Who else is worried about SE and Ast?

[Limonia]

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?

[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.

[YusiKha]

snip

Or, like NIN and SMN, make Play a GCD.
Even a short GCD like Meditate would give you more time to switch targets (2.5s to target an ally, 1.2-2.5s to go back to the foe).

[Limonia]

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.

I think this will only really be useful in high end gameplay or with statics. For DF or PF content I don't know before the battle runs for a while who the "best DPS" even is. For example if I put it on a BLM and MNK and after a minute I notice how the BLM is an ice mage and the MNK ignores positionals, I can't put that buff on another DPS. If I even managed to in the first place, because someone pulled the boss immediately anyway. It may work theoretically, but I can already see me being annoyed at it.

I'd rather have Sleeve Draw replaced with a skill that makes the next card AoE or something like that.

[Lastelli]

Or, like NIN and SMN, make Play a GCD.
Even a short GCD like Meditate would give you more time to switch targets (2.5s to target an ally, 1.2-2.5s to go back to the foe).

That would change very little, I'm afraid.
Currently, you need to press a minimum of 3 to a maximum of 6 buttons to give a card to a dps player + 1 more button to go back to the boss if you're dpsing or 3-4 buttons to target the tank if you need to st heal them. Your suggestion would give a little more time (like and extra second) to deal with those buttons after you played the card, but the amount of buttons to press would still be a little overwhelming, especially when compared with what the other two healers have to deal with.
A quick look at healers' CPM (which doesn't include target shifting) makes it glaringly obvious that AST is pressing way too many buttons right now when played correctly, and something should be done to address this; AST currently has to press more buttons than any other caster and most dps jobs if you're playing with a controller. Controller users can't even use macros because they'd need 4 macros for play and 4 for minor arcana, and at that point the button bloat would be unbearable.

I think this will only really be useful in high end gameplay or with statics. For DF or PF content I don't know before the battle runs for a while who the "best DPS" even is. For example if I put it on a BLM and MNK and after a minute I notice how the BLM is an ice mage and the MNK ignores positionals, I can't put that buff on another DPS. If I even managed to in the first place, because someone pulled the boss immediately anyway. It may work theoretically, but I can already see me being annoyed at it.

I'd rather have Sleeve Draw replaced with a skill that makes the next card AoE or something like that.

You're not wrong, but I'm not sure tunnig skills around the possibility of having terrible players in your party is a good ide. As long as other party members are not totally incompetent, the difference is actually very small. Also, that's why I included the possibility of manually selecting a party member and override the effect of the buff: if you realize that you gave the favor (or whatever you wanna call it) to a bad player, you can just select another player and keep playing as you'd do now. And after the inevitable wipe caused by the bad player, change the target for the favors.

[ForteNightshade]

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.

While I like the idea of this in theory. It has the unfortunate side effect of completely trivializing Cards—more so than they already are. At this point, Astro becomes a budget White Mage since you'd seldom interact with its core gimmick.

[Lastelli]

While I like the idea of this in theory. It has the unfortunate side effect of completely trivializing Cards—more so than they already are. At this point, Astro becomes a budget White Mage since you'd seldom interact with its core gimmick.

As you said yourself, cards are already trivial. There's a set priority system and you don't deviate from it. Right now, the only "challenging" aspect is the actual execution, in the sense that it's practically annoying to do. As much as I dislike how the game is becoming more and more easy in terms of rotations and such, AST is simply unjustifiably uncomfortable to play with respect to its peers, the biggest offender being manual targeting for cards allocation. Playing AST using a controller is nothing short of nightmarish.

[MitsukiKimura]

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.
.

You still have RNG of dancing between melee and ranged dps cards. I've lost count how many times it has danced between arrow and balance back and forth wasting my redraw stacks as I'm trying to weave them in with malefic. People who loved AST adapted to it, people who were lazy and only fished for balance were sub par at AST, granted balance was the best card, it was not efficient to waste time going for it 100% of the time. You seemed to forgot that we had Minor arcana that turned our Spire or Ewer to a Instant heal card which was lovely to have on stand by since we did not have stacks of ED and the potency wasn't as good back then. Having the cards all straight dps buff does not reflect lore or bring any sort of uniqueness of gameplay to it. It needs to change, you can't respect lore of other things about FF if you cannot acknowledge lore of a class that its card system is the Main reason it stands apart from other healers.

[Lastelli]

You still have RNG of dancing between melee and ranged dps cards. I've lost count how many times it has danced between arrow and balance back and forth wasting my redraw stacks as I'm trying to weave them in with malefic. People who loved AST adapted to it, people who were lazy and only fished for balance were sub par at AST, granted balance was the best card, it was not efficient to waste time going for it 100% of the time. You seemed to forgot that we had Minor arcana that turned our Spire or Ewer to a Instant heal card which was lovely to have on stand by since we did not have stacks of ED and the potency wasn't as good back then. Having the cards all straight dps buff does not reflect lore or bring any sort of uniqueness of gameplay to it. It needs to change, you can't respect lore of other things about FF if you cannot acknowledge lore of a class that its card system is the Main reason it stands apart from other healers.

That's a very biased way to look at it. In previous expansions, cards were an "all or almost nothing" mechanic. Either you got lucky with your draws, or you simply had to be satisfied with an extremely suboptimal result. Lord/Lady? They didn't even come close to the utility provided by an aoe balance.
Right now, even if you don't get the card you want, you're not losing much in terms of utility. This is always true, be it because you wanted a melee card instead of a ranged card, or because you couldn't prep 3 different seals for divination, bad luck doesn't screw you too much and you're losing very little in terms of actual support. In HW and SB, on the other hand, spire/ewer/bole direct effect (tp/mp regen and damage mitigation) had very little utility in most scenarios and were close to useless in a well coordinated party because tanks and healers would map all their cds to deal with all the dangerous mechanics.

I can understand if you tell me that you prefer variety. But the argument that "fishing is worse than before" or that "there were no useless cards before 5.0" is not convincing.

Gameplay consistency > Lore btw. Lore is already butchered in this game anyway.

[Boomsmash]

Gameplay consistency > Lore btw. Lore is already butchered in this game anyway.

Nope. All the nope. And you have it wrong. The effects before had lore consistent with gameplay. It was about surfing probability and adapting, a lot like Dancer's mechanics. People can complain about those too of course but that's just what the devs thought would be fun.

For the cards, there was the random chance and ways to influence it, to make the most of what you got or adapt to a changing situation. Making arguments that such and such is useless in Savage/Extreme/Ultimate statics makes your argument invalid. 99% of the players don't live in those. You can't argue that class mechanic was too hard and then be calling the fights too easy. Doesn't work that way.

DPS have DPS buffs. Tanks have defense buffs. Healers have healing buffs. Then there are the weird and wonderful classes that have a bit of a mix. Instead of reveling in that or playing another class in the role that fit your notion of the play style, you wanted AST reduced to some uninteresting, "optimized" slurry.

If you can't stand that it won't always be "optimal", don't play it. I'd rather have my Healer Improvisation back.