Astrologian Cards Can't Be a Coin Flip: A petition

[Melichoir]

If you need to play the class to understand that they transformed 6 different buffs into one buff, ok. Most of us can read the tooltips though.
If you play a lot of astrologian this information is more than enough to decide if you like it, hate it or don't see any difference.

A lot of the doom saying boils down to some variation of "The took my cards - ast now boring/,class sucks, and SE is terrible! They hate healers!"



If we want to talk cards, what cards? Someone else pointed out correctly that theres only 3 widely viable cards - Balance, Spear, Arrow. All the other cards are at best flavor cards that are heavily situational and would not be picked over those three unless luck + situation demands they be played. (cant wait for that anecdote about how one time someone got a Ewer and saved the entire day from a wipe and how clutch that ewer was.). With changes to mana and TP, Spire and Ewer become a lot less functional. How Bol would effect things is up for debate. Lord and lady have been repurposed.

So what next? Do they keep Balance, Spear, and Arrow the same? Well then, you pretty much make strong buffs more on demand that were balanced against the RNG factor, cause you know, the current system fully utilizes the fact that there are stronger and weaker cards as a means of balance. If you repurpose Ewer and Spire, then it comes down to the same RNG issues the class had complaints about + balance issues which may shift AST into a must pick category for being so buff heavy. This gets even more complicated cause we dont know how sub stats will play out (again why waiting till the xpac drops matters.)

From a pragmatic stand point, the changes they made make sense. Youre not worrying so much about the overall RNG factor anymore. Cards generally give you a damage buff (that is much easier to balance around btw) no matter what you draw, so you have a consistent net benefit now. And playing those cards on your fellow players will alter a subsequent buff. Youre dealing a lot less with RNG and getting overall better bang for your buck. It's getting balance on every draw now, pretty much. Slightly less powerful (depending who you apply it too) but you get it every pull now, and how good at AST you are is now more dependent on how you apply the card rather than whether you get the right card in the first place.

But this is somehow absolutely terrible? So terrible that people are forgetting that one of the core complaints to AST over the last few years was how RNG the cards were and annoying that was creating inconsistency in performance. That again, the only 3 cards that really mattered were Balance, Spear, and Arrow, and that of those 3 only 1 really was the big cheese.

Yeah, The card system was so good. Not really. Im not arguing that this system is better, but rather all this posturing about how good it is currently vs how good itll be in ShB is the bothersome part. Xpac drops, people play it, dont like it cause its not satisfying when its applied to the content? Fine. Complain to your hearts content. But without that context of the changes, all this is just a lot of hoopla and speculating. Just calm down and let the game come out in a month before going on the crusade that these threads devolve into. Cause frankly, no matter how much people complain, theyre not going to revert changes for ShB until the game drops and they see it in performance. So all the fury and screaming at the heavens is just nonsense.