What are the AST changes that everyone wants, realistically speaking.

[ThorneDynasty]

Ultimately it's most likely not even the developers' fault, SE as a producer is ridiculously stingy with servicing one of their most reliable source of income, but clownshoe timeghost nonsense projects get infinite production values. One can only hope the upscaling of the infrastructure after the uptick in the game's popularity will eventually show in-game too. But the pessimist in me says that Square is just complacent they can find the sweetspot where they can squeeze the maximal amount of subscriptions while putting the minimal investment in. It's not until people literally can't register into the games because it's technically impossible to handle the logins with the amount of servers they have when they wake up.

And yeah, you can make the valid point that simply throwing more designers and programmers at the project isn't an immediate panacea. But some of the prominent points of criticism go back several years already, and some all the way back to 2.0 launch. At this point I have zero patience for deflecting any reasonable improvements to say, the glamour system, because "spaghetti code". It's been almost a decade, the rookie programmers would be vets by now. The number of players who've put over a thousand dollars into this game is going to grow less trivial by the month. At some point you have to stop saing "we've been sitting on this problem but it takes so much manhours to fix", or "well you just have to accept jobs are going to be more shit since there's so many and balancing is hard and there's only so many designers". The honeymoon period with your playerbase is going to end when the players start feeling like they put more into the game than the production company does.

[HyoMinPark]

Ultimately it's most likely not even the developers' fault, SE as a producer is ridiculously stingy with servicing one of their most reliable source of income. . . . And yeah, you can make the valid point that simply throwing more designers and programmers at the project isn't an immediate panacea. But some of the prominent points of criticism go back several years already

I disagree. You have to hold the developers at fault to a certain extent because healer balance has been wonky ever since HW when AST was first introduced. It and WHM have always been at odds with one another because WHM has nothing to compete with AST’s raid buffs; suggestions to give WHM something like Bravery were repeatedly ignored. AST itself has always been a balancing nightmare, be it because of the card system or because of its old Sects.

The development team have no dedicated healer mains. I don’t think it’s impossible for them to find at least one person to dedicate to healer design and healer combat—but if they’re unwilling or unable to do that, then perhaps they should listen to the repeated feedback given from the people who play the role and play it extensively. I don’t think there’s ever been a period where the healers weren’t getting rightful criticism; AST especially.

I don’t consider the dev team entirely blameless when it comes to the state of the job, or the state of the healer role altogether.

So, the "big AST rework" is just changing the cards and they're literally relying on the players to do their job for them and are confused because we're not telling them what to do clearly enough. Please look forward to it.

I don't know, I guess I didn't expect anything better...

I’m not even surprised that it’s just the cards. That seems like the highest point of contention when it comes to veteran ASTs and people that have only been playing the job since ShB or EW. And that they don’t know what to do really doesn’t surprise me because that’s been obvious for several years now when it comes to healers in general.

A part of me can’t help but hope this might mean the return of Royal Road or some other old elements if the changes are related to the card system. But I’m sure it will just be card effects or durations, and any aspect of AST’s original job will stay in the bin. :/