Final Fantasy XIV’s healer problem and how it’s kind of unsolvable

[KDSilver]

The old cards system was balanced around 3 offensive cards and 3 non-offensive cards.
Some were more desirable than other, but it was really up to the player to decide how he wanted to play depending of many factors as Content, party composition, player mindset (preferences) and what's happening right now in the fight.

YES x 1000
I wish more people would actually understand that it was all about in what environment you were in that made your gameplay flexible with cards.
You could go full buff with solid savage parties with no mistake... to carefull with some bole and ewer with less experienced players. You could wander around Eureka and some other content throwing some defensive or offensive buff depending on your actual real needs.
It was not all about "duh, balance".
Any real good AST player who has played this game on many scenario can tell this.
And it's frustrating because that's what made this job so awesome to play. You had your basic healer responsabilities which already vary with your party and the content, but since healing alone as we know it has its limit, this mini-game made AST so refreshing to play and never ever a run was the same.
You actually felt really useful and helpful because you could save and prevent some death or stressful moment.
I have so many exemple in mind...

Anyway... Thank you for saying it.

[GrimGale]

You can have RNG and then skills around to mitigate it.

Royal Road was such system. Same with Minor Arcana. You could still make undesired cards useful. With a charge system, you could play around RNG even more.

Royal road was great imo. It allowed AST to manipulate the nature of its buffs, which I believe made AST so unique and would currently allow to fill the prevalent healing downtime.

[Tulzscha]

If the RNG system requires tools to remove all of the RNG, then what is the point?

This is my main issue.

The old system was all fishing for Balances, that was the optimum way to play it, and everyone wanted tools to manipulate the RNG so that you could more reliably fish for Balances.

I didn't say remove all the rng, just one or two cards out of six. GrimGale gets it; I didn't play much AST when they had those tools though, that sounds great. It's such a shame they ruined the cards, there are so many better ways they could have gone about them.

[Side-Eye]

You can have RNG and then skills around to mitigate it.

Royal Road was such system. Same with Minor Arcana. You could still make undesired cards useful. With a charge system, you could play around RNG even more.

Royal road was great imo. It allowed AST to manipulate the nature of its buffs, which I believe made AST so unique and would currently allow to fill the prevalent healing downtime.

It's really frustrating because I felt like Astro had a wonderful balance of defensive, offensive, and party support abilities -- the other two healers should have been brought CLOSER TO AST in that mindset of adaptability, instead of gutting the jobs to make them all similar in the most dumbed-down simplistic way.

[Crushnight]

The fact that crushnight and other hardcore raiders like them focusing on balance as a dps card being above all others is proof they were missing the entire point of the astrologian job as there is more battle content than just raids which was where the other cards shined, but since the hardcore community focuses purely on dps to exclusion of all else ignoring the fact that a clear is a clear as theres no reward for speed beyond beating enrage.

I must've missed the part where I said I only wanted balance, I just pointed out consistency was the old system's biggest flaw, consistency works for getting boles, arrows, spears, Ewers and yes even the odd spire, can't tell you the amount I times I wished for a single bole in dungeons with 0 cd tanks or a times where I raised entire party via lightspeed and I want an ewer just so I don't go oom while waiting for Lucid. Even getting the way to secure either the card you want for RR or using it, on a 2 min cd would go a long way to making old system better.

I raided a lot on healers prior to ShB but I also did everything else with them too, I fully understood that holding anything for too long was bad and minor arcana did wonders for allievating the old RR getting overwritten or dropping a card (lets face it aoe spire was very much the lowest point and minor arcana got rid of it as a possibility entirely).

Also really need to read some of my posts in other threads I am a huge supporter of getting old system back, if I really wanted consistent dmg buffs and only dmg buffs I wouldn't want that

I just know they are plenty enough people who enjoy current Ast, and honestly they want to see Ast improve too just with this current system so I do like to engage with them to see if any ideas of theirs seems like it may get me to enjoy Ast again.

[Recon1o6]

snip

my apologies, misinterpreted what you were getting at regarding consistency and I genuinely mixed up you and seraphor when scrolling

corrected my post

[Crushnight]

my apologies, misinterpreted what you were getting at regarding consistency and I genuinely mixed up you and seraphor when scrolling

corrected my post

No worries ^^

[GrimGale]

The balance card was incredibly potent. At some point it granted 20% flat increase in dps for 30s. With royal road you could make that 30% for 30 seconds. It was INSANE. You could even extend the duration twice, giving it 15s extra with Time Dilation, and 10 more with Celestial Opposition.

The trade off was, AST had weaker healing and damaging potencies over all, plus the fact that Balance was 1 out of six possibilities.

The balance was nerfed subsequently. First down to 10%. Then buffed to 15% then back down to 10%.

Clearly the card was an outlier in the system. But in shadowbringers rather than convert the card to a buff more in line to fit the rest, they just removed all the other effects and made each card a balance.

It would have been so easy to simply make Balance give 10% Determination.

Stats are already balanced out, why bother with homogenizing the cards.

[ForteNightshade]

If the RNG system requires tools to remove all of the RNG, then what is the point?

This is my main issue.

The old system was all fishing for Balances, that was the optimum way to play it, and everyone wanted tools to manipulate the RNG so that you could more reliably fish for Balances.

This is only true for the speed meta and parse runs. Bole had significant uses in dungeons, especially when dealing with less than optimal tanks. Both it and Ewer were invaluable during prog scenarios, and sometimes even held despite losing a card usage simply because it made things easier. Were they're uses as frequent? No. But they had a purpose. What could have been done to mitigate the problem is adding a second slot in Royal Road. Lets call them Left and Right for simplicity sake. Left slot can only hold Balance/Spear/Arrow and Right slot can only hold Bole/Ewer/Spire. Bam. Now you don't have utility based cards competing with damage cards. Additionally, you can now hold a Bole without losing a card system.

But speaking on the card usage. You're mistaken. While yes, you're technically placing them on Melee/Range now. This more or less ends up being the same handful of jobs. If your comp consists of say, SAM/DRG/DNC/SMN. The only time you'll consider the Dragoon or Dancer is during openers, reopeners or the better target already has a card. Samurai and Summoner will consistently be the higher damage dealers; with bursts that are more or less going to overlap with the others. Therefore, you really aren't making a decision. You're either looking at your parse to see the best DPS if it's with pugs, or you're prioritizing certain jobs.

Contrast that to Stormblood where Arrow had a use on Black Mage or Monk; Spear, in general was pretty good, but especially on Bard or Monk, and finally balance was universally good. So the problem here is balancing being a bit too strong but that could have been adjusted. What we have now is a new system no less an illusion of choice—possibly more so—that functionally makes almost the entire card system pointless. Seriously, delete all the cards and have Seals generate from new Lord/Lady. You've changed absolutely nothing. That is how shallow the new card system is, and why people dislike it.

[Seraphor]

Bole had significant uses in dungeons, especially when dealing with less than optimal tanks. Both it and Ewer were invaluable during prog scenarios, and sometimes even held despite losing a card usage simply because it made things easier.

And if you didn't draw them when you needed them? What then?

Their replacements, Celestial Intersection, and a more potent Lucid Dreaming, are far more useful than Bole and Ewer ever were.
AST could do with yet more MP regen admittedly, but Ewer is not the best avenue for that.

The only alternative I could reasonably support would be splitting it up into two 'pools' you can draw from, either draw from the 'healer' cards Bole, Ewer and Spire, (with Spire being like a heal card) or draw from the 'dps' cards, the other three.
At least then you'd have a 2/3 chance of getting the card you can mitigate/heal damage with, and redraw would make that guaranteed, and a 2/3 chance of specifically drawing a Bole.
Or perhaps change Minor Arcana into Bole and Ewer effects, so that no matter what card you draw, you can turn it into a healer/utility card instead of DPS.

As for the rest of your post on the dps cards... I simply don't agree.
Choosing between Ranged/Melee is no better or worse than choosing the jobs that better suit Speed/Crit/Flat Damage.

Perhaps it 'felt' better because you have it in your head that they do different things. And I suppose there is something to that, it's job fantasy, like using white magic or black magic even if they both just deal the same damage in the end. I don't completely discount the value of aesthetics.
But functionally, you as the AST don't feel the effects of the cards, you don't feel the extra speed from Arrow, or the extra Crit from Spear, you just 'know' that's what their effects are. Meanwhile the DPS themselves that are the recipients of these buffs are more than happy to just get a flat damage buff, and it causes far less controversy.

I've explained on these boards before, that the toxicity I've received from using the wrong cards on the wrong jobs, even accidentally, has far outweighed anything else I've ever had to deal with in this game. This has been removed with this new card system.
Meanwhile the best healing experience I've ever had in this game, was leveling AST from 70 to 80 in the first 2 weeks of Shadowbringers, before they received buffs in 5.01.