Healers, then and now:

[Absurdity]

I feel like the ‘time aspect’ removal from Astrologian’s identity is another symptom of the devs desperate attempt to maintain absolute balance (which cannot be maintained without standardising literally everything lol). Extra 15s on a party member’s buff? Unbalanced.
Extra 5 sec on all nearby party member buffs? Unbalanced.

They were somewhat unbalanced to be fair. Celestial Opposition didn't just extend normal damage buffs by 10 seconds, it extended Lucid Dreaming, your potion, Lightspeed, HoTs, Shields, your Earthly Star and probably something else that I forgot about. It didn't just make Ast an rDPS powerhouse but allowed it to run almost no piety and pump out healing so powerful it made Whitemages cry in a corner.


But as overpowered as it was, both Celestial Opposition and Time Dilation involved actual decision making, something severely lacking nowadays.

[Connor]

They were somewhat unbalanced to be fair. Celestial Opposition didn't just extend normal damage buffs by 10 seconds, it extended Lucid Dreaming, your potion, Lightspeed, HoTs, Shields, your Earthly Star and probably something else that I forgot about. It didn't just make Ast an rDPS powerhouse but allowed it to run almost no piety and pump out healing so powerful it made Whitemages cry in a corner.


But as overpowered as it was, both Celestial Opposition and Time Dilation involved actual decision making, something severely lacking nowadays.

I mean, that’s fair to say; that it genuinely was unbalanced lol, especially when compared to other healers. At the same time though, they could’ve at least tried to adjust them before throwing them out the window, even if it was something like making it only affect cards buffs, or just increasing the cool-down. Or giving White Mage something to actually contribute outside of some dps lol (but that’s a whole other topic lol).

[Rilifane]

Not to mention it required some thinking to even set it up to extend so many useful things with one button in the first place. It's not something the average player was able to do properly. Instead of rebelancing it so it would be a bit less broken, they deleted the skill ceiling with it. Although, honestly... if someone is able to pull something off that requires good thinking and planning, they deserve a reward. Maybe not a reward that invalidates all other healers but if you excell at something, take your reward.

[Osmond]

This Is what i HATE the most. I am a player (and former main AST) and i DID NOT wanted It ti change. You cant generalize all ppls.

Dont care if i am a filthy casual or what.. they, as usual, could have done something to make the class work without destroing it's divining identity (with time mage aspects), and instead decidere to take the lazy route

The devs just looking at the overall data from savage, the extremes, ultimate….I think? Back in SB, that’s all they saw. Ppl barely use Bole, it was trash, numbers didn’t go up. Dmg reduction for tanks? What’s that? The Arrow was good..but overtime jobs don’t need them anymore as the game progressed. Was screwing up rotations and such…except BLM. The Spear, really good crit rate card especially when stacked. Yet, the devs probably saw it as it was going to make fights too easy overtime. The Ewer & Spire…hmm. Situational, but barely used. Now that MP/TP isn’t much of an issue…pointless. Balance….numbers go up, majority happy.

It’s not that you’re a casual or anything, the devs going by the overall result. Dmg cards was more used than any other card….while spear is 2nd. The job was really bloated. Way too much responsibility. Tried to do too much for its own good.

Also yes, I’m going to generalize all people. Being too nice helps no one. In fact it make it worse for everyone. Go outside, how’s it going so far? It’s getting better or worse? I’ll let you ask yourself that.

[ForsakenRoe]

What if we consider then, the reason Bole wasn't used as much might not have just been 'no damage'? If you had a Ewer/Spire burned with RR (next card is AOE), you would purposely re-burn Ewer/Spire (cos it just refreshes the buff, nothing lost nothing gained), play Arrow Spear Balance (unless you wanted to gamble on getting a Balance reroll, but there's every chance of getting screwed too), and completely discard Bole. So if there were a way to 'Play' the card currently held, without using the stored Royal Road effect, people would have used Bole, because it'd shift from 'using Bole now wastes my RR' to 'well, Bole's not what I need, but I might as well play it because the alternative is 'literal nothing'. Instead of 'play without RRing it' we have Undraw taking the same hotbar real estate.

Alternatively, putting 'reflect damage with a potency of X' on Bole would have solved part of the issue. Think about it. We only wanted AOE RRs, and only wanted Balance (or Spear as 'i guess itll do' tier). This means not just the usual 'everything except balance was bad' for the actual effects, but the OTHER side of the cards, the RR effect, the only one we wanted was AOE. So if we instead had Bole able to cause a Vengeance style effect, then maybe the 'duration increase' effect of Arrow and Spear's RR would have seen more use. A full 60s of the boss hurting itself because of it's autoattacks would be a good strong source of damage, maybe not as amazingly busted as AOE Balance, but if there is a system in a game, there will always be something that is 'better' than the others. The RNG is what made it 'balanced'. You didn't always get Ewer, Balance, Ewer, Balance, Ewer, Balance, etc. Far from it, most of the time you got screwed and made do with what you had. But entitled logheads saw 'the best AST runs' on FFlogs and complained that 'its not fair that I don't get Balance every 2nd draw', rather than putting in the hours like those top ASTs did to beat the RNG and get that godly run.

It's just like when they changed WAR in 4.2, because people complained that 'it doesn't feel good to do your opener and get no crits'. Like, what the hell did they think every other class is going through with THEIR opener? Did they think PLDs enjoyed having their Confiteor not crit in SHB (now the issue is 4x as much!), do they think GNBs love it when they Double Down and get Double Screwed-Over by their DHit/Crit stats? So to finish, let's go back to AST for a second. I want to show everyone this, and remind them of the event that set everything in motion:



See, some people here might not be as old as others, they might not have played at this point. But once upon a time, AST was dog. It was considered griefing to bring to Gordias, as much as PLD to some. It received buffs in 3.2 to make it competitive for Midas (I've heard World Second ran AST SCH, but can't find any evidence so take with salt), but the stigma persisted that it was 'bad' and 'not good'. So SE did the above changes in 3.4, to essentially 'shock' people into trying it. Only, people are weird. Rather than just trying AST and going 'oh this is actually viable', the shoe just swapped feet, and now they said 'lmao WHM griefing', despite it having received zero changes from Midas (where it was considered 'not griefing') to Creator (where it was). How was any other card, let alone CLASS, meant to compete with the power of 10% AOE damage increase? So yeh, I blame SE for not bothering to even try and balance the cards. Many people in here have had many ideas on how to reduce Balance's stranglehold on the meta in the years since SB, and hindsight is 20/20. But SE just, giving up and making all the cards 'Balance, but worse, and you can't AOE them' is pretty lazy IMO.

If you want me to accept that 'we have to make the cards have the same effect for balance reasons', you're going to also have to fully accept that we should remove every other source of RNG from the game that could 'ruin someone's parse'. Crits, DHits, natural damage variance (that + or - 5% that happens on every attack), DNC/RDM procs, BRD DOT ticks and Repertoire procs, etc. Because if we're on about 'balance' at all costs, well, what if I and another GNB do the exact same rotation, the exact same GCDs, but I get zero Crits on my Double Down and they crit all of them? It's 'not fair' that I played with the same skill, and got a worse parse because of RNG right? God I hate this parse obsession it is a plague, yes I'm mad

[Absurdity]

The other problem with Bole was that it simply served no purpose. You could never include it in your mitigation planning because it was entirely up to RNG whether or not you would have Bole for a certain mechanic.

So you planned your mitigation under the assumption that you wouldn't have a Bole, which meant when you actually drew one it was entirely superfluous.

[GrimGale]

God I hate this parse obsession it is a plague, yes I'm mad

When every end-game boss is hitting a dummy while doing a little dance perfectly or reset, the only metric that naturally matters is how quick you can reduce that health bar before someone trips over themselves and takes the whole party with them. You can't stop the boss from attacking you. The only "utility" that matters (until your healthpool is enough to make it irrelevant) is mitigation/shielding. There is no CC, there is no interrupts, there is barely no dispelling debuffs. No adds that need to be controlled, no line of sight and no battlefield manipulation, like changing the shape of the terrain.

All of that would fall under "utility" and would require gameplay elements that are not present in the game.

Point is, FFXIV seems to have no space for interesting utility, and what they had before has been removed. Which is one of the reasons healers seem to have been designed into 1 button peashooter spam.

[Sebazy]

Meanwhile, Bole on the warrior for the last A12S adds allowed them to merrily drop stance and do pretty considerable extra damage with a little coordination.

Niche for sure, but saying that Bole served no purpose at all isn't really fair. IMHO the haste card (Arrow?) was more annoying as you could genuinely throw some jobs out of alignment with it.

It's good that the time extension stuff has actually got brought up though, those abilities were great and you could get huge value from them really giving AST an impressive level of depth that's far beyond anything healers have now.

[Deceptus]

They were somewhat unbalanced to be fair. Celestial Opposition didn't just extend normal damage buffs by 10 seconds, it extended Lucid Dreaming, your potion, Lightspeed, HoTs, Shields, your Earthly Star and probably something else that I forgot about. It didn't just make Ast an rDPS powerhouse but allowed it to run almost no piety and pump out healing so powerful it made Whitemages cry in a corner.


But as overpowered as it was, both Celestial Opposition and Time Dilation involved actual decision making, something severely lacking nowadays.

Sprint + Strider boots from Anemos + CO was really nice in cities.

Meanwhile, Bole on the warrior for the last A12S adds allowed them to merrily drop stance and do pretty considerable extra damage with a little coordination.

Niche for sure, but saying that Bole served no purpose at all isn't really fair. IMHO the haste card (Arrow?) was more annoying as you could genuinely throw some jobs out of alignment with it.

It's good that the time extension stuff has actually got brought up though, those abilities were great and you could get huge value from them really giving AST an impressive level of depth that's far beyond anything healers have now.

With the removal of TP haste would actually be a decent card to throw to a lot of jobs.

[Connor]

If we really want to talk about useless cards, remember when Spear was a cool-down reduction that only affected cool-downs already used lol, so it would only work if you like, just so happened to use it on someone who’d used a cool-down lol. That effect didn’t last very at all before they replaced it