AST Minor Arcana need to be changed back!

[HyoMinPark]

I too would like back some iteration of the old cards and of Minor Arcana, but I have to admit I don't much see of the irony, exactly. Every influencer harked on and on about the card systems being literally nothing more than fishing for Balance, and most players were happy to bandwagon that thought to the exclusion of any idea for balancing the other cards against Balance. (Only a few others I saw were even willing to insist that such a fatalistic, reductive take on the cards would inevitably have a... reductive effect on our variety therein. And each of us were quickly dismissed.) So what did we get? Balance 24/7, diluted to make up for its removal of RNG in getting a +%Damage (as opposed to indirect damage) effect at all. Disappointing, sure, but not exactly unexpected nor even counterintuitive given the opinions thrust in the devs' direction.

Within the design they've taken, MA makes sense, too. It's a 33% stronger card than the regular ones that you can use as a spare Redraw or after having already completed your Seals as not to ruin them, and until 5.1 was another way to bank yet another ST buff into your Divination period. It has (and had even better) good synergy with the systems presented by Divination, Redraw, and Sleeve Draw.

It might not be ideal on the whole, but it's sensible design in its context.

Obsessions with Balance fishing aside, Balance was the single card that really pushed AST to be superior to WHM in every way, despite WHM having higher personal damage and better raw healing (at least, pre-3.3 Malefic buffs, which boosted AST’s personal damage significantly) because WHM did not have an answer to it. Balance was the card many proposed be changed into a different effect (e.g., % Direct Hit was often thrown around in the healer discussions) to try and lower how influential AST was compared to a WHM, especially if the developers were not going to provide WHM with buff utility akin to something like Bravery. Giving Balance a % D.Hit effect would not have negatively affected the variety of the cards—it would have still been present: 6 different cards, 6 different effects; 3 offensive, 3 defensive/resource management. Obviously with the TP removal, Spire would have also had to be changed, but people had been acknowledging that alongside changing Balance into something not direct damage %.

Balance was what made AST so unbalanced—and now every card is a crappier version of it. That’s where the irony comes from.

[Shurrikhan]

Balance was what made AST so unbalanced—and now every card is a crappier version of it. That’s where the irony comes from.

It wasn't, though, or at least no more so than 5.0 Repertoire makes Bard unbalanced. Its RNG-based rDPS; that's all. It alone did not make AST unbalanced, the surrounding toolkit did.

Yes, so long as so much of its rDPS was RNG based, just as with Deep Meditation or Repertoire, there was going to be significant deviation between its runs, but that doesn't make its average parse impossible to balance. At worst you end up with an inflated presence in top 10 or top 20 fflogs ranks because of the sheer number of times they can run the encounter to get up there, but that's not fundamentally different from any other compositions rerunning an already perfected fight until they get their highest possible crit rates on their strongest possible skills and so forth, by sheer luck.

Again, you're preaching to the choir here in regards to wanting varied card effects back, but it's in no way ironic that when the lead complaint was too much RNG variance and too much waste, they then removed what both the JP and NA communities (idk about EU, as I can't read French or German with any real proficiency) declared "non-optimal" or "trap" card effects and gave more means by which to control that RNG. That is a sensible solution, given the complaints. We could perhaps call it "malicious" acquiescence, but it was at the very least in keeping with what was requested.