Yoshi-P's Interview with Famitsu includes a few comments about AST

[Miiu]

No way, that takes away the whole gimmick and makes it less unique. You're using cards. And, hey, maybe you're cheating a little with a quick shuffle or a card stuffed up your sleeve. But if you just pick at will that totally kills it.

I don't need to pick my cards. I just need them all to be useful. In all circumstances.

Sorry but I fully disagree here. The gimmick of the class are the cards/buff. Them being random is just a cheap attempt to make the class balanced which completely backfired.

[Mclyde]

You're not talking about strategy here. The first dumbass can understand when it's time to up damage or attack speed or to give pt/mp when someone need it.
The thing is the random aspect make the job strategic 'cause you have to know or think to how optimize the card you just drew : for exemple if i get a spire card does it worth right now to use it on one of my teamate ? does it worth to turn it in royal road to get the spread effect ? In this way reducing the next card effect by 50% ? How much of my teamates ould be able to efficiently use the 5% dmg bonus i could use on them if i do that ? Shouldn't i better instead focus my buff cards on one or two very good dps ? if so i shuffle the spire card i just drew... etc etc..

If you remove this random aspect, the Astrologian will just turn in those kind of preset job with witch you know your entire cycle :

"ok i will begin the fight with the spear card spread on all the team to reduce all their offensiv CD time. Then i'll use a bole card with 150% potency on the MT since it will be a tunnel phase. After that it will be a dps check so i'll draw the balance and spread it and then.... Zzzzzzzzzz
"

Just use one of the other healers if you don't like the Astro. And don't tell that you actually like it, 'cause rng is what makes the Astro so cool.

[Dyvid]

AST is FFXIV attempt at a gambler job and everyone wants to remove the risk verse rewards or gamble from it now? If you remove the RNG from the cards then you are also asking from them to be nerfed in some form or another. Is that what you really want because I can just see it now. You can draw all 6 cards at once and place them any way you see fit but your cooldown for another draw is 180s.

[Miiu]

I wouldn't have played it to 60 and finished all available content except Savage with AST if I wouldn't like the job. The problem with random in its current iteration is like so many people have talked about before its unreliable. It doesn't make the job "cool" it makes unnecessary "harder". If you look at the corsair from FFXI for example they could choose their buffs but would random roll for the effectiveness of it. While this wouldn't solve the problem it is at least a more calculated randomness.

Additionally there isn't much strategy at the moment. We already figured out which classes get the most benefit out of our cards "Did I get card Y? Okay give it to job X" If it comes down to it we make 1 strategic decision every 1 min. depending if we want to use royal road/spread or not. So its pretty much already a set rotation job to some extend.

Now if you want to keep the randomness or keep the AST from using all of the available cards. There could be a few different ways.

1. Have a currency like aetherflow stacks. 1 stack = 1 card. AST get to play 2-3 cards every X amount of time. (the same card can't be played again until your "stacks" are refilled)
2. Make draw pull up 2 cards and lets us choose 1 of them.

[Khalithar]

"ok i will begin the fight with the spear card spread on all the team to reduce all their offensiv CD time. Then i'll use a bole card with 150% potency on the MT since it will be a tunnel phase. After that it will be a dps check so i'll draw the balance and spread it.

That actually sounds a lot more fun to me, being able to carefully plan each buff and when to maximize the effectiveness of each? I'd really enjoy that.

[Rewind]

The thing is the random aspect make the job strategic 'cause you have to know or think to how optimize the card you just drew : for exemple if i get a spire card does it worth right now to use it on one of my teamate ? does it worth to turn it in royal road to get the spread effect ? In this way reducing the next card effect by 50% ? How much of my teamates ould be able to efficiently use the 5% dmg bonus i could use on them if i do that ? Shouldn't i better instead focus my buff cards on one or two very good dps ? if so i shuffle the spire card i just drew... etc etc..

The cards now just give the illusion of strategy. There's nothing beneficial or strategic about drawing the same cards in a row, or only drawing balance once through the entirety of an encounter, or never drawing bole when you actually want reduced damage on the tank.

Take Ravana extreme. Imagine you go into the fight for the first time. Whilst you’ve watched a couple of videos and read the strat, there are things you only begin to understand when experiencing the fight. For example, there are significant periods of ‘down time’ in this fight where Ravana leaves the arena. Unless you are fully prepared with the timings of these abilities you are most likely going to waste your buff times – there were plenty of times where I could have wasted an extend + balance combo (when RNG was nice) without realising that the DPS couldn’t actually DPS for the next 40 seconds. That might be your only balance for the entire fight.

Cards aren't as useful for progression - they're not consistent enough. I like WHM, I like SCH and I like AST. I'd like to use them all interchangably and feel confident that AST can hold its own. It's apparent it can't and one way to keep the uniqueness would be modifying the way the cards function - because at the moment they simply don't work (as confirmed by the OP).

[Arcana]

I laugh at people that says the card system is more strategic than other healers abilities? Is it that hard for you to manage draw, spread and RR? If we are not able to drop the card the party need in any specif moment of the fight we are garbage imo.

For example: During full dps phase we have a very low chance to drop the 2 cards needed for this phase (balance + ewer/spire) or (arrow + ewer/spire). Or when a big hit phase arrives you should be able to get a bole card + ewer/spire.

The RNG is nice but we should be able to manage it more to be useful in raids where the fights are scripted.

[Mclyde]

The cards now just give the illusion of strategy. There's nothing beneficial or strategic about drawing the same cards in a row, or only drawing balance once through the entirety of an encounter, or never drawing bole when you actually want reduced damage on the tank

The thing is not about what the rng makes you draw, but what you are going to do with what you get. What can be more strategical in this game than that ? It asks you to have the largest look on what's going on.

I laugh at people that says the card system is more strategic than other healers abilities?

You see that ? It matchs with the big majority of the Astro you can meet in raid or dungeon. They don't
optimize the strategic aspect of their job. It's normal since every jobs are concerned by a big majority of players playing "half" their potency.
I'm okay with the fact that healing is the big part of the Astro, and it's healing potency is not that bad actually if your co-healer understand that you're here to support him when you're in noctural (so if he's a whm). But in addition of using wisely all your healing support skill like Synastry and Celestial Opposition in order to keep your mana up while you dps a little too, you have to find the best way to make all your draw something usefull for the team, and without this part the astro would really become a bad interval between sch&whm. It would have been much simplier to just add a regen mp/tp skill to the scholar pet instead of created a whole new job if it's to removed his particularity.

[SuzakuCMX]

The thing is not about what the rng makes you draw, but what you are going to do with what you get. What can be more strategical in this game than that ? It asks you to have the largest look on what's going on.

Balance goes on highest DPS, Bole goes on the tank or someone standing in an AoE, Spear requires voice chat, Arrow goes on BLM/SMN, Spire/Ewer whoever has lowest MP/TP (requires voice chat).

The point is there is very little strategy that goes into using cards because you never actually know what you're going to get and therefore trying to set up RR combos is nearly useless and otherwise your strategy is limited to a half second of seeing what card you got and then using it.

[Miiu]

The thing is not about what the rng makes you draw, but what you are going to do with what you get. What can be more strategical in this game than that ? It asks you to have the largest look on what's going on.

No it actually doesn't. I don't have to pay more attention to what is going on than I have to do on sch or whm. During my runs as AST I already know in general who gets which card before the run even begins. This only changes slighlty if I have used spread or royal road. Obviously there are exceptions.