AST Cards are boring

[Absurdity]

It's not really fair to call the current cards 'minor' but man, as per the title, they truely are boring and uninspiring. If you're not running a parser you're just never going to feel them.

Say what you will about the old cards, but when you got a good run of luck and really pocketed someone with them, it felt good for all involved at least from my experiences.

This is a big one. Even the cards that were regarded as "mostly useless" like Bole and Ewer had a noticeable impact in the right situation.

Being able to put 20% mitigation on your random dungeon tank that doesn't know what mitigation is, or stacking Ewer with Lucid and extending them with CO to not run out of MP in savage pugs with your 0 piety gear made you appreciate those cards without having to comb through logs.

[IceBlueNinja]

This is a big one. Even the cards that were regarded as "mostly useless" like Bole and Ewer had a noticeable impact in the right situation.

Being able to put 20% mitigation on your random dungeon tank that doesn't know what mitigation is, or stacking Ewer with Lucid and extending them with CO to not run out of MP in savage pugs with your 0 piety gear made you appreciate those cards without having to comb through logs.

The only card that become useless when TP was removed was spire anyways else all of them was good. BLM will be all over you for giving them an arrow which makes it that they can save their ley lines up for more bigger damage burst at the right moment. Also yes that is the same thing I say on every ast card post. Stormblood ast =best ast.

[Valence]

This is a big one. Even the cards that were regarded as "mostly useless" like Bole and Ewer had a noticeable impact in the right situation.

Being able to put 20% mitigation on your random dungeon tank that doesn't know what mitigation is, or stacking Ewer with Lucid and extending them with CO to not run out of MP in savage pugs with your 0 piety gear made you appreciate those cards without having to comb through logs.

Yeah but nowadays people cry long crocodible tears whenever their rotation is not strictly MP positive...

[Absurdity]

Yeah but nowadays people cry long crocodible tears whenever their rotation is not strictly MP positive...

Which is honestly understandable. There are barely any MP manipulation tools like Ewer, Celestial Opposition, Mana Shift, or Refresh left.
They all but removed abilities for resource management, so your only remaining option is to stack Piety or stop casting, neither of which is good design.

[Supersnow845]

Which is honestly understandable. There are barely any MP manipulation tools like Ewer, Celestial Opposition, Mana Shift, or Refresh left.
They all but removed abilities for resource management, so your only remaining option is to stack Piety or stop casting, neither of which is good design.

This is a very valid point, 3 healers MP tools are a DPS gain to use (cards, astroydyne, assize, lilys and aetherflow), the other 2 non lucid MP tools (addersgall and thin air) are totally DPS neutral, so functionally you know exactly how much MP you have in a fight based on its timeline, a strongly MP negative economy (like say 6.0 WHM) either just forces you stop casting or stack a useless stat like piety which feels bad to do because piety feels so bad

I hate that the healers economies are by default MP positive (well I think SCH is technically negative but on such a long timescale it really doesn’t matter) but also without optional MP manipulation tools that don’t amount to “press tool you were going to press anyway to receive MP” you can’t really give healers strongly negative MP economies without them just feeling like crap