Did people even ask for changes to AST, like they do / did for MNK and MCH?

[Maeka]

None of them were “junk” when you take into account Minor Arcana. That was the best skill AST got in SB because it turned cards you didn’t need at the time into something more useable. You no longer had to throw them away as useless.

Not like we don't have Minor Arcana now, right?

While all the cards are now “useful”, your percentages are not really how the Seal RNG works. And, personally speaking, the Divination+Seals mechanic is just transferring the “Balance fishing” to “Seal fishing”. Nothing really changed.

Unless they do some skewing, you have 6 cards. There's 2 Sun Cards, 2 Moon Cards, and 2 Sky Cards. You want 1x Moon, Sun, Sky for Divination. When you draw the first card, the first is 100% useful. When you draw the second card, you get a 4-in-6 chance, or 66% chance of getting one of the two you didn't get the first time. When you draw the third card, you get a 2-in-6 chance, or 33%, of getting the remaining seal you didn't have.

Unless of course, the game does some trickery, like "If the player has Sun and Moon, -10% chance of getting sky" or some crap.

The cards are all the same and it’s boring. There’s no decision making to them now—it’s “highest melee DPS card” and “highest ranged DPS card”. No more giving BRDs Spears to give them insane bursts. No more giving BLMs Enhanced Arrows for more explosions. And Minor Arcana is just more of the same. No more free damage card or free mini-Tetra. I’d rather variety, even if you have that one card that’s basically fodder. Makes things far more interesting. Of course, the theme of ShB was to dumb down jobs that had any sort of complexity to them....

......on the job that was already the most complicated, and still is the most frenetic to play of the healers? Before asking for yet MORE complexity to AST, you should look at WHM sometime.

You weren’t throwing away the vast majority of cards before because you should have always been Minor Arcana-ing cards that weren’t being used on a party member, for a Spread, or for a Royal Road modifier.

Minor Arcana is about the same thing as throwing it away, in terms of each individual card being useful or not. If you Minor Arcana a card, you don't care WHAT the card is, you're just going to dump it into MA. This means all cards are basically the same, which is exactly what you are complaining about with ShB.

I will give you that RR did care about which cards.

Balance hasn’t been 20% since early SB. That was quickly reverted before the first Savage tier released. It was +10% for single-target and +5% for AOE since AST was released (3.0) until 3.4 when they broke it in an attempt to draw people to the job. The 20% was reverted back to original potencies in the same patch Deltascape dropped (4.05).

Fair enough, I suppose. Still.

Mathematically, it was the best because nothing beats straight damage increases. But that doesn’t mean that the other cards were useless because Balance was “the best one”. If you were throwing all of your cards away to fish for just Balance, then you were playing the job incorrectly. Balance fishing ultimately only mattered for top-tier speedkills and for people seeking Balance-padded parses.

Or your average clueless players in Duty Finder, which is where I do most of my group play. Doesn't matter what is really what, if a large portion of the public believes otherwise. You know how your average Duty Finder Hero worships +Damage output, or you surely do?

Are you talking about original Spear or Arrow here? Because Spear was changed from cooldown reduction sometime in SB to +10% Crit (+5% for AOE). The cooldown reduction was literally worse than Spire—and they changed it. A Spear on a BRD or a MNK was a good play—it was insane how good it was on those jobs, especially if they were bursting (BRD + Minuet/Raging Strikes + Spear was an unbelievably good thing).

Memory is somewhat foggy, I will admit. I dont' remember when exactly I was leveling AST during StB.

SB AST (and ShB AST) had the worst MP economy of all the healers. A Ewer was far more useful than you’re giving it credit for. ShB AST would kill to have it back, honestly. They seem like they’re MP negative if you try to keep up with ABC.

Odd, I never noticed any real problems. Popping Lucid seemed to solve most of my problems? I can't say I ever thought "OMG YES A EWER!" after, say, Lv50 or so. Maybe some early levels back before I got into the hang of playing it and I was wasting MP on the wrong spells maybe.

The damage reduction was less beneficial in solo play and more in party play. Giving it to a tank in a large dungeon pull was pretty great. Whether they were a great tank or a poor one. And, as cheesy as it may sound, my UwU clear had an AOE Bole during the primal roulettes before Ultima begins charging up his enrage. It might have been RNG, but it saw some use.

LMAO. No. Having an Enhanced Bole on a tank for a large pull was a godsend. It basically gave you free reign to AOE the trash down—especially if you stacked HoTs on them and extended the durations with Celestial Opposition. I could do that even to the worst kinds of tanks and not have to heal them most of the time. Giving them a Bole wasn’t an “insult”—I have no idea where you even heard that from. It was literally a free cooldown.

Again, Duty Finder, general public. Personally? I loved the idea of throwing a short duration Rampart on a tank in a Trash pull. But you know, I kept hearing about the "Card of Shame" and all that, and didn't want people getting mad at me, so RR/MA it is anytime Bole came up.