How could you do this to AST?

[ASkellington]

Well here's the thing, the AST playerbase complains about how the old cards were taken out. As it was pointed out by you, ALL THOSE CARDS WITH THE EXCEPTION OF 3 WERE SITUATIONAL. You don't want situational, yet you want the old card system back? They changed it to the current one BECAUSE YOU PEOPLE DIDN'T WANT SITUATIONAL. But people want the old one back. Here's the thing... IF YOU WANT THE OLD CARD SYSTEM BACK, YOU'RE GOING TO GET SITUATIONAL CARDS. NOW EITHER YOU WANT THEM BACK, MEANING YOU WANT THE OLD SYSTEM, OR YOU DON'T, MEANING YOU WANT THE CURRENT SYSTEM. THERE IS NO IN BETWEEN!

Now that I've had ample time to think about it, there is a way we could have the old cards back by lessening RNG. I'll even give two ways to go about it:

Chronos' passive from SMITE
or
Drawing cards on a set rotation

* Note that both of these options straight up require Divination be separate from the seals system like it is in PvP

So for tl;dr of Chronos' passive: in SMITE he has 4 quadrants with his 2 ability used to activate them. The passive acts like a clock and when you press 2 you stop on which ever quadrant it lands on and use it's effects while underneath the duration. Same thing could be applied to AST cards. You control when the draw happens and what card you draw. Does this mean we'll get more consistent Balance uses instead of everything else, yes. But, it also gives us a greater chance of being able to use Ewer/Bole when we want instead of hoping to draw it at the right time.

Drawing cards on a set rotation (i.e. Balance--->Arrow--->Spear--->Bole--->Ewer--->Spire repeat) is also an option. You know when you're going to draw X card cause its in order. Redraw could be used to skip over a card. "I don't need Ewer or Spire at this time", Redraw x2 you're now at Balance, or w/e rotation you want to use.

Neither of these are really perfect. With the card cycle you still have a bit of RNG to factor because it could be missaligned very easily (I played alot of Chronos, I should know) and personally I haven't found away to make Sleeve Draw/Redraw have uses with this.
With the rotation, depending on what order its in could have some problems. Again, Sleeve Draw has no use in this system, or I haven't thought of a good one since I've booted Seals out, and it also doesn't fix the problem of "redraw til you get what you want" aka Balance.

Point is, we could have old cards, with adjustments, we just need to think outside the box.

As for OP's post, I called Nocturnal being removed in 6.0 ages ago. Neutral sect exists, Noct was heavily critizised (either for how much mana its abilities costed at the beginning of 5.0 or for being less efficient than Diurnal), and even the community wanted it to be removed. I don't like it since AST is already WHM but with cards and more lore purging (also, wtf are they going to do for the SB questline? doesn't it call for Noct Asp. Benefic?) and there's 0 news on if they're going to alter/change the card system again. /shrug Here's to hoping we get a unique healing playstyle come 6.0