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

[Jandor]

Not an AST, never been an AST, but just peering in from the outside, wouldn't having all the cards be equally good all the time kind of make the RNG/astrology/divination aspect of the system a bit pointless?

After all, the fates are not always kind.

[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.

[Crushnight]

If any card was called the card of shame in SB(none were this is actually the first I have heard of this moniker) it would've been Spire, with how they changed tp if a spire was needed, oof, just oof.

Only 1 card was functionally useless Spire, it had 0 use for solo play and so incredibly small use (literal so many deaths in short time frame everyone used tp restores etc) that it was either RR or MA 99% of the time, Ewer and Bole however fared much better they had more Consistent uses Bole for mass pulls in dungeons or big hits in trials, Ewer for your own mp Gravity spamming or your Co healer if they died etc.

Thing with these cards though is they indirectly increased damage rather than directly so people didn't see the effects of these as well but every card apart from Spire(and this is SB only in HW mnk would love the Spire) increased damage dealt just Balance was the best for it.

[YusiKha]

If any card was called the card of shame in SB(none were this is actually the first I have heard of this moniker) it would've been Spire...
Only 1 card was functionally useless Spire

Spire and Ewer were two of the strongest cards because of their Royal Road effect (~3x power). It wasn’t as effective in solo or light party content, but none of the RR effects were great in that scenario either.

[HyoMinPark]

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

The point of what I was saying clearly went completely over your head.

I never said we lost MA. I said it gave use to the cards we did not need at the time. And it had a lot more variance to it then than it does now. Now. It’s all just lore of the same. I’d rather have my old Lord and old Lady back. Having an extra single-target oGCD was nice, and it felt more rewarding to turn an unneeded-Spire into a free oGCD damage card.

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.

That’s not how probability works in practice.

......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.

Heaven forbid we have complexity and decision-making involved in a job. You can also drop the WHM strawman because we aren’t talking about WHM. AST is only cumbersome now because of how the cards function—and things like the new Sleeve Draw making it a nightmare for controller users. It’s not complex in terms of decision-making. Cards go to the highest damage dealers with no real variance. You don’t make strategic plays anymore.

I’d rather decision-making return to AST than be like: “Oh? Balance? SAM card.” “Bole? BLM/SMN card.” “Not the Seal I need? Minor Arcana for another damage card for the SAM/BLM/SMN.” It’s a lot more engaging to draw something like an old Spear and consider if it would be strategic to play it on the BRD or MNK, or opt to Redraw instead.

Besides, I’m not a fan of single-target padding. Which is all you do now.

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.

Disagree. Minor Arcana’s addition in SB was wonderful for giving things we didn’t need a use. You did have to care about whether or not you MA’d a card or did something else with it—it was all part of that decision-making aspect of AST that has been sucked out of it.

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?

No, Balance fishing didn’t matter in “the average Duty Finder”. I ran all kinds of content on AST in HW and SB. I was never once complained at for not Balance padding someone’s dungeon pull.

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.

I take it you never did anything beyond a dungeon? Because it was relatively easy to feel MP strains in something like a 24-man or an 8-man if one was simply trying to keep up the Always Be Casting mentality. Even without having to do much Raising.

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.

I played AST more than any job in SB. Never once had a tank cry at me for giving them Boles. This sounds like you dramatically skewing things you read about a couple times on the Internet.

Spire and Ewer were two of the strongest cards because of their Royal Road effect (~3x power). It wasn’t as effective in solo or light party content, but none of the RR effects were great in that scenario either.

I think they’re talking more about using it for the TP regen as opposed to Royal Road. Spire was pretty useless in terms of its intended card effect in SB. Not so much in HW, though.

[PyurBlue]

Not an AST, never been an AST, but just peering in from the outside, wouldn't having all the cards be equally good all the time kind of make the RNG/astrology/divination aspect of the system a bit pointless?

After all, the fates are not always kind.

The cards don't have to be equally good all the time, but if they're situational then RNG is a hindrance. The change that I think AST needs along with more varied cards is the ability to choose which card you get. Balance fishing didn't come from nowhere, it was the result of DPS being more useful more often than anything else. The other cards had at least some value, but if they came up at the wrong time they were useless. We had some tools to mitigate that like MA, but for me it felt like a loss to convert an unwanted card.

As far as how being able to choose cards would work in the lore, we have the echo which lets us avoid unfavorable situations already, why couldn't we apply it to AST cards?

[Jandor]

The cards don't have to be equally good all the time, but if they're situational then RNG is a hindrance. The change that I think AST needs along with more varied cards is the ability to choose which card you get. Balance fishing didn't come from nowhere, it was the result of DPS being more useful more often than anything else. The other cards had at least some value, but if they came up at the wrong time they were useless. We had some tools to mitigate that like MA, but for me it felt like a loss to convert an unwanted card.

I guess I just always assumed it was part of the appeal of AST, a gamblers job, with all the highs and lows that would imply.

Don't get the joys of an awesome streak of excellent cards without sometimes experiencing the lows of string of bad luck.

[MitsukiKimura]

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.

You don't know MP Struggles until you have people dying in your savage raid parties as an AST. One Rez is enough to crush your MP regen to dangerous levels. On Titan? You'd wish you had that Ewer Card.

[HyoMinPark]

I guess I just always assumed it was part of the appeal of AST, a gamblers job, with all the highs and lows that would imply.

Don't get the joys of an awesome streak of excellent cards without sometimes experiencing the lows of string of bad luck.

This is honestly a mood.

It could be incredibly annoying to get a Spread Spire, Drawn Spire, AOE Royal Road with Lady of Crowns in a Sleeve Draw—and you’d just be sitting here like “ugh what are these cards”. And then the next time you use Sleeve, you get the god-tier Sleeve of Spread Balance, Drawn Balance, AOE Royal Road with Lord of Crowns. I liked that about Sleeve. The lows made the highs great.

[PyurBlue]

I guess I just always assumed it was part of the appeal of AST, a gamblers job, with all the highs and lows that would imply.

Don't get the joys of an awesome streak of excellent cards without sometimes experiencing the lows of string of bad luck.

I've never liked gambling, so maybe it's a me problem partially. One of the things that I found myself enjoying with AST, and still focus on with the current version of the class, is supporting the rest of the party. It was never about luck, but helping everyone achieve the best that they could. The more control I have over that, the more accomplished I feel for succeeding and the more I feel the drive to improve when I fail.