Who else is worried about SE and Ast?

[Lastelli]

I have a question for those people that say AST is fine besides MP management, and play with a controller. What do you think of the card system?
I'm actually not against the cards all being straight damage buffs (though it would have been more interesting if they still had different effects, just balanced out so that they are the same potency).
But without Royal Road all cards are single-target, and Sleeve Draw is extremely annoying.
What are you thinking about having to target all the DPS with a controller all the time?

It's painful. Honestly, I prefer having all cards be straight dps buffs like now, instead of having variety for the sake of it but half the cards being useless or rr fodder. The fact that the probability of repeatedly drawing bole/spire/ewer (and spear, when it had that ridiculous cd reduction effect attached to it) was non-zero is what made chose SCH over AST in previous expansions.

However, having to manually target party members with a controller is extremely annoying and uncomfortable, especially in the opener or during sleeve draw windows.

This is easy to solve though. Very easy. It's just that healers are not really a priority for the devs, as is pretty obvious by now. One possible solution I just came up with is the following.

Introduce 2 new skills that can't be activated during combat (so you use them before the pull):

Sun's Favor: grants the sun's favor to the target. Any Bole, Ewer and Spire played is redirected to the target if no other party member is selected -> You give it to your stronger ranged dps.
Moon's Favor: grants the moon's favor to the target. Any Balance, Spear and Arrow played is redirected to the target if no other party member is selected -> You give it to your stronger melee dps.

Basically, AST's version of closed position. This way, you'd only need to specifically target a party member during the sleeve draw window or if someone's dead.
This would also be useful for M&K players, since it's let them get rid of play macros.

Sure, it may not be the most elegant solution, but it would work. However, I'm afraid it won't happen. The devs have shown that they don't really put much thought into healers' gameplay and balance. SB lilies, and 5.0 minor arcana convinced me of this. They'll probably just buff AST again until more people play it and that's it.