Who else is worried about SE and Ast?

[Rai_Takara]

You may as well remove the base cards and draw only Lords and Ladies. We want the classes more engaging to play, you realise?

I mean, the purpose of cards is to build seals, and lord/lady exists to get rid of cards without messing up the seals. You want more engaging? Wait till next expansion when they expand on the seals concept.

The current cards are fine, in the sense that they are functional.
The weight and thought has been moved from 'quick decision-making' to 'memorise the burst phases of every class in the game, adjusting for downtime or mistakes' (or just yolo cards onto the highest dps melee/ranged).

You weren't guaranteed damage with the previous system, but you're also not guaranteed to get a 3 seal divination. Randomness is still part of the class, and when I join a normal raid with 4 ranged/caster, I roll my eyes and prepare for half of my cards to immediately become ShB Boles.

The only place where 3 seals isn't guaranteed is the opener, after which there's ample time. Worst case you don't? 4% damage which is still better than zero if you didn't draw anything worthwhile in the previous expansion. The jobs make more tuned for PF/Savage/Ultimate levels of gameplay and not per say dungeons or normal raids. Cases where having zero melee or zero ranged is virtually impossible. Plus, the old decision making part of it wasn't much to a seasoned AST. The meme of balance or bust comes to mind and if you didn't see that shiny card, it was redraw or minor arcana for the vast majority of draws.

I get what you're saying - but you shouldn't take a stanley knife to fun's gut for the sake of implementing a just-as-annoying-let-me-draw-a-bloody-ranged-card coin flip.

This is just opinion but job balance should be the primary decision making factor when it comes to job design. That's not to say AST can't be changed. All I've been stating is the current system is a good foundation to build and improve on, but that doesn't mean they'll go back to what it was in terms of having buffs be completely RNG as that system was flawed and the cost of fixing that was a new healer this expansion.

Imean... Something's pretty wrong when the competitively best healer is in less than 20% of parses, especially when you're saying it should be the most popular for that reason.

You say that but go look at SB. AST was the best healer hands down for prog and competition and yet, most people played WHM, the worst healer in that expansion. Popularity =/= competitiveness. People play jobs for different reasons, some aesthetics, some playstyle, some for the meta, etc.