7.0 AST rework - it WON'T be this, but what if...

[Sebazy]

My spicy take, with a bit of a nip and tuck, AST has the potential to be by far the most compelling healer currently in the game. It's had close to all the right ingredients at various points in time, SE just need to combine the best bits, take a few risks and add in a splash of yolo to see how things pan out.

IMO:

Combine the current healing kit with HW's time extention and specifically patch 3.2's card system with two key exceptions.

Haste gets changed to crit, TP gets changed to HP

If oGCD Draw is on cooldown, It switches to a very short cooldown GCD instead, lets go with 8 seconds so that you can spend as much as 1 out of 3 GCDs pulling cards. Cards pulled with GCD Draw are massively weakened, cannot be Spread/Enhanced/Extended by Royal Road but can still be used to a generate a Royal Road buff. Instead I'm thinking that allowing GCD cards to stack to say 3 cards on a person. EG regular Balance from oGCD draw would be 10%, GCD Balance would be 1% but you could stack 3 of them for an additional 3%. Or you could mix and match, say 1 crit, 2 balance or really whatever you pull.

As back in HW, Time Dilation etc would be able to extend all of this as well as HoTs, Shields and so forth.

IMHO this strikes a neat balance of being fairly easy to implement as Draw is the only 'new' ability here and not too horrible to tune as you've got plenty of ways to quickly adjust how powerful the cards are. And most importantly, it solve the current 2 minute RSI AST faces whilst also giving a bonafide option for healers that really don't want to be a green DPS but do want to contribute meaningfully to the group.

[ForsakenRoe]

If oGCD Draw is on cooldown, It switches to a very short cooldown GCD instead, lets go with 8 seconds so that you can spend as much as 1 out of 3 GCDs pulling cards. Cards pulled with GCD Draw are massively weakened, cannot be Spread/Enhanced/Extended by Royal Road but can still be used to a generate a Royal Road buff. Instead I'm thinking that allowing GCD cards to stack to say 3 cards on a person. EG regular Balance from oGCD draw would be 10%, GCD Balance would be 1% but you could stack 3 of them for an additional 3%. Or you could mix and match, say 1 crit, 2 balance or really whatever you pull.

I'd suggest making Minor Arcana into this with tweaks. I've suggested it before, but bringing back the old effects would help this. Basically, the 'Lord, Lady and Knave' are, I think, the 8, 9 and 10 of our real world cards, with the named cards we have now being the Aces (aces are high in Eorzea, I guess). But there's still the other cards that make the deck of sixty. So we could just have the numbered cards be the same effect, but lower effect, with the effect scaling based on the value of the card. Perhaps with some baseline value so the variance is lower. For example, the Balance is presumably flat 10% damage still. But if we have, say 2-7, Knave, Lady, Lord of Swords (in terms of power), we could make those be that effect, but scaling based on value of the card. EG, a 2 of Swords is 1%. Each value above that is +0.5%, so a 3 is 1.5%, a Knave Lady and Lord are 4, 4.5, and 5% respectively. The 'Aces', Balance Arrow etc, retain their 'powerful' status as being both the strongest of their kind (Balance is 10%, Lord of Swords is 9%), and the 'Ace' would be RoyalRoad-able (assuming RR is a move brought back for this). In fact, by changing RR to be 'burns the Minor Arcana to empower the next Major Arcana', the problem of 'having to waste good RR effect on not-good card' is alleviated, because Minor Arcanas would be every like, 15s or something

Sleeve Draw can be reworked to be 'Draw a random Lord from the Minor Arcana deck. If you already have a Minor Arcanum drawn, swaps it out for a Lord of that suit'. Essentially a way to slightly stack the deck in your favor a little more for your burst window (the nature of the effect is still up to fate though)