AST fix ever?

[Mansion]

Jesus girl you ever played AST?... dmg boost is the only thing that a party need? We talking about the same game? Final Fantasy 14? Defense and survivability far overpriority than dps as even mp regen as you cant do anything without mp or without life. Maybe in atom savage raids (what is meaningles even they existence) its works but in any other raid damage boost is simply useless. Dont have meaning for its existence in any way. AST always was an utility support healer, not a dps. And it was perfect in it. I saved whole groups even in roulette raids with an aoe bole card and keep up the aoe crit card for places where needs fast short burst in mechanic. Need to know the bosses and they mechanics to adapt with ast to it. Not easy, yes, for me needed years to learn all but then i already knew what use where. Even spire... when the bards and mchs depleted they tp in seconds in aoe burst. Now the cards not even worth to waste time with them. The boost they gives are worthless even in savage raids cause too small and too overcomplicatedly rng. If they dont want unique char then simply copy holy paladin from wow or druid. This is my point of viev and as i could used ast in every situation perfectly well, i wont change my mind for anything.

You are stretching the old cards value by a large amount. "TP regen for AoE burst" wasn't a thing, as it was used un dungeons and people had Tactician / Goad / Motivation if needed (because they are reliable) rather than hoping for a Spire. And as I said, it was for dungeons, TP regen would be enough in between packs of trash.

So yes, DMG was the most valuable, and "defense and survivability" are nothing relevant for the card system when you had shields / collective unconscious / a co healer / party mitigation that you knew would be available. You couldn't hope for a Bole to save anyone. Yes I'm sure someone has a story about that one time they saved a situation thanks to a Bole, but it isn't needed thanks to all the mitigation we have now.

Arguably, I think people miss Royal Road, the old Minor Arcana, Arrow and perhaps the occasional Ewer (but MP regen could have been easily fixed otherwise, and it seems to be coming at last in 5.3). Spear was valuable when Crit was interesting in the Crit meta we had, but they nerfed it so that this kind of buff isn't that valuable anymore.
But yes, DMG buff were what made AST so desirable and OP in the first place. As its healing was on par/better than WHM's own healing.

[MintnHoney]

Yes I'm sure someone has a story about that one time they saved a situation thanks to a Bole, but it isn't needed thanks to all the mitigation we have now.

Conversely, none of those situations are possible anymore at all, because Bole (and, in fact, the rest of the cards) can no longer function in a way that make a significant difference for critical moments. Which is part of the class fantasy: being able to take critical moments and "manipulate fate" to work around the undesirable outcome.
Now, AST must either power through with healing (yay, bad habits!), or (though it's usually "and") they have to stay the course and hope someone else finds a way. They now have a significantly more passive role, in direct contrast to their unusually high APM potential (which is why many ASTs used to find themselves not even bothering).

To that end, I would say a majority of AST players, who miss the old cards, myself included, typically enjoyed having the ability to significantly manipulate/alter battle situations in the moment, which is completely lost on a system of only being able to keep up a constant slow burn (made even slower when you're not working with the tippy topiest of the top players, in only the endiest of end-game raids).

I do agree that TP regen was not truly a big thing for the cards, but, truthfully, it wasn't really much of a thing at all (hence the removal of TP requirements from actions). To that end, that same majority of AST players sought a suitable replacement for the card itself, rather than the whole deck.

[Mansion]

Conversely, none of those situations are possible anymore at all, because Bole (and, in fact, the rest of the cards) can no longer function in a way that make a significant difference for critical moments. Which is part of the class fantasy: being able to take critical moments and "manipulate fate" to work around the undesirable outcome.
Now, AST must either power through with healing (yay, bad habits!), or (though it's usually "and") they have to stay the course and hope someone else finds a way. They now have a significantly more passive role, in direct contrast to their unusually high APM potential (which is why many ASTs used to find themselves not even bothering).

To that end, I would say a majority of AST players, who miss the old cards, myself included, typically enjoyed having the ability to significantly manipulate/alter battle situations in the moment, which is completely lost on a system of only being able to keep up a constant slow burn (made even slower when you're not working with the tippy topiest of the top players, in only the endiest of end-game raids).

I do agree that TP regen was not truly a big thing for the cards, but, truthfully, it wasn't really much of a thing at all (hence the removal of TP requirements from actions). To that end, that same majority of AST players sought a suitable replacement for the card itself, rather than the whole deck.

Fully agree.
Actually, although the flavour of each card (Minor Arcana included) did have an importance for me, personally what I miss the most in AST now is Royal Road. I loved the card set-up it allowed, compared to the card-spitting machine we can be with Sleeve Draw now. If we just had Royal Road back, I'd be quite happy, even if all cards have the same effect.

[QooEr]

You couldn't hope for a Bole to save anyone. Yes I'm sure someone has a story about that one time they saved a situation thanks to a Bole, but it isn't needed thanks to all the mitigation we have now.

it wasnt about "hoping" for a bole. a lot of times during savage or ultimate prog you would **hold** onto a bole for a hard hitting mechanic, especially at minimum ilv. the issue was that using utility cards "wasted" your royal road, which means itll be harder to get an expanded balance next time around.

[Mansion]

"preparing" a Bole meant a DPS loss. You can call it what you want, FFXIV endgame is just DPS. More DPS is less things to deal with, that's it.
I'm having a hard time believing AST planned Boles for prog (at least, I didn't) when shields (espiecially with a SCH) and mitigation are 1 reliable 2 not a DPS loss 3 arguably more efficient.

As I said, if it popped at the right time, great. On the tank in a dungeon that you outgear, outlevel, so you can perhaps sneak one more DPS spell (if the tanks plays correctly too), fine.
But using all card tools for DPS (be it Balance, Spear or Arrow) was more efficient in the mindset of raiding.
Now if you think healers should heal and buff defense, well you are free to think so. That's not a commonly shared opinion in FFXIV though.

[QooEr]

"preparing" a Bole meant a DPS loss. You can call it what you want, FFXIV endgame is just DPS. More DPS is less things to deal with, that's it.
I'm having a hard time believing AST planned Boles for prog (at least, I didn't) when shields (espiecially with a SCH) and mitigation are 1 reliable 2 not a DPS loss 3 arguably more efficient.

obviously dps is all that matters once you can reliably kill a fight, but just as you didnt save boles for prog i know people who have, including myself. the dps loss does not matter during prog Because youre trying to see more of the fight. once you know how to deal with mechanics without that bole you can go back to holding the dps cards.

instead of fixing the issues by giving us a way to be able to use the utility cards without sacrificing RR, give more uses for cards so cards other than the balance could get legitimate use, or force every card to appear in cycles so one can rely or actually plan around certain cards, they just threw the whole system to the trash.

kind of reminds me how instead of just making aetherflow have no cooldown when outside of combat so ppl didnt have to wait, they just decided to make it impossible to use it outside of combat.

[Ilenya]

They should probably rename the entire role of "Healer" to "Combat Support" or something, to better reflect their actual playstyle.

Why do I feel like this would get more people to play healers?

[KDSilver]

"preparing" a Bole meant a DPS loss. You can call it what you want, FFXIV endgame is just DPS. More DPS is less things to deal with, that's it.
I'm having a hard time believing AST planned Boles for prog (at least, I didn't) when shields (espiecially with a SCH) and mitigation are 1 reliable 2 not a DPS loss 3 arguably more efficient.

You are right. I agree. I can't disagree, this is true.
However... except if you're running with the same (good) static 100% of the time and only stick to savage as the content you do...
Most FFXIV experience "sadly" can't be summed up by that.

When you help least experienced player, when you run other content such as dungeon, r24, deep dungeon, eureka.
I understand it might not matter to a lot of people (precisely raider only), but for me, it does.

As much as I enjoy raiding and optimizing myself (so, going for the full dps cards and balance fishing with some of my old static), I also enjoyed "saving" the day with some bole and ewer elsewhere for some progging or anything else.

What I'm trying to say is, as much as it's true that dps is king in this game, the first requirement for this is playing really good (mitigating damage, performing your rotation well, good oGCD healing timing, doing mechanic properly...)
And perfect scenario is not what you meet everyday if you play this game with several player on different content.
I can't suddenly make them play better in 2s. Instead, I had some option to cover these situation. And I miss that flexiblity of gameplay with AST.

That's all.

[Mansion]

snip

I got a bit derailed by the flow of the discussion, but essentially I'm on that side. While I did not rely on bole effect or whatever, I did enjoy having 6 cards, 3 royal roads and two Minor Arcana.

I agree with QooEr about how they thought they fixed AST when in reality they created even more problems. But it would be very difficult to make support other than DPS boost in a game like FFXIV where everything boils down to DPS.

[Zolvolt]

playing astro is way more fun than it ever was before shb. The old card system was extremely frustrating when you got anything that wasn't balance, or crit when crit replaced CDR. While its nice to pretend TP, MP, Damage reduction or skillspeed were useful cards it was ultimately more than pretending they were useful was fun. I'm tired of seeing threads of people asking to fix a job that is incredibly fun to play with a plethora of decisions to make. One of the biggest most frequent decisions is who to use cards on and how to use the cards you draw and I hope they never go back to what we had before.