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

[Melichoir]

Jeez. They’re really kicking Healer mains in the legs with this expansion, huh?

Depends on your perspective. AST changes are more QoL related based on actual player feedback, SCH is being brought in line with the other too, and WHM being brought up to speed. Still missing the context of actual gameplay, so who knows. Could be absolutely terrible for healers, or could be eh, or could be best thing ever. Have to play to see.

Food for thought regarding AST changes:

Without knowing the nature of encounter design in 5.0, there are still some unknowns. From a design standpoint on the cards though, I'd say that the changes to the individual cards are thematically disappointing, but mechanically necessary. On the surface, it looks like it's just "oh so now we only have 2 different card effects and they're only different because they say to play them on different people."

But really, the decision making focus and the interactive aspect of cards is just being shifted to a different area. Instead of analyzing who's the best geared, who's the most skilled, and what card effects which job to what degree at what point in their rotation, and what player is skilled enough to use the card properly, and how does my decision of what to do with this card affect my ability to play the all-important AoE card for the next major burst, etc...
The decision of whether to play the card and who to play it on has been very streamlined, and the decision is instead about when to play the cards. You get to play every card, which feels a lot more like the job fantasy of slinging around buffs left and right, but without the gigantic statistics and probability and 5D Chess headache of trying to optimize an obtuse lovecraftian clusterf*** of game mechanics and interactions.

And there should still be room for complexity, optimization, interactive decision making, etc. in the new system, but it's instead about managing your Redraw charges, knowing when to sit on a card before playing it, efficiently prepping your seals for Divination so you can MA the rest of your Draws for more powerful damage buffs in the meantime, and quickly and efficiently slinging out multiple consecutive single target damage buffs from Sleeve Draw to stack on top of Divination for your 3 minute bursts, which are now reliable.

This isnt an end all be all point, but just one that is worth considering.