Fix AST's Accessibility Issue

[HyperiusUltima]

I believe you misread my post. I said "Its been homogenised as is (which is what SE seems to think accessible means)
That said, I am in complete agreement. Its absurdly difficult to play efficiently atm not to mention a chore, especially on a controller. The play button was one of several mistakes that's caused me to leave it on my main and barley touch on alts.

With flow and accessibility though, a good example is Horoscope. To me it seems like a poor version of earthly star only you dont place it on the floor, and then you have to manually power it up to detonate it on top of it doing no damage.

I barely see anybody using it, even though it can grant a free aoe heal a short time later after powering it...so why go through this faff when it would flow better with a button that just boosts your next aspected helios potency to 400 and be done with it.

That I feel is better job flow and more accessible if I'm understanding you correctly

It doesn't mean that they can't change their definition of it if the community attempts to push that definition on them. How long did it take for them to put MCH in the right direction? 2 EXPANSIONS. For WHM, that was 2 as well after the AST Balancing Act of 3.4.

As for your example on Horoscope, I fail to see how that is an accessibility issue. Horoscope is meant to be planned ahead of time for room-wides and raid-wides; at best though it could certainly do with being able to be popped regardless of range since you have 10s to Helios/Aspected Helios. I prefer to think of it like Healing Storage, similar to how WHM has Lilies; just on a timer to make sure it's not wasted(30s for Lilies, 30s for Horoscope Helios). On top of that, if you need a quick, weak heal at 200 potency, you could literally just hit the button again without applying Helios.

[Crushnight]

Horoscopes issues are twofold
1. Requires a gcd heal, in a game where healers are discouraged from gcd healing as much as possible.
2. It doesn't self detonate, so even if you do proc horoscope you HAVE to manually set it off. depending on situations you could forget about due to not needing or just too busy with other things, this can lead to feeling like you wasted that gcd heal and subsequently dmg spell.

Play fixed one issue brought in another one. (Play fixed the issue of double tapping draw would use the card immediately on you but yea the issues Play causes by existing is arguably worse).

The staple of ShB Ast - Fix one issue to replace with another.

MA change - reduce button presses, added second play button so more macros needed yay >_> (also loss of card animations)

[HyperiusUltima]

All I was suggesting is that Royal Road be brought back to recover some of AST's depth of gameplay and decision-making instead of this Seal Fishing Contest with 3 Charges of Redraw. As far as old Royal Road goes, it literally made 1/3rd of those things useless since 150% didn't work out for most cards(except Balance, Spear and Ewer back then?). They can reimplement Royal Road so that AST isn't clogged up by Sleeve Draw. Namely, they could decide on the following for effects:

- All Royal Road effects are AoE, no matter what and can only be applied via Play or Minor Arcana.
- Lunar Seal: Increases Ranged DPS by 2%.
- Solar Seal: Increases Melee DPS by 2%.
- Celestial Seal: Recovers 500 MP for the entire party.

Now, you may think: "But we only want Lunar and Solar Seals to matter when we Play or Minor Arcana!" But given that AST already has a decent buffing system in place, I didn't want to tack on too much given how we might wind up in the problematic issues we had before with balance in both HW(overbuffing AST) and SB(AST contributing better than WHM, but only because of WHM mechanical oversight).

It's easy to differentiate between Sun and Moon either way for DPS Buffs, and Celestial Seal could definitely go a long ways for AST recovering MP for the raid by a set amount(given it's capped at 10000 anyway). It won't be much, but it can help healers that are still learning for the high-end plus deal with some of AST's MP issues in Dungeons in particular.

I'ma just leave this here in case you forgot an entire page ago; though with an edit from @Risvertasashi. It's something, and it's better than nothing.

[Risvertasashi]

You make a valid point. I wasn't sure if it was a viable way for balance, but AST has been lacking in the MP management department since the other two healers have better management. Especially in regards to N.AST, which needs the extra MP. If 1k MP is that much, they could simply just make it 500 MP since that's what a Aetherflow is for SCH. Though in hindsight, we already have WHM that has a ridiculous amount of MP Management(Infinite MP for 12s, Free GCD Healing, Free Instant Cast, etc.) while SCH has to manage a fairy while on GCD and their Aetherflow which is all oGCD.

It's worth noting that a frequently-overlooked SCH CD lets them use anything without consuming aetherflow and guarantees crits. Sort of the SCH version of thin air.

N.AST has issues, but they run much deeper than MP - to make it competitive with SCH, we need to be talking about completely different things. AST as a whole... well, let me put it like this. As of the 5.1 buffs, AST is already topping the damage charts ahead of every other healer, and every tank. And buffing AST's MP (along with faster casts, etc) in stormblood is what sent the healer balance from the relatively balanced 'SCH+AST for farm, but WHM for prog' to the completely out of control 'SCH+AST for everything', so I'm a bit wary about this.

500 MP would be more reasonable, but I think it would be better still if the ability was on something not in the healer role.

Then why not make the "undesirable" cards more desirable, rather than tossing out the baby with the bathwater? The old card system had a minor flaw, and that could have been remedied without scrapping the whole thing and replacing it with something that I cannot even see the benefit of without a parser...

They started to do that.

What happened was more and more of the cards became DPS buffs. Inferior to Balance, however, so most people still sought that.

[Side-Eye]

They started to do that.

What happened was more and more of the cards became DPS buffs. Inferior to Balance, however, so most people still sought that.

Making all of the cards practically the same (and worse than Balance) was not making the old cards more desirable -- it was just a cheap, quick, easy thing to appease DPS who just wanted bigger epeens.

Squeenix could have kept the flavor of the old cards and simply made each better at its purpose, and given Spire a purpose to replace TP. And if they were going to kill off RR/spread, they could have attached a minor DPS boost to each of the cards so that they could provide their original benefits and still be useful on a recipient even if the original benefit wasn't particularly needed at the moment.

What they did was neither creative nor inspired; and it left a lot of AST mains wondering why the F so much was taken away that was scarcely related to the card system, like TD buff extension and AE stun.

[HyperiusUltima]

It's worth noting that a frequently-overlooked SCH CD lets them use anything without consuming aetherflow and guarantees crits. Sort of the SCH version of thin air.

N.AST has issues, but they run much deeper than MP - to make it competitive with SCH, we need to be talking about completely different things. AST as a whole... well, let me put it like this. As of the 5.1 buffs, AST is already topping the damage charts ahead of every other healer, and every tank. And buffing AST's MP (along with faster casts, etc) in stormblood is what sent the healer balance from the relatively balanced 'SCH+AST for farm, but WHM for prog' to the completely out of control 'SCH+AST for everything', so I'm a bit wary about this.

500 MP would be more reasonable, but I think it would be better still if the ability was on something not in the healer role.

I wasn't entirely aware of how much MP had an impact on healers in Stormblood given how I was still getting better and understanding the different jobs. If we really had to throw in something that's not MP, then we need to make sure that we don't wind up with Balance Syndrome. If anything, we could make Celestial be a minor Haste buff...though the problem that comes with that then disjoints a lot of openers. It's really hard to think of something that could benefit for Celestial, because AST does not need more healing, nor can they be given an MP Boost...on top of that making it 2% increase raid-wide for all party members just makes people fish more for that card since it's more beneficial; though honestly, they can still get a good benefit off of just RRing the Lunar/Solar Seals as well. Doing it that way may work for the time being perhaps.

Also, Recitation is dumb, yes. At the least, they could put a little more pressure on SCH's resources and just make it guarantee a critical while costing resources to make it more competitive so that SCHs have to make better decisions instead of Recitation Excog/Indom(which when those can guarantee Crits it makes SCH look strong on the healing front).

[HyperiusUltima]

Making all of the cards practically the same (and worse than Balance) was not making the old cards more desirable -- it was just a cheap, quick, easy thing to appease DPS who just wanted bigger epeens.

Squeenix could have kept the flavor of the old cards and simply made each better at its purpose, and given Spire a purpose to replace TP. And if they were going to kill off RR/spread, they could have attached a minor DPS boost to each of the cards so that they could provide their original benefits and still be useful on a recipient even if the original benefit wasn't particularly needed at the moment.

What they did was neither creative nor inspired; and it left a lot of AST mains wondering why the F so much was taken away that was scarcely related to the card system, like TD buff extension and AE stun.

SE was looking to simplify things because there was too much going on for the player; the level of complexity was something they were looking at, and they wanted to slow it down so that it's not as difficult compared to having to throw cards around. Play fixed many of the Draw Issues when trying to spam it to get the action in because of ping, but either way they should have not removed CO's Stun. TD on the other hand could've been redone for just their own cards to nerf them a bit since it was generally applied to all buffs since inception. Again, look up above for what my suggestion is along with @Risvertasashi's arguments because mind you reverting back and forth from one thing to the other takes a lot of development time to test, perfect, and make sure everything works properly with the new system they had set up for Shadowbringers.

[Side-Eye]

SE was looking to simplify things because there was too much going on for the player; the level of complexity was something they were looking at, and they wanted to slow it down so that it's not as difficult compared to having to throw cards around.

If simplification was truly their goal, they failed spectacularly. Sure, sandpaper is more "simple" than a drill with a sandpaper attachment, but it takes a tremendous amount more work and effort to get similar results. After a session playing AST, my wrists sometimes actually ache from the constant re-targeting and clicking to use those 15 second tiny-dps-booster cards.

Furthermore, there was already a less complex option if one wanted to play a healer job without as much complexity. That's one of the things that has traditionally been great about this game: choices.

[MerlinCross]

AST before, on paper, sounded hard to use to someone like me who plays on controller. Having to juggle all those cards across different party members sounded like a nightmare. It was something I always wanted to try though.

AST now is far more accessible, on paper, as I don't need the 'right' cards anymore and just throw out cards as soon as possible. Even if it's wrong it's still a damage amp. I just have no desire to play it now though as the interesting spark is gone.

I play WHM cause it was easier than old AST. I play WHM as it feels more fun than new AST.

[Shurrikhan]

The easy fix is just bring Royal Road back and its effects. This would solve all Controller issues with AST and also add depth to the job(since sometimes you need to get rid of that Ewer just to get a Spire, Play, then another Ewer) plus solve other issues as well.

The only way to "fix" the controller issues is to bring back massive imbalance in choices of Card usage so that you either just Spread (Balance > Arrow > Spear if necessary), Expand (Bole or Ewer), Play (Balance > Arrow > Spear) or Undraw (everything else, including whenever Spread or RR have already been used).

So long as there's reason to care who your cards go to, the same controller issues will be present and the game's barebone controller support will show through. Being nearly the only game to have controller support still doesn't make that support actually good, let alone nearly as good as it could be.

If Expand was merely balanced, you wouldn't be able to get away with the wastefulness made obligatory prior to ShB. Instead, you'd likely see RR made retroactive instead of preemptive, so you could use another card on which you did not want to consume RR. You'd likely see RR usable from a Spread card. And even then you'd still want to occasionally place an Arrow specifically on your BLM or a Balance specifically on your gauge-high SAM, which would bring back the same issues short of improved Controller features.