I miss old AST cards

[SassyAssassin]

Me too fren

[IceBlueNinja]

The only time you should take that person's posts seriously is if at least 1 other person supports the claim with their own argument, which almost never happens.

SGE technically doesn't do everything SCH does to a tee, but it doesn't exactly bring much new to the table. I'd say 80% of the kit is recycled from SCH with some tiny twist, so I understand when people call it a clone.

whm/ast is the same thing too? there is barely any thing different from ast and whm other than ast having some now joke of a cards with the same boring effects, and better cheap mobility mp stuff.

[ForsakenRoe]

whm/ast is the same thing too? there is barely any thing different from ast and whm other than ast having some now joke of a cards with the same boring effects, and better cheap mobility mp stuff.

Eh AST/WHM at least has differences in how they heal, with AST having a plethora of HOT/delayed healing effects like celestial opposition, collective unconscious, earthly star, horoscope, now macrocosmos, so it's healing is based on rationing these tools out across the fight and not overspending them all on one raidwide and being dry for the next, WHM on the other hand seems to have ended up with a very GCD locked healing style, where the solution to every raidwide, no matter how far apart or close together, is 'uhh Rapture I guess', with Plenary indulgence to make Rapture stronger if needed. That's cool, differences like that. But SGE/SCH have literal copypaste skills, down to the potency, learn level, cooldown, etc. Ixochole and Indom are both 30s, 300p, cost one stack, and are learned at level 52. Druochole and Lustrate are both 600p, cost one stack, learned at level 45. Heck, even the 'adds a barrier equal to X% of healed' text got changed so the two are functionally identical (SCH Succor is 200p +160% shield, SGE E.Prognosis is 100p +320% shield). This would be fine if there was differences in the DPS rotation, but SGE and SCH also both have one dot, one nuke, one 'skill you pool charges of and dump in raidbuffs' aka Energy Drain and Phlegma, and 'one skill that you use for movement' aka Ruin 2 and Toxicon. Which is the worst offender, because Toxicon 1 is in the trailer, and it's nothing more than A: a movement skill that is also a damage loss to restore charges of, and B: replaced by a different animation almost as soon as you reach EW levels (82)

Cards are bad though, big agree, Astrodyne's 'reward' contributing less than 1% of your damage total is pathetic, Divination is another mindless 'oop 2mins up time to hit raidbuffs' (the discussion about the 2min meta sucking has been beaten to death, but the meta itself still lives, please change course and kill 2min meme for 7.0 SE). I don't remember who said it in a thread, but someone said 'If we gave WHM 'Bravery: Increases party member's damage by 6% for 15 seconds. 2 Charges, 30s CD', what's actually the difference between that, and the Cards as they are now? Absolutely nothing about the cards says 'fortune telling, fate bending' any of the identity I mained the class for in HW. But as is SE tradition, rather than careful reworking to balance the unbalanced things, they threw the baby out with the bathwater, and the bath too just to make sure.

[ASkellington]

whm/ast is the same thing too? there is barely any thing different from ast and whm other than ast having some now joke of a cards with the same boring effects, and better cheap mobility mp stuff.

Eeh yes and no. At lv50 WHM and AST are pretty much clones with AST having better MP management. Once you get to about 70+ AST starts feeling a bit different with abilities like ES, Horoscope and Macrocosmos - an actual healing identity of time based/delayed healing.

Basically, it has more to define it than SGE/SCH does from WHM. Cause alot of SGE's abilities are literally just renamed SCH ones with maybe a minor difference in execution.

[Recon1o6]

One of the best draws of pvp atm for me is I can play with half my deck of cards again. I still hate pvp in general due to ganking and the awful tick rate in this game but I do enjoy playing quite a few jobs in it

Ast especially, because I actually have to put thought into how I play with my cards and choosing CC vs damage vs healing in group fights. Macrocosmos also takes a bit of skill to get its best benefit as the initial cure is weak but being able to slap 12000 hp on allies instantly is pretty good.

Similar for other pvp jobs, I like them because they have actual identities and some have actual skill to use.

[flowerfairy]

whm/ast is the same thing too? there is barely any thing different from ast and whm other than ast having some now joke of a cards with the same boring effects, and better cheap mobility mp stuff.

Not really, WHM's main thing is GCD lilies and burst healing whereas AST has a lot of oGCD charges and heals that are stronger when delayed (actually, AST is the only one without a 3-charge system, maybe that’s changing with the rework? ) I can maybe draw ties between Horoscope/Plenary and CU/Temperance but they both function pretty differently. Now compare that to fairy/Kardia, Pepsis/ET, Physis/WD, and the entire Addersgall system with Aetherflow; 3 charges every 60s, pretty much all the abilities are the same except Taurochole, but even that same cooldown and almost the same potency as Excog so go figure. Not that I'm defending the jobs design because they're still all really boring, and I agree with the stupid card system, but AST/WHM has a little bit more going for it than SGE/SCH.

One of the best draws of pvp atm for me is I can play with half my deck of cards again. I still hate pvp in general due to ganking and the awful tick rate in this game but I do enjoy playing quite a few jobs in it

Ast especially, because I actually have to put thought into how I play with my cards and choosing CC vs damage vs healing in group fights. Macrocosmos also takes a bit of skill to get its best benefit as the initial cure is weak but being able to slap 12000 hp on allies instantly is pretty good.

Similar for other pvp jobs, I like them because they have actual identities and some have actual skill to use.

They gutted AST's cards to be generic attack/defense buffs and left it with an abysmal LB charge, but its still fun to be playing a job that actually feels unique for once. I always felt like it was missing one more button for real interaction with the cards, like rerolling one for another with stronger effects using Royal Road, that would've been a real sucker punch to PvE AST so that's probably why they avoided it.

[EnigmaticDodo]

Wish folks would have said something about this years ago when they took it away, instead of now. B-but Button Bloat! b-but skill issue! b-but job effectiveness being based on player skill... is a joke - They'd filter people off who suck at them and let them try out any of the other 19 available, but no. Every job must be the same thing or little timmy can't have fun.

By same thing - I am kind of leaning on essentially every class does the same damage in it's role with marginal percentile differences, does roughly the same amount of healing, roughly can deal with mechanics in the same exact way. I'm able to put different class buttons in the same places across my configurations because everything is nearly identical across the roles.

PvP is where some variance lives in terms of abilities, but I'd rather not... Anyways, contrarian in 3...2...

(I'm genuinely looking to be corrected if necessary and have a discussion, just a salty boy lol)

[Recon1o6]

Wish folks would have said something about this years ago when they took it away

We did
Yoshida basically told us that he refused to even consider it less than a month after the launch of shb

[ForsakenRoe]

Wish folks would have said something about this years ago when they took it away, instead of now.

People raised the question when SHB was launched 'hey isnt this just gonna dumb down healer damage rotations? Are we really gonna have just one spam button to press and a 30s dot to barely manage?' and we were told to just be patient and watch, the amount of incoming damage would be so high we wouldnt even have time to think about doing damage as a healer! Yeh, look how that turned out. So EW Media Tour happened and the same issue was raised, 'are there no changes to the DPS side of healers?' and we got told 'just be patient, watch, the amount of incoming damage would...' yes the same broken record of 'just wait and see' and it has not turned out to be true any time it's been used so far. Couple that with how this tier went for 'oops they increased incoming damage and now Jimmy AFKhealz can't keep up with the damage because he's not used to the game asking competence of him', and we'll probably be going back to 'healing is not stressful, and the DPS rotation is dull as dishwater and doesn't keep the gameplay between healing moments interesting'.

And of course, the whole thing with Yoshida saying 'we are not planning to go back to 3.0 design', which, fair, Cleric Stance was not good. But 4.0 design, where Cleric was just a personal 5% damage buff for 15sec, WHM had Aero3, SCH had like 5 DOTs, AST had cards that actually did effects that matched the lore the quest giver talks about (unless they went and redid that text lmao), that should not be objectionable by players OR by Yoshi-P. The healing was 'accessible', that is, you press Medica or Succor or Indom or Helios and the party gets healed. But the DPS side was where people could stretch their optimization knowledge. In fact, I remember being amazed by a Momo Sama video, where he explained how he and his cohealer got down to 4 total healing GCDs in O12S, and one of the tricks they used was to apply a Succor to the party, then re-deploy the same Succor off of the fairy, because the fairy doesn't get hit by AOEs. I had never thought to use Deployment like that before, I had (until then) assumed you'd only want to use it on Adlo. Why would you want to spread weak Succor shield, when strong Adlo shield? But it turns out, applying two different shields, at different timings, with the same 1 GCD cost, is exactly the kind of 'genius battlefield tactician' move the SCH's identity should be hitting.

Swear to god if anyone tells me 'just wait and see, 7.0 will have SO much incoming damage' I'll damage them at the Wolves Den

[EnigmaticDodo]

We did
Yoshida basically told us that he refused to even consider it less than a month after the launch of shb

...

I feel like the people who cared should've been more vocal and not let up. If you have let up, start being loud everywhere that you can about it. That seems to be what DPS players do and the Devs give some ground.