Endwalker AST has too many buttons, and other issues

[rewd]

I don’t think you know what hyperbole means if you’re calling my posts to you hyperbolic. You seem to be fixating on the “you can hold a card for the entire fight” when myself and QooEr are only responding to an example YOU brought up.



AST cards actually used to have a timer. You couldn’t hold them indefinitely. That is purely a ShB AST and onwards thing—which was when the card system became so divisive and when Play came into existence. Play itself was also a controversial addition in ShB; and it didn’t help that it had issues with delay in the beginning. Before, you could only hold them for 30 seconds; and there was honestly very little reason to remove said countdowns in the first place. With the way bursts now work in this game at static intervals of 60 seconds (barring those weird examples that directly contradicted the changes the devs wants to make in EW of lining buffs up to 60-second intervals), there is little reason to hold a card unless you are allowing Draw to drift or missing casts of it. Which is suboptimal play. Even those weird examples of 90 seconds (Astrodyne being one of them), cards would still line up as 90 is divisible by 30.

The hyperbole is saying that you could potentially hold a card for the entire fight because cards have no timer. I'm saying you shouldn't base your rebuttal on this hyperbole (and not that your posts are hyperboles...) because then you are missing the point (hence looking at my finger and not the moon). Whether you drift the cooldown by one second or 500 seconds (going by extremes) doesn't matter, you still can drift and it feels bad. Lady and Lord are usually cards you don't use right away because you either have nothing to heal (Lady) or you are waiting for a scenario to maximize DPS, like an add phase (Lord). With everything going on in a fight (especially on AST), it's not out of the realm of possibility to hold a card for more than 60s waiting for the best opportunity to use it, especially if you can't physically see the cooldown of MA.

Minor Arcana and Crown Play being different buttons is justified with the current design but it is not necessary as you could simply introduce a very easy fix (timer on cards? cooldown shown on the arcana gauge?) and merge the buttons. This is different from DNC's case, for example, where there is no justification at all for Fan Dance IV and Starfall Dance being different buttons when they could simply change from Flourish and Devilment without any problem.

As for the edited part of your comment, it feels a bit out of place as I never mentioned Draw and Play but only MA. I guess the situation is a bit iffy there as Draw has 2 charges now.