Learning how to properly play AST

[Leigaon]

Every BLM work with their mana pool, they know when to transpose/flare or any of their skill they work with their mana limitation
You give them more mp, they will be temps to use one more spell and everything will be ruined (loss of enochian wrong thunder timing)
The only thing they do love is arrow that allow them a greater spell management or balance stronger DPS

I have been asking questions from the jobs like crazy to better understand. It seems that basically they are dedicated to that rotation and really I was told they just ignore it if the refresh is given to them and continue to do their normal rotation.

...I will go with I understand and leave it at that for the black mages, they do get arrow though when I see it benefits them. Still I kept doing dungeons and reached 35 where I can now play with Royal Road.

I've created Macros and I've learned a lot. First half don't know if we put it on them outside of raiding. Secondly most don't even know what the cards do. All they know is that it should be on them because they were told so. Some do notice when I use a card due to the animation, sometimes I will admit I am healing / esuna / or might be in DPS mode too long and they'll mention I have not used a card in a while. A while being 15 seconds or so past the actual CD, which is a lot in this game.

This is making me create a royal road macro to let people know I've taken time to put the card back in and what the next buff will do. This is unnecessary micro managing, but I enjoy that. I got voice commands for my tank lol

I am so far enjoying the job...in this job communication is by far helping me do things and letting other users know what's going on. Some will react, some will do nothing. I do see there are a few flaws and hope that S.E. fixes them.

I do not like how the spear doesn't reduce cool downs already activated, it seems best used for pre-pulling. Spear and Ewer I can see being used mostly for the RR, or I have started casting it on myself then activating lightspeed for some speedy heals / MP management.

I love our first regen based spell. It's a bit shorter but I feel it's an instant heal that also makes up for the few ticks I get as WHM. Plus normally as a WHM I will regen a troubled player such as a DPS and want to make sure they get in a safe range so I'll maybe throw in a cure if I see they have a history of being in danger of dying. That cure is usually too big and lets the regen go to waste, this AST one though is perfect.

[Rongway]

So far the healing is fine but maybe that changes later?

It does change...it gets better. With Synastry, if you heal someone other than the synaster, the total potency of Benefic is 400 * 1.2 * 1.4 = 672; you're basically splitting a cheaper Benefic II unevenly between two people. And then as mentioned previously, once you have Collective Unconscious, you have the option to put up a triple regen that heals almost as much as a Benefic every three seconds.

Stuff about cards

More stuff about cards

It's nice that you took the time to make macros, but it's not really necessary. If people are so focused on what they're doing that they don't notice the buff flytext or buff panel, they won't notice the /p notification (or worse, notice it and get distracted).

For the people who do notice, behavior change while buffed will be minimal, with the exception of a decently timed Spear, where someone might decide to activate a support ability a few seconds earlier than he would have otherwise. And aside from that, most people will just do what they would have been doing anyway; so the only person whose behavior is significantly dictated by the cards is the AST using them.

As for Royal Road and Shuffle, sure, some cards aren't as desirable as others, but keep in mind that if you Shuffle-cancel or Royal Road-Royal Road or Draw-cancel too often, you're losing a lot of potential buff-person-seconds. If there isn't a very specific, difficult phase that you're saving a very specific combo for, you might as well just use some of the cards that you initially want to throw away, just to avoid going two minutes without actually playing any cards at all.