AST Suggestion: Allow us to pick the card BEFORE fight?

[Amiaze]

I am filled to the brim with rage every time I see this sentiment. WHY is it so completely unacceptable for AST to be better than WHM or SCH in ANY WAY. AST are currently worse than both classes in every way. Why is that possibly seen as acceptable?

That was actually what Yoshi P. said, not me. I'd have to find a link, but he said during what I believe was an interview with Famitsu that they are going to rebalance AST, but they don't want it to overpower WHM or SCH and make them irrelevant, or make them seem like a worse choice. I didn't play FFXI, but I do recall reading quite a lot about one particular class being so outdone by all the others that players who chose it would be kicked from parties without a moment's notice. Perhaps they're trying to avoid that scenario?

That being said, as I mentioned in my first post, I want to see AST buffed. I really enjoy the class. I only became a MCH because I was excited for it for so long and loved the idea, but I was always a healer before that. As Blood-Aki and RichardButte said, it's very easy for AST to become preferable to the other two healer classes and cause people to favor seeing them, similar to how a lot of parties I was in didn't want to see a Warrior at all.

[Alahra]

I didn't play FFXI, but I do recall reading quite a lot about one particular class being so outdone by all the others that players who chose it would be kicked from parties without a moment's notice. Perhaps they're trying to avoid that scenario?

It happened just about every time they introduced new content to some class or another. FFXI's content wasn't really as structured as it is in modern "theme parks" like FFXIV or WoW, so a given type of content could have wildly different party compositions and strategies from another (whereas in XIV, the same basic party structure works for just about all content). Whatever content was all the rage tended to support certain classes, and classes that weren't favored for it simply weren't used for it.

I can think of numerous examples, but the most relevant (and broadest) probably concerns tanks: from early Rise of the Zilart (first expansion) to sometime in Aht Urghan (third expansion), NINs were used by just about all serious groups instead of PLDs for tanking. (PLDs could survive by using NIN as a subjob for some fights though). Then, during Aht Urghan, traditional tanking fell by the wayside in a lot of ways--NIN, which could repurpose as a passable (and survivable) DPS, survived the transition okay, but PLD had no such option. They eventually did change things, but new content came around (Abyssea) where PLDs were essentially never used and NINs (and MNKs, actually) were the tanks du jour.

Similar things happened with various DPS classes, too (with DRGs generally being undesirable) and some classes essentially never being welcome in parties.