New AST from a New Player

[EaMett]

What I am most curious about is why they changed it; to whom were the devs listening to that when brought about these changes? Was there an absolutely vocal crowd who simply despised what AST has been since release? It's been mentioned that the simplification was to attract the influx of new players who were brought in by the expansion, but while I cannot speak for anyone but myself, I felt like AST on its own was already appealing enough. In fact, it was being disillusioned by the changes which drove me to voice my opinion.

They were listening to themselves. The core of the issue seems to be that they don’t have a separate class balancing team and instead it’s an effort put forward by the content designers with limited ressources.

Balancing dps is easy enough but once you need to do two-three-more way balancing (utility-enmity-healing-dps-mobility-ressource management) where one can directly affect the others, you really need dedicated people to the art and dedicated tools. It implies having a lot of hands on experience with all tiers of skill as well. I doubt the current team has much time to play at all tbh.

As a result they’ve been struggling to balance the game a lot and move away from meta and whatnot. This especially with healers whom they seem to have very little experience with in the first place.

As a result they made their life easier by homogenizing everything so all healers have «*equivalent*» skills, removing significant utility from many classes, removing enmity management, removing TP, etc. It all happened this expansion.

They made these changes to suit themselves while seemingly ignoring the player base that was asking for more complexity.

It’s a real problem and I’m amazed no influencers have gotten around to asking them the hard questions regarding this. Though it isn’t surprising considering none of them play healer.