I've had my long rant about AST in the healer section but I may as well put it here.

First thing's first I did not have the enjoyment of playing HW/SB AST and wish I did. The six different effects and learning how and when to use them is probably the funniest thing I've heard as far as a gameplay mechanic goes. And before someone comes in to sway my opinion that Balance was the best and only card I would ever want, no, it wouldn't have been.

There was 0 reason to keep 6 cards in EW/Shb system other than the seals system and both Divination in Shb and Astrodyne in EW are objectively TRASH and deserve to be called out as such. If a melee/range split was "the best" the dev team could be arsed to offer and not even split the damage type into 3 they may as well have dropped it down to 2 cards for all that it REALLY mattered.


With all that said the old card system had its issues. Balance was not (ha) balanced, Spire was worthless, Bole and Ewer weren't consistent enough. And rather than adjust the card effects, the dev team went ahead and chose to replace the flavor of the cards with the seals system.

In theory this would have been fine - all cards are Balance with a split between ranged and melee and the effects of Bole/Ewer/Spire could have been updated and set on the seals with the combination of Lunar/Celestial/Solar giving those effects. Kinda a win win for everyone. Except they screwed up and made it a whopping 1% difference depending on how many different seals you had for Divination which replaced AOE Balance.

GOOD JOB. /s

EW was worse thanks to the 2 min meta they're dead set on so there's even LESS decision making on where you put the card on your party (like the bar was that high, lets be real) with an even shittier seals replacement - Astrodyne. Coupled with the removal of Nocturnal Sect to make way for SGE. They couldn't have even be bothered to split the three cards into 3 differing forms of damage jfc.

And now we have DT's cards which... even I'll admit with tweaks could be "fine":
  • Reduce the recast timer to 30s
  • Make the "curative" card a Refresh (read MP regen)
  • Assuming we draw from two different sets, have both sets do different things underneath "Damage", "Defensive", "Curative" - so one Curative could be MP, another HP; Defensive* could be Reflective damage/Movement speed; and Damage can be split between DHit and Crit/Crit Chance
  • Alternatively make Defensive do something else AST has enough shields/mits to work with considering CI has 2 charges (unless they plan on changing it) Neutral Sect and Exaltation
  • Make this 60s Draw into Sleeve Draw and reintroduce Draw with these new cards

I don't think I'd be HAPPY exactly with those changes, but they can be made...

But the point is, no one is really getting what they want out of these. People who wanted old cards back wanted the old cards back. They pretty much lost their job for 2 expansions with everyone else telling them to "suck it up, the old cards weren't what you wanted; AST is better this way" and the AST mains coming in from Shb/EW are losing a fast paced APM job.

If there was ever a point where I could say the dev team desperately needs a healer main, this would be it. And Twelve is this but ONE reason out of many.