for prog raid content. In order to get more players to use AST, they once again showed a lack of creativity and just overtuned it to the stratosphere.

No, no. If you want use creativity as your angle, then I would trace it all the way back to the roots. Players have always shown an exceptional amount of creativity in mmos, and because most follow the path of least resistance; if there is an exploit to be found, they will find it. Yet, AST card mechanic remained, and basically remains the same: Draw the right three cards in order to boost everyone's damage. Any, and I do mean any utility from the cards other than DMG boosts was not desired by your party members. If your fishing resulted in something other than the Balance, then you use it if the situation warrants it, and if not then you just used minor arcana instead. Another broken ability back then because you did not always need the heal.

I am also not sure what you're talking about with each card having three different effects. Each card had one effect that could be augmented three different ways, but those augments were the same for every card: 50%potency+AoE, 200% duration, or 150% potency iirc. From those, you would always aim to get the AoE, despite how nice the other ones were.

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Jesus girl you ever played AST?... dmg boost is the only thing that a party need? We talking about the same game? Final Fantasy 14? Defense and survivability far overpriority than dps as even mp regen as you cant do anything without mp or without life. Maybe in atom savage raids (what is meaningles even they existence) its works but in any other raid damage boost is simply useless. Dont have meaning for its existence in any way. AST always was an utility support healer, not a dps. And it was perfect in it. I saved whole groups even in roulette raids with an aoe bole card and keep up the aoe crit card for places where needs fast short burst in mechanic. Need to know the bosses and they mechanics to adapt with ast to it. Not easy, yes, for me needed years to learn all but then i already knew what use where. Even spire... when the bards and mchs depleted they tp in seconds in aoe burst. Now the cards not even worth to waste time with them. The boost they gives are worthless even in savage raids cause too small and too overcomplicatedly rng. If they dont want unique char then simply copy holy paladin from wow or druid. This is my point of viev and as i could used ast in every situation perfectly well, i wont change my mind for anything.

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Originally Posted by Nhala_Levee

Jesus girl you ever played AST?... dmg boost is the only thing that a party need? We talking about the same game? Final Fantasy 14? Defense and survivability far overpriority than dps as even mp regen as you cant do anything without mp or without life. Maybe in atom savage raids (what is meaningles even they existence) its works but in any other raid damage boost is simply useless. Dont have meaning for its existence in any way. AST always was an utility support healer, not a dps. And it was perfect in it. I saved whole groups even in roulette raids with an aoe bole card and keep up the aoe crit card for places where needs fast short burst in mechanic. Need to know the bosses and they mechanics to adapt with ast to it. Not easy, yes, for me needed years to learn all but then i already knew what use where. Even spire... when the bards and mchs depleted they tp in seconds in aoe burst. Now the cards not even worth to waste time with them. The boost they gives are worthless even in savage raids cause too small and too overcomplicatedly rng. If they dont want unique char then simply copy holy paladin from wow or druid. This is my point of viev and as i could used ast in every situation perfectly well, i wont change my mind for anything.

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As much I want the old cards back as the next person, this is a bit of stretch.

Spire was very much useless and honestly removing TP was for the better.

The real reason that AST's cards were a problem is that there was damage card mixed in with utility cards. You're right that damage mostly related to raiding and high end content.

But unfortunately this made it difficult for them to balance, as people would beg for the Balance card constantly.

What they should have done is made all the cars utlity based and keep Divination. There would be no best card as random utlity is subjective to the raid, but damage buffs? That is.

Keeping Divination with the old card system probably would have been a better way to marry the two systems (probably kinks to work out).

But to say that damage buffs aren't important to AST is kinda wrong. SE wanting to balance out the cards isn't wrong in itself. They just went about it the wrong way. It wasn't the system, it was divide between what they can do and what thay provided for the party.

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Originally Posted by Nhala_Levee

Jesus girl you ever played AST?... dmg boost is the only thing that a party need? We talking about the same game? Final Fantasy 14? Defense and survivability far overpriority than dps as even mp regen as you cant do anything without mp or without life. Maybe in atom savage raids (what is meaningles even they existence) its works but in any other raid damage boost is simply useless. Dont have meaning for its existence in any way. AST always was an utility support healer, not a dps. And it was perfect in it. I saved whole groups even in roulette raids with an aoe bole card and keep up the aoe crit card for places where needs fast short burst in mechanic. Need to know the bosses and they mechanics to adapt with ast to it. Not easy, yes, for me needed years to learn all but then i already knew what use where. Even spire... when the bards and mchs depleted they tp in seconds in aoe burst. Now the cards not even worth to waste time with them. The boost they gives are worthless even in savage raids cause too small and too overcomplicatedly rng. If they dont want unique char then simply copy holy paladin from wow or druid. This is my point of viev and as i could used ast in every situation perfectly well, i wont change my mind for anything.

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You are stretching the old cards value by a large amount. "TP regen for AoE burst" wasn't a thing, as it was used un dungeons and people had Tactician / Goad / Motivation if needed (because they are reliable) rather than hoping for a Spire. And as I said, it was for dungeons, TP regen would be enough in between packs of trash.

So yes, DMG was the most valuable, and "defense and survivability" are nothing relevant for the card system when you had shields / collective unconscious / a co healer / party mitigation that you knew would be available. You couldn't hope for a Bole to save anyone. Yes I'm sure someone has a story about that one time they saved a situation thanks to a Bole, but it isn't needed thanks to all the mitigation we have now.

Arguably, I think people miss Royal Road, the old Minor Arcana, Arrow and perhaps the occasional Ewer (but MP regen could have been easily fixed otherwise, and it seems to be coming at last in 5.3). Spear was valuable when Crit was interesting in the Crit meta we had, but they nerfed it so that this kind of buff isn't that valuable anymore.
But yes, DMG buff were what made AST so desirable and OP in the first place. As its healing was on par/better than WHM's own healing.

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Originally Posted by Mansion

Yes I'm sure someone has a story about that one time they saved a situation thanks to a Bole, but it isn't needed thanks to all the mitigation we have now.

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Conversely, none of those situations are possible anymore at all, because Bole (and, in fact, the rest of the cards) can no longer function in a way that make a significant difference for critical moments. Which is part of the class fantasy: being able to take critical moments and "manipulate fate" to work around the undesirable outcome.
Now, AST must either power through with healing (yay, bad habits!), or (though it's usually "and") they have to stay the course and hope someone else finds a way. They now have a significantly more passive role, in direct contrast to their unusually high APM potential (which is why many ASTs used to find themselves not even bothering).

To that end, I would say a majority of AST players, who miss the old cards, myself included, typically enjoyed having the ability to significantly manipulate/alter battle situations in the moment, which is completely lost on a system of only being able to keep up a constant slow burn (made even slower when you're not working with the tippy topiest of the top players, in only the endiest of end-game raids).

I do agree that TP regen was not truly a big thing for the cards, but, truthfully, it wasn't really much of a thing at all (hence the removal of TP requirements from actions). To that end, that same majority of AST players sought a suitable replacement for the card itself, rather than the whole deck.

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Originally Posted by MintnHoney

Conversely, none of those situations are possible anymore at all, because Bole (and, in fact, the rest of the cards) can no longer function in a way that make a significant difference for critical moments. Which is part of the class fantasy: being able to take critical moments and "manipulate fate" to work around the undesirable outcome.
Now, AST must either power through with healing (yay, bad habits!), or (though it's usually "and") they have to stay the course and hope someone else finds a way. They now have a significantly more passive role, in direct contrast to their unusually high APM potential (which is why many ASTs used to find themselves not even bothering).

To that end, I would say a majority of AST players, who miss the old cards, myself included, typically enjoyed having the ability to significantly manipulate/alter battle situations in the moment, which is completely lost on a system of only being able to keep up a constant slow burn (made even slower when you're not working with the tippy topiest of the top players, in only the endiest of end-game raids).

I do agree that TP regen was not truly a big thing for the cards, but, truthfully, it wasn't really much of a thing at all (hence the removal of TP requirements from actions). To that end, that same majority of AST players sought a suitable replacement for the card itself, rather than the whole deck.

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Fully agree.
Actually, although the flavour of each card (Minor Arcana included) did have an importance for me, personally what I miss the most in AST now is Royal Road. I loved the card set-up it allowed, compared to the card-spitting machine we can be with Sleeve Draw now. If we just had Royal Road back, I'd be quite happy, even if all cards have the same effect.

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Originally Posted by Mansion

You couldn't hope for a Bole to save anyone. Yes I'm sure someone has a story about that one time they saved a situation thanks to a Bole, but it isn't needed thanks to all the mitigation we have now.

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it wasnt about "hoping" for a bole. a lot of times during savage or ultimate prog you would **hold** onto a bole for a hard hitting mechanic, especially at minimum ilv. the issue was that using utility cards "wasted" your royal road, which means itll be harder to get an expanded balance next time around.

"preparing" a Bole meant a DPS loss. You can call it what you want, FFXIV endgame is just DPS. More DPS is less things to deal with, that's it.
I'm having a hard time believing AST planned Boles for prog (at least, I didn't) when shields (espiecially with a SCH) and mitigation are 1 reliable 2 not a DPS loss 3 arguably more efficient.

As I said, if it popped at the right time, great. On the tank in a dungeon that you outgear, outlevel, so you can perhaps sneak one more DPS spell (if the tanks plays correctly too), fine.
But using all card tools for DPS (be it Balance, Spear or Arrow) was more efficient in the mindset of raiding.
Now if you think healers should heal and buff defense, well you are free to think so. That's not a commonly shared opinion in FFXIV though.

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Originally Posted by Mansion

"preparing" a Bole meant a DPS loss. You can call it what you want, FFXIV endgame is just DPS. More DPS is less things to deal with, that's it.
I'm having a hard time believing AST planned Boles for prog (at least, I didn't) when shields (espiecially with a SCH) and mitigation are 1 reliable 2 not a DPS loss 3 arguably more efficient.

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obviously dps is all that matters once you can reliably kill a fight, but just as you didnt save boles for prog i know people who have, including myself. the dps loss does not matter during prog Because youre trying to see more of the fight. once you know how to deal with mechanics without that bole you can go back to holding the dps cards.

instead of fixing the issues by giving us a way to be able to use the utility cards without sacrificing RR, give more uses for cards so cards other than the balance could get legitimate use, or force every card to appear in cycles so one can rely or actually plan around certain cards, they just threw the whole system to the trash.

kind of reminds me how instead of just making aetherflow have no cooldown when outside of combat so ppl didnt have to wait, they just decided to make it impossible to use it outside of combat.

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Originally Posted by Gravagar

They should probably rename the entire role of "Healer" to "Combat Support" or something, to better reflect their actual playstyle.

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Why do I feel like this would get more people to play healers?

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Originally Posted by Mansion

"preparing" a Bole meant a DPS loss. You can call it what you want, FFXIV endgame is just DPS. More DPS is less things to deal with, that's it.
I'm having a hard time believing AST planned Boles for prog (at least, I didn't) when shields (espiecially with a SCH) and mitigation are 1 reliable 2 not a DPS loss 3 arguably more efficient.

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You are right. I agree. I can't disagree, this is true.
However... except if you're running with the same (good) static 100% of the time and only stick to savage as the content you do...
Most FFXIV experience "sadly" can't be summed up by that.

When you help least experienced player, when you run other content such as dungeon, r24, deep dungeon, eureka.
I understand it might not matter to a lot of people (precisely raider only), but for me, it does.

As much as I enjoy raiding and optimizing myself (so, going for the full dps cards and balance fishing with some of my old static), I also enjoyed "saving" the day with some bole and ewer elsewhere for some progging or anything else.

What I'm trying to say is, as much as it's true that dps is king in this game, the first requirement for this is playing really good (mitigating damage, performing your rotation well, good oGCD healing timing, doing mechanic properly...)
And perfect scenario is not what you meet everyday if you play this game with several player on different content.
I can't suddenly make them play better in 2s. Instead, I had some option to cover these situation. And I miss that flexiblity of gameplay with AST.

That's all.

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Originally Posted by KDSilver

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I got a bit derailed by the flow of the discussion, but essentially I'm on that side. While I did not rely on bole effect or whatever, I did enjoy having 6 cards, 3 royal roads and two Minor Arcana.

I agree with QooEr about how they thought they fixed AST when in reality they created even more problems. But it would be very difficult to make support other than DPS boost in a game like FFXIV where everything boils down to DPS.

playing astro is way more fun than it ever was before shb. The old card system was extremely frustrating when you got anything that wasn't balance, or crit when crit replaced CDR. While its nice to pretend TP, MP, Damage reduction or skillspeed were useful cards it was ultimately more than pretending they were useful was fun. I'm tired of seeing threads of people asking to fix a job that is incredibly fun to play with a plethora of decisions to make. One of the biggest most frequent decisions is who to use cards on and how to use the cards you draw and I hope they never go back to what we had before.

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Originally Posted by Zolvolt

playing astro is way more fun than it ever was before shb. The old card system was extremely frustrating when you got anything that wasn't balance, or crit when crit replaced CDR. While its nice to pretend TP, MP, Damage reduction or skillspeed were useful cards it was ultimately more than pretending they were useful was fun. I'm tired of seeing threads of people asking to fix a job that is incredibly fun to play with a plethora of decisions to make. One of the biggest most frequent decisions is who to use cards on and how to use the cards you draw and I hope they never go back to what we had before.

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We all know this is a bullshit. Cards have no meaning in shb. Im a healer not a bard. My job is not dps boost. And i will cry until they fix what they broke.

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Originally Posted by Nhala_Levee

Im a healer not a bard. My job is not dps boost.

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You are an Astrologian.
That's the purpose of diversity within a role.
You are playing a healer that boost DPS.
If you can't accept that, you're on the wrong class and WHM exist for that.

Buffing allies is not just a Physical Range DPS thing.
Cause same goes for mitigation with that mideset.
Every role has a least one tool or more to mitigate incoming damage. But that's not their role to do so right? They're not healers, why would they bother ?

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Originally Posted by Nhala_Levee

We all know this is a bullshit. Cards have no meaning in shb. Im a healer not a bard. My job is not dps boost. And i will cry until they fix what they broke.

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DPS boosting is what the cards were predominantly used for in previous expansions.

• Balance was a dps boost.
• Arrow was a dps boost unless felt the need to use it on yourself while turret-healing (pretty much never required, especially with Diurnal's old baked-in spellspeed buff).
• Spear (crit) was a dps boost unless you threw it on yourself for some reason. Spear (cooldown reduction) was typically Royal Road fodder.
• Spire and bole were almost universally RR'd/minor arcana'd.
• Ewer saw rare use if it popped up when someone was desperate for MP and their other options were down, but was otherwise treated as spire/bole (RR fodder).

I will agree that the 5.0 revamp made the cards incredibly lackluster, particularly since we can no longer manipulate the kind of buff we're giving out (RIP Royal Road, the real victim), and losing Time Dilation + the revamp to Celestial Opposition were insult to injury, but if you weren't using the cards as a dps boost 99.5% of the time previously (assuming you weren't drawing all spire/ewer/bole), you were doing it wrong.

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Originally Posted by Nhala_Levee

We all know this is a bullshit. Cards have no meaning in shb. Im a healer not a bard. My job is not dps boost. And i will cry until they fix what they broke.

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Your objective, whenever you enter a fight in FF14, is "win the fight," not "heal lots of HP." If your goal is to heal HP, then optimal healer play would revolve around soaking up as much avoidable damage as possible, as opposed to avoiding it. You've got Lv80 jobs, so I think you understand that isn't the case.


"Win the fight" means reducing the enemies you're fighting to 0HP. The actions you take in a fight should guide your party towards this goal, and my deeps friends agree that giving them cards helps us win. Gonna have to agree with what others said and ask- what is it that you like about playing AST instead of other healers? If you don't like buffing damage, wouldn't WHM suit you better? They don't have any party damage buffs at all.

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Originally Posted by Nhala_Levee

We all know this is a bullshit. Cards have no meaning in shb. Im a healer not a bard. My job is not dps boost. And i will cry until they fix what they broke.

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Cards are utility. Naturally a good player picks the best utility from the options available and in a game where enrage timers and dps is king, dps was often the best utility. Since players often went for dps, the devs simply removed the inferior options. Your job is to provide the best utility you can and that's going to be dps boosts.

If you don't like that, blame the way the game is designed. WhM exists for those who don't like to play utility support.

unfortunately some people here seem to be missing the point. Utility variety is what many astros want because its fun, and the game revolves around fun, not dps- granted some people find that dps or nothing is their ideas of fun, but the majority do not hence the exodus of astros until it got buffed through the roof. This is why many ex astros are so disgruntled- yes the identical cards of shb are good for dps, but they aren't fun.

Every card had its uses, some niche some weren't. Many astros didn't view the spear for example as dps, they viewed it as helping out the bards and monks. The bole was not junk, it was helping the tank's survivability so the astro could have some fun spamming gravity, or helping the alliance stay standing when everyone got smacked by calofisteri's bleed

The highs and lows were what made the job fun and varied and it was what many astros signed up for. Not this coin flip that you have to break TOS in order to see the effect of