The Case for the Spear

[Furious]

You are assuming here that the combat situation is against mobs, not a boss. As I mentioned in response to @MoroMurasaki, I am primarily talking about trial/raid situations. Not that the Spear is necessarily useless in mob dungeons, but the situations in which it is actually useful are so few and far between that it's not really worth trying to argue for.

It's not any better in trials, I'm not sure how you could argue that it is

It sounds like you're only taking into account smooth runs. Yes, we only use certain cooldowns, like our 'emergency' spells, when we need to. But who is to say that "when we need to" isn't more often than the spell's base cooldown? Sure, if you're in a farming party and you use a major cooldown to fix someone's mechanic error, then it's not likely to happen again a few seconds later. If it does, then someone is going to post the "I thought this was a farm party" macro and leave, leading to a disband.

So you want to use emergency situations as an argument for spear being useful, which is a card you don't want to get in the first place.. which lasts half as long as other more useful cards. Are you holding spear incase you have an emergency, thereby delaying your other draws or blocking your spread if you get a followup balance? Are you talking about using spear when you get it just in case you have an emergency?

I hope you can see how futile it is to argue that spear is fine because it allows you to reduce your cooldowns by 20% for 15 seconds, and you MIGHT need those abilities again some time in the last 20% of their cooldowns to respond to an emergency. It's even worse in this scenario than it is in a planned scenario or when using it on a dps to reduce their rotational cooldowns.

This sounds unbelievably boring to me. I like that we can control it to some extent, but not entirely. If I desperately need to find a Ewer because I'm out of mana and Lucid is on cooldown, I actually have a decent chance at rolling it. A roughly 1/3 chance with just Draw/Redraw, and if that fails I can throw out all my cards and use Sleeve Draw for another 1/3 chance. Of course, people try to do the same thing with Balance, but that's just those people. There's never a situation where you genuinely need Balance. People just want it. Hyper-simplifying the system the way you want just to get rid of people fishing for Balance would kill off the genuine usefulness of having some control over the cards just to try to stop something that is the fault of the players' mindset, not the system itself.

Edit: Actually, I suppose you could have a DPS check situation where you "need" Balance just to clear the check.

This is an irrational argument that stems from a self-sustaining belief that balance being much stronger than everything else is "just in people's heads". It's like when religious people claim god exists because the bible says so.

We can agree there, then. It is definitely reminiscent of Cleric Stance, though I hope they never just effectively remove Spear the way they effectively removed CS. I would be okay with either nerfing AST's other cards, or possibly a change to Spear that maintains its current identity. There have been some suggestions that call for changing Spear to instantly reduce cooldowns by a percentage. This is a decent compromise, although what I don't like about it is how, from a safety-first player's perspective, it encourages us to do nothing but fish for Spear all the time just to use it on ourselves to have our cooldowns up at all times. If this change was made, I'd probably find myself still holding a Spear, and/or just using any Spear I find on myself.

There is absolutely no reason you would ever logically do this. There are almost no healer cooldowns that have as measurable an impact as cooldowns of a dps or tank and certainly not astrologian ones. Healing is a zero-sum game, you only need to do "enough". DPS is a no-ceiling game; you can always benefit from more.