I made a mistake by ignoring the dev discussions (AST changes)

[Yakugami]

I miss the time-mage spells from AST. Just Gravity and Lightspeed are alive.

I miss Royal Road or just some diversity on cards.

This is not AST. This is a cheap tarot card reader with just damage cards.

#bringback4.0AST

i highly disagree with everything but "time mage" spells

we definitely should feel more "time magey" as that's what i wanted this class to be, and that's what this class IS, just with a different theme to make it a "healer" and not a "dps support" basically

but, no
royal road really wasn't a good concept, at first launch, sure, but it's better that we've evolved from it after 2 expansions

you waited longer to use your next card just to buff your next card, that's a full minute of a cooldown, that's not "fun or engaging" just because you "get to decide which one i want to use"

this new mechanic of tossing out cards MUCH faster is a lot better, while having to accept losing out on the "utility" of bole/ewer (spire was trash and would be useless now due to no TP, and arrow/spear were just balance, let's face it)

seals are a different story

the problem i have with it, is right now, we have SIX buttons (7 with Undraw, but you could count that if you really wanted to) dedicated to this card system


yet all it is now, if you really look at it, is basically a 4% damage buff for ONE target over the course of an engagement
that looks like it's just so not okay when looking at it on paper


the only two "different" ones are Sleeve Draw, allowing you to give it to "more targets" at once on a 180s cooldown, and Divination lets you also boost damage for your group on another 180s cooldown

but regardless, ignoring those 2, that's still 4 (5 with undraw) buttons just being dedicated to give one person a 50% uptime of 8% damage

before, you also had 6 buttons (7/8/9 for undraw/spread undraw/road undraw, but meh) dedicated to cards
but yet we had a heal, a damage, a damage resist, an mp refresh, a tp refresh, and a damage boost
now, THAT, on paper, sounds incredible (aside from how it "actually" worked, tp being useless, mp being manageable without it, and damage resist being unnecessary)

i mean now it's barely as interesting as bringing Selene for her previous little haste buff that would be auto-cast, like???
that's not "engaging", it's just a flat number boost to allies
there's really nothing interesting about that, and that doesn't change how you or your allies get to play the game

at that point, just give us a third cooldown along with Sleeve Draw and Divination that's single-target

it's like if they re-added Protect into the game for WHM, but you had to dance around and have 5 buttons you had to micro-manage to apply it

i'm not totally against the direction they took the cards, i just think they handled it poorly
(especially because "ARROW" is melee???????????????)

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

we definitely should feel more "time magey" as that's what i wanted this class to be, and that's what this class IS, just with a different theme to make it a "healer" and not a "dps support" basically

I am on a different boat - I'd prefer to have a real Time Mage job and not this identity theft.

[Yakugami]

I am on a different boat - I'd prefer to have a real Time Mage job and not this identity theft.

i'm also not against this, and i didn't say i was against that concept, i certainly would have liked this, myself

Time Mage is probably one of my if not definitely my favorite class in the Final Fantasy universe, right under Mime

but, eh, it's not like they'd remove the entire class or switch its role entirely, so we kinda have to accept what we got

honestly, i can understand their direction of it, "time magic" in an MMO would just be "too" support-y and "too" debuff-y, i feel like it'd just be required in every group at that point, unless they made it REALLY different... i dunno, it all really just depends on what they would have decided on to do with it, i suppose it could have just been basic party buffs, then full dps rotations, but, eeeeehhhh