AST (and DRG) had their improvements pushed to 7.0 PLD are getting theirs in 6.3

[Renathras]

I feel like the AST (and DRG) changes are going to be SOMETHING significant, but they got put off by all the SAM/Kaiten complaints. They made that change thinking it would be a relatively simple one for accessibility and balance/tuning, and the SAM community has had a complete and total meltdown over it. I feel like that stayed the Devs' hand and now they won't make ANY changes that are not outright necessary until expansions going forward because they don't want to have to deal with that blowback and people seem to accept changes more when they come with an expansion.

For the cards, this also makes some sense as they may want to do some stat reworks and such, and if that's the case, they may be waiting for those. For example, say for the sake of argument they were going to rebalance crit to just be a chance and NOT increase crit damage. That would change gearing but would also change the value of things like Chain Strategem. It would also make a DH and Crit Card somewhat equal in power (vs today where Crit would automatically be better). So there may be some of that going on.

And for DRG, they said they weren't sure where to go with it now (like 5.X SMN), so...yeah.

[Liam_Harper]

I feel like the AST (and DRG) changes are going to be SOMETHING significant, but they got put off by all the SAM/Kaiten complaints. They made that change thinking it would be a relatively simple one for accessibility and balance/tuning, and the SAM community has had a complete and total meltdown over it. I feel like that stayed the Devs' hand and now they won't make ANY changes that are not outright necessary until expansions going forward because they don't want to have to deal with that blowback and people seem to accept changes more when they come with an expansion.

Which is a good thing. Because the community provided strong negative feedback over badly done changes that made no sense, the devs actually have to analyze their own jobs and make the toolkits enjoyable and work well.

The bad thing is that now they're forced to do something that should be standard, we have to wait an entire expansion because their job design team isn't actually capable of it. It demonstrates there are serious issues with their job design team and how few experienced developers are assigned to it.