Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[Soge01]

Healers used to be designed that way up until Stormblood… somehow.. the players that cried about fishing for balance on AST … translated into the nonsense we have now…

I miss old Astrologian and its tarot card system.

[whitemoonflower]

Healers used to be designed that way up until Stormblood… somehow.. the players that cried about fishing for balance on AST … translated into the nonsense we have now…

I miss old Astrologian and its tarot card system.

Not to mention the days when AST's job quests actually made sense. A friend of mine had to fill me in on what removed abilities they were even referring to.

[ASkellington]

I miss old Astrologian and its tarot card system.

Still asking for it to come back!

[Nethereal]

Old Ast's systems didn't work because of the way they have fights designed. All anyone wanted was Balance and some would literally click off an enhanced arrow.

I personally loved having a tank CD to give out but it was random and couldn't be used reliably, same with the other cards. Not to mention I think one of them was used to recover TP so with the removal of TP it was an easy choice for them.

Rework Ast cards or rework combat.

I think they failed in reworking the cards personally, they just made everything a balance and were done with it.

I get it though every single patch they have to go through and figure out every possible combination of card and how it would interact with everyone else.

Oh wait they didn't.

I feel the class could've been so much more fun and had much more identity if each card had its own cooldown and was simply a different skill.
Another Idea would be forcing a card rotation so it's no longer random but functions similar to bard's 'forced' song rotation. You have each card in a specific order with a skill that can choose between two preset of card orders and redraw being able to essentially skip a card in the order. One preset would have offensive cards in the front and the other defensive cards in the front.

Just me though.

[AngeliouxRein]

I’ll just say I will never understand that mindset to “fish for balance” even with so many AST mains back then telling them they could clear raids easily by also using arrow and spear… but alas…

I will agree that AST keeping 6 cards that do the same thing is redundant. The cards really need to go back to their tarot, diverse ways that helped the role truly feel like it was aligned with the stars and making use of any star reading we got through them. Sigh…. There just has to be another way for AST to go back to that feeling. I appreciate their attempt to make AST interesting with the mini rework this expansion… but it was no where near enough..

[Rilifane]

I’ll just say I will never understand that mindset to “fish for balance” even with so many AST mains back then telling them they could clear raids easily by also using arrow and spear… but alas…

I will agree that AST keeping 6 cards that do the same thing is redundant. The cards really need to go back to their tarot, diverse ways that helped the role truly feel like it was aligned with the stars and making use of any star reading we got through them. Sigh…. There just has to be another way for AST to go back to that feeling. I appreciate their attempt to make AST interesting with the mini rework this expansion… but it was no where near enough..

You can clear every raid doing or not doing a lot of things.
You can clear a raid without using Kardia. You can clear a raid not using Kaiten. You can clear a raid partnering the healer. You can clear a raid giving Dragon Sight to the tank.
None of that changes anything about one simple fact: FFXIV is not designed for utility and dps sharing the same cooldown.

There are edge cases during prog when you use everything you have to survive a mechanic. GCD heals, channeling Impro, aoe Bole, Vercure, Titan Egi and so on. Anything to survive so the pull continues and you can practice later mechanics. Outside those fairly rare and usually short-lived cases it may be possible to play whatever you got but in the end it's simply less effective than going for Balance. SE made the mistake of putting all cards on the same cooldown and the moment you didn't absolutely need to scrape for every little bit of mitigation and heal anymore, the utility cards were a nice thought but inferior to Balance.
It's not the playerbase's fault that SE designed it like that. You can't blame the playerbase for wanting to contribute as if it's something bad.
Sure, you were able to clear without ever using Balance, let alone fish for it.
But what contributed more to a run? An aoe Balance or a for fun Bole?

Don't get me wrong, I loved the old cards. I like the idea of a versatile buff healer. And it could've worked with some changes but if they re-introduced the cards as they were right now, it'd be even less viable to not go for Balance than it was in the past.
Sometimes you got really, really lucky and drew just the right card to save someone. Yes, it felt great to give the newly raised and out of MP co heal an Ewer. It felt great to slap an Enhanced Bole on a squishy tank.
But the majority of the content and situations isn't made for RNG utility sharing a cooldown with dps buffs when the entire game is heavily focused on dps above all.
I would like for AST to get its identity of a versatile buff healer back. But not with 1:1 old cards.

[Liam_Harper]

I’ll just say I will never understand that mindset to “fish for balance” even with so many AST mains back then telling them they could clear raids easily by also using arrow and spear… but alas…

I'll just say I will never understand that mindset to avoid "fishing for Freecure procs" even with so many WHM mains telling them they could clear raids easily by also using Cure and Cure II... but alas...

(Is it really that surprising players wanted to push the button that was useful to their team, instead of the useless flavor button?)

[Colt47]

This is effectively what the lead designer of this game told Healers in the latest live letter.

Consider if he had said that about your role (tank / dps) for a second and how you would feel.

Forget the leveling experience, it doesn't matter.

Forget dungeons up to 90, they don't matter.

Forget normal raids, EX's, and Savage, they don't matter.

If you want your job to be engaging, play Ultimate, the hardest content in the game that only a few percentage of actual players do.

Engagement shouldn't be either 0% or 100%. It shouldn't be either braindead easy in 95% of content or pull your hair out in the hardest thing the game offers.

Um... the engaging part of savage is having to get people that can do raids for three nights a week (not two), and have the strength to boot people who suddenly turn around and say they can't attend three days even though you posted it and said it numerous times that we have to go to three days, and then end up with a casual static instead of what you envisioned, which ultimately leads to burn out because it takes too long to clear the content.

I don't know what it is with people but I'm basically forced to run this tier five days a week because of wishy washy people who don't have the interest or inclination to progress on their own.

[Deceptus]

There are edge cases during prog when you use everything you have to survive a mechanic. GCD heals, channeling Impro, aoe Bole, Vercure, Titan Egi and so on. Anything to survive so the pull continues and you can practice later mechanics. Outside those fairly rare and usually short-lived cases it may be possible to play whatever you got but in the end it's simply less effective than going for Balance

Back in the day of being able to choose stats: Choosing Vit and melding vit to survive mechanics.

[AngeliouxRein]

Snippy...

Yup, I remember reading all of arguments about this. Here, Reddit, Youtube...it was a strong back and forth happening, peeps brining up their numbers, data, their own group performance on the matter... BUT... the AST mains in game got to me first when I was trying some of the raids in STB on my Lala. Too many had told me how to do it and not stress over balance card so much. This is an RNG system we're dealing with so "have fun with it" was their words. The "have fun with it" advice is what I rolled with from those Vets and was able to get through the raids I wanted to try. As long as I applied buffs to the right person, we were solid, it was a nice added challenge that made raids actually kind of fun for me. Of course, now I no longer have any desire to raid.

Which leads me to @Liam_Harper comment... Yes, it is hard for me to see why some of the AST mains stressed over balance. The pug groups I ended up with had no stress about it either. We had fun, arguments, jokes, hella jokes lol. We didn't stress over perfection or numbers. It was only if we were making absolutely no progress would someone make suggestions on when people should use their utilities and what not. As long as we made progress and eventually cleared, I never got stressed over which card I had at the moment.

But I'm not about to get that deep into that argument, since we can't even test it or anything anymore. I only wished, during a time that seemed like the devs were listening to players, that players asked for balance to just be changed into something else. SE obviously likes bole and increased attack speed when looking at Exaltation and Astrodyne. Only thing they needed to do was to find a different utility for balance. Something that wouldn't stress out players but also allow for it to be equally useful alongside the other cards. But, unfortunately, it looks like we could end up having all our cards deleted and become WHM 2 before that ever gets considered...