Quote Originally Posted by Seraphor View Post
SO they were all useless. Right. So you're not sad to see them go then.

And Ninja, and in high level content, pretty much everyone with buff windows.
Expanded Arrow was a big no-no, but everyone still used it under the delusion that it was a DPS increase.


That's what I'm saying. From a balancing perspective, they either become essential and puts AST at a huge healing disadvantage, OR (is was the case most of the time) they were useless, which means they were a bonus when you did get them, putting AST at an unfair advantage in some very select situations.
But because this is weighed against their DPS output, this actually put them at a disadvantage in the meta.
AST was only ever selected in high end content for their raid buffs, specifically Expanded-Balance, and if the rng didn't smile on them, they single handedly tanked the entire raid.
The rest of the party do not give a single shit what your other cards did, they only needed you for the Balance. Except Bards, the Crit junkies.
You were raiding with some odd people if they didn't like getting expanded crit as well, free damage is free damage. If you even raid that is.

They weren't useless, if you read what I said their use was being royal roaded in the case of ewer, and bole could be used in niche circumstance, but was mostly used as a lesser option in the case of bad rng to give an enhanced card to a job. These are not being useless, they are the uses for the card, its just not as useful from its direct effect, and in the case of bole, the best thing imo about an rng class is having to adjust around bad rng as still make an "optimal" move, so if you adjusted correctly around a bole and threw out an enhanced card you were still being useful. AST was also selected because it was very good at solo healing iirc, most solo heals I saw used ast over the other 2. I raided all of SB with and without an AST at various times, people did give a shit about the other cards, getting expanded balance or crit under the trick+chain window was amazing, again arrow just needed adjustments maybe to being a dhit buff.

All of this is detracting from my initial point, that is you claiming it was objectively impossible to balance. It was not, it was just hard to balance. Every card had a use, just not necessarily all of their uses were to be played.