I wish AST never had a DPS buff

[Seoulstar]

Fair enough. Just I feel the post-5.0 claims trying to downplay the balance card's popularity are misleading.

A bit of a late response..but I was not trying to downplay balance. I know it was a popular card. But what I don't agree with is how people are going as if it was the only card AST mains wanted and had a balance or bust mentality. Also yes, spear and arrow were changed. But arrow could be used for other ways than DPS. For instance, when things got a bit hectic, I loved using an enhanced arrow on myself to get my heals off faster.

There was so much you could do with the old cards, but now it's just balance balance balance. Yes, there were people in high end content that had the balance or bust mentality and felt that RNGesus hated them because they weren't constantly getting balance. But those people were not the entire AST community as a whole. If they were, then SE would have got much better response to the card changes. With that being said, I am glad some are happy with just getting balance. But for far too many it was a terrible decision that made many drop the class.

[Rai_Takara]

It's easy to claim this retroactively.

Every log I reviewed of high end AST players as balance, balance, balance. If another card got played, it was because their RNG wasn't playing nice. Not to mention the complaint that old versions of spear and arrow weren't useful, leading to them being changed to DPS buffs, albeit lesser ones, even before the expac.

Exactly, top ASTs were doing it because it was the best option. It wasn't really a vocal minority that pushed for this, it was the raiding community as a whole and SE saw the writing on the wall.

One thing I do notice from all these healer suggestions is, usually people aren't sure what they want. They just want something different. However, if I recall correctly, this has always been the case on these forums, even during the supposed "good" times. I understand people want healing to be different but perhaps SE has decided this is how healing will forever be.

[Bsrking5]

I understand people want healing to be different but perhaps SE has decided this is how healing will forever be.

SE already said they want healers to be a heal centered, ie pure healer. Which doesn't line up with healing demand in most cases. Honestly I hate how homogenized the balance for 5.0 is, not just healers, all jobs.

[Saefinn]

SE already said they want healers to be a heal centered, ie pure healer. Which doesn't line up with healing demand in most cases. Honestly I hate how homogenized the balance for 5.0 is, not just healers, all jobs.

Yep. I think this is kinda where they've missed the mark.

Gutting what we do in our downtime and adding more to our healing kit doesn't make a job more healing focused. Blue Mage proves this. It's the job with the strongest healing focus (when a healer) in the content it does despite having the least healing spells and a butt load of DPS ones.

They could keep everything they've gutted out, you could have the most complex DPS rotation in the world and the healing focus would remain exactly the same.

This is simply because your healing focus is determined by mechanics requiring you to heal and the tools you have available to handle it. If those tools handle it super well, then your healing focus is small.

And I think if that healing focus is small, then we need a different focus to keep us entertained between healing.

Actually I think it would be a smarter idea to give us more to do in our downtime and start adding more and more content that pushes our healing abilities harder. To me, this is how you improve a healing focus. It'd pretty much be a waste to retroactively make all old content more healer focused, healers will still have solo stuff to do and not all new content will be a challenge (to suit people of different levels) you will still get healer downtime, so make that more interesting. Then by adding more content that push healer checks, you'll get more of a pure healing focus.

[Rai_Takara]

SE already said they want healers to be a heal centered, ie pure healer. Which doesn't line up with healing demand in most cases. Honestly I hate how homogenized the balance for 5.0 is, not just healers, all jobs.

If you're referring to the snippet back before ShB release about healers being tuned with healing in mind, that's a mistranslation. What Yoshi meant was that healers would rely less on shielding and mitigation and rely on healing spells and ogcds. The current healer designs fit that goal. I think SE knows exactly what they want from healers and that's why they've kept it as such. After all, this was the expansion, this was their chance, and they seemingly balanced all healers better than they have ever before.

Actually I think it would be a smarter idea to give us more to do in our downtime and start adding more and more content that pushes our healing abilities harder. To me, this is how you improve a healing focus. It'd pretty much be a waste to retroactively make all old content more healer focused, healers will still have solo stuff to do and not all new content will be a challenge (to suit people of different levels) you will still get healer downtime, so make that more interesting. Then by adding more content that push healer checks, you'll get more of a pure healing focus.

I don't think they need to add healing checks. But you are right, they should add more things to do between healing downtimes. I think this aspect of healer is the most engaging (aside from saving a run that goes south real fast).

[Dyvid]

The issue isn't AST's DPS buff, it's the other healers lack thereof. SE needs to change course in 6.X and start designing Healer/Support jobs rather than "pure" healing.

[Archwizard]

No, the ultimate issue with the AST cards was the randomness. What makes the current implementation work (despite its inherent clunkyness for controller players) is the guarantee of granting your party a damage up even if it's at its absolute weakest.

Which is why I would argue that Lord/Lady of Crowns should be reworked to no longer be affected by the card used to transform it, but just merged into one card with a flat buff regardless of role. Same functionality for Seal-fishing, but if you're getting buffs for the wrong roles, you have a backup option to further mitigate the RNG.

[Rasikko]

The issue isn't AST's DPS buff, it's the other healers lack thereof. SE needs to change course in 6.X and start designing Healer/Support jobs rather than "pure" healing.

I feel like they have or are reaching the end of the line with job creation because they keep complaining that it takes so much time to make a job.

[MitsukiKimura]

Anyone who says this card system is fine is only fooling you. This system has so much fishing for seals and cards constantly that you’ll be begging for more redraw stacks. I’ve had instances where I’ve drawn 6 melee cards in a row With sleeve draw and drawing after that. Same with the same seal, I drew 5 of the same seals in a row with no redraw stacks left. This literally happened just now when I was clearing E7S for the week. It’s pissing me off to have this class so Reliant on Rng on its main gimmick. They need to get rid of this awful seal system, fix sleeve draw because it’s a damn mess.

[Brandedblade]

Anyone who says this card system is fine is only fooling you. This system has so much fishing for seals and cards constantly that you’ll be begging for more redraw stacks. I’ve had instances where I’ve drawn 6 melee cards in a row With sleeve draw and drawing after that. Same with the same seal, I drew 5 of the same seals in a row with no redraw stacks left. This literally happened just now when I was clearing E7S for the week. It’s pissing me off to have this class so Reliant on Rng on its main gimmick. They need to get rid of this awful seal system, fix sleeve draw because it’s a damn mess.

Yeah. Ofc theres still rng. Theres still going to be times where you get the perfect set of cards you want for the fight and times you dont. The difference now is you're still providing a guaranteed effect that is universally wanted. But now bad RNG means a weaker damage effect as opposed to no damage gain. You can get away with playing the cards suboptimally and still get a guaranteed gain from it. If you're drawing nothing but melee cards in a savage fight, you likely have melee dps to throw them on, otherwise? from what I've seen so it's actually mathematically better to throw melee cards on tanks.

As I've said time and time before tying utility that needs to be planned around or be able to be used at a moments notice, like mana regen and damage mitigation, to RNG is a bad design, especially if combined with damage boosts in the same system.