Their heart was in the right place with AST.

[SakiKojiro]

The thing is you could throw out as many buffs now as you could before. Nothing about the draw rate actually changed except for sleeve draw being reworked. What changed is we lost the ability to modify cards, extend their effects, and they got homogenized to one effect.

You could choose to use Royal Road to improve future buffs, but it was not required. Especially since you could put a card in spread and save trying to use royal road till the opportunity presented itself. Allowing you to throw out as many card buffs as you wanted. If you did not that was part of your thought processes behind your use of the cards.

The class is not throwing out more buffs, the class is throwing out worse homogenized buffs. It is trying to build up to a party buff that is weak without you using sleeve draw to throw more damage buff on top of it which disrupts the flow.

Yeah, except Royal road was actually a loss in overall rDPS except when used for an expanded, because a 50% bonus is just losing you like half potency. Every time, without argue. I still really liked the effect of buffing my next card, but unless it doubled the power of the next card, you're losing potency. SE would have never allowed that. Could you imagine a 40% DPS buff on an ally? There'd be chaos in the streets. If RR still existed, you'd still always be expected to fish for an expanded SOMETHING just because of that. I prefer this world in which RR is gone, and every so many cards doesn't get eaten to power up the next card.

Also I seriously don't see the problem so many people have with sleeve draw. You aren't forced to use the card right away and GO GO GO. It's just like, 3 free buffs to help you fish for seals and/or get out a whole bunch of buffs. If you already have all your seals, it's an absolute win in which you just throw out 3 buffs without having to think too hard about it. Now imagine again...if these were the old buffs...

Current AST does need a QOL change, though. We should be able to get seals out of combat. It's so god damn annoying to be forced to throw out a heal or damage spell in dungeon before throwing out my card to make sure I get the seal. Like, I get why they did it, but it's unnecessary complication.