Thank you for the Astro changes coming in dawntrail!

[Supersnow845]

Ykno we could easily say go play something else too, you could play BLM or any souls like if you want some difficulty. There is an entire genre of games based around using your brain more as well.

BLM and MNK were literally the last hard jobs we had and both of them are being made easier this expansion

How many easy jobs do people need before they are happy. Will people really enjoy the game when your skill ceiling is your skill floor on every job as it is on SMN

[Zaytex]

Ykno we could easily say go play something else too, you could play BLM or any souls like if you want some difficulty. There is an entire genre of games based around using your brain more as well.

BLM, MNK and AST are literally the only remaining jobs in the game which have skill expression or a genuine skill ceiling. DT will make changes to MNK and AST to have a lot less skill expression and difficulty, effectively leaving BLM as the only relic of the past where you can feel challenged when playing a job, and not play a brain dead rotation which requires no thought once learned. So to tell players to just ''go play another job or game'' when there is effectively, going to be only one high skill-ceiling job remaining in DT is laughable, and extremely hypocritical of you. You're sitting content and comfortable watching AST lose its identity as the healer to play if you want a difficult job with skill expression, but then telling the people to go play something else if they want to feel challenged. Do you realise how selfish and hypocritical you are, or just don't care?

Making newer or casual players feel like they have a job to play is important, but it's equally important for veterans and people who want to be challenged more. We've gone from 3 jobs out of 21 being designed for those type of players, to now 1 in DT. It's phenomenal how much FF14 has been homogenised and simplified for the casuals, yet they still want more. People wouldn't stop begging for AST's difficulty to be removed so they could play WHM but with stars.

I really wish casual players had more humility and self-awareness to accept some jobs in the game are just not for them, or to get better if they want to perform well on them. I get bored easily on WHM/SGE, and dislike SCH, but do you see me asking for those jobs to be fundamentally reworked into what I want? No, I just accept they're not for me and to leave them as they are for genuine mains of the job to enjoy and choose something else, which was AST. Now with it's identity and how it plays completely different, where do players like me go who want to heal, but also feel challenged? Well we just stop playing, or move to another role.

Watching SE delete my hard healer job then to watch the casual audience applaud it and tell me it's for the better or I should just go somewhere else is truly a FF14 moment.

[Aelin_Ashryver]

snip

You completely missed the intended irony within the post. The person I quoted is telling others to go play smn or play something else. Hence the response, it's obviously not helpful to say such things. That was the point.

I played ast since SB, I hated the changes in SHB and EW. I hated my monk losing it's positionals, I loved it being busy. I know full well how much it sucks to feel losing the aspects of the job you enjoy. The fact is ast in current state is brainless to me compared to what it was, there is still a little thought to it but it's not hard stop kidding yourself. Myself and others enjoy the change and want some tweaks, in my case I'd like card manipulation back. And the people who have stated support have had nothing but vitriol thrown at them.

The continual blaming of casuals is also getting old, even I was salty at them to begin with going into SHB with but ykno what? A lot of the people who want things simplified are also the more hardcore or midcore, the ones pushing content and realise hey x or y is pretty annoying for me. Also a lot of the hardcore pc players are already using a variety of third party tools to make the game easier for them anyway all while crapping on other people for playing poorly. Hilarious considering they are using more crutches to play than the casuals they crap on, one AST enjoyer ik wouldn't even play the job without his macro to play his cards for him, still considers himself better than others. Meanwhile I moved my party ui closer to the middle of my screen to allow for faster swapping between targets during burst for throwing cards. Casuals often don't even leave feedback at all, they play or they don't. Only the more invested players leave the feedback most of the time. They matter just as much as you or I do, much as I miss my positionals on MNK.

I'm excited looking forward to all the changes for DT, outwith job changes I'm hyped for story, for more item slots in my houses good GOD I will be so glad of that I've been waiting years. Double dye channel is hype as well, better graphics, exploratory zones the list goes on. Even if I disliked the job changes, I'd be playing having fun. I went to other jobs during EW when I found my AST miserable to play. Going into other roles and trying other jobs was good fun, I'm glad I did. I want to try more jobs this summer before I get busy again in the autumn, glad I have the alts to play from my housing obsession.

[ForsakenRoe]

in my case I'd like card manipulation back.

Issue is, at no point have they said that DT AST will have card manipulation. Rather, it appears to be very much a case of 'draw card, play card' as it was in EW. Just now, the amount of cards to consider in the damage slot goes from 6 (thanks to Seals and the ranged/melee split) to just 2, and from 4 damage cards to play per 2 minutes, to 2 per 2min, with the hazy 'assurance' that 'oh but you'll have defensive/healing cards too', completely glossing over the part where most content will not hit hard enough for those cards to actually feel like they're making a difference. In fact, the content that most benefitted from AST having 'more going on' compared to other healers, the low-end no-failstate stuff like EX roulettes, is the same content that least 'demanded' the correct use of the cards. You could play the cards on anyone, at any time, including not playing them at all, and still clear the roulette.

Without the full picture provided by seeing the whole range of tooltips from the media tour, we have to go off of what we see in the Job Action trailer, and the small amount of talk about the job they gave during the slides. That is, they're removing the RNG because some people said they don't like the RNG (on a job who's identity is predicated on something that inherently is made up of RNG, Tarot), that there will be three kinds of cards drawn, Offensive, Defensive and Restorative, and that you'll draw cards once per minute. Being able to manipulate the cards was never mentioned, and is just wishcasting until we see tooltips that show it's a thing again. It's fine to want card manipulation back, but we haven't been given it back, and what we are given may well turn out to be 'EW cards, but you can only draw Balance and Bole, and the cooldown is doubled'.

[Kissune]

What is even the point of just having a bunch of single target mitigation and healing anyways when tanks are still going to be able to completely solo casual content on their own, thereby making your entire single target suite next to useless... and in harder fights, single target stuff is... still pretty useless? There's only a handful of mechanics I can remember across all of EW that even required single target healing, and the most notable one to me was A. unaffected by mitigation B. was mostly covered with aoe healing anyways

Like... Single target utility is so ridiculously underutilized and having a bunch of cards that, no matter how unique there effects are, are just gonna sit on my bar or get overwritten by my next draw anyways just feels even worse than EW's system? What are they gonna do, magically double all of the damage in the game to adjust for this massive bloat of mitigation and healing they're giving every tank and AST? What about the other three healers? They're gonna need stuff too, otherwise AST will be the only one who can keep up. But if they're not gonna bloat the fuck out of those classes, but then design it so that they can still do content comfortably (bc they'd get a shitstorm if they couldn't) then... AST is just gonna be the only bloated one. And if they get rid of all of our existing single target tools (which they already said they're adding another charge of ED, so we're still bloated af on the healing department now)... what was the point of this whole ordeal? Getting rid of our existing tools just to please the people who wanted it to have their utility with a card effect and that's it? If they drop exalt and intersection to put the exact same equivalent effects on cards that is so unbelievably pointless it makes me just laugh out of pure frustration. Especially when I just *know* that casual content won't be harder in any meaningful way, bc casual players cannot handle any kind of skill wall in their way. That's why we got EW healing design, and it's why it's only continuing to get worse.

At the start of EW we got a bunch of extra healer bullshit that made everyone think 'oh man the fights are gonna be so hard now' and then we ended up having no uses for them. What makes anyone think dawntrail is gonna be different? The other healers aren't getting a bunch of single target bullshit, so that means what. Either AST doesn't need theirs, or the other classes are just going to be straight up incapable of keeping up to AST. Maybe WHM might get a second charge of aquaveil, or sage gets a reduced cooldown on taura, or sch gets two charges of protraction but if thats all that's needed to keep up why the fuck are we getting this lazy and pointless 'card' system when we could have just as easily been given a second exaltation stack and called it a day? It baffles me how out of touch they are with healing their fights.

[Aelin_Ashryver]

Issue is, at no point have they said that DT AST will have card manipulation. Rather, it appears to be very much a case of 'draw card, play card' as it was in EW. Just now, the amount of cards to consider in the damage slot goes from 6 (thanks to Seals and the ranged/melee split) to just 2, and from 4 damage cards to play per 2 minutes, to 2 per 2min, with the hazy 'assurance' that 'oh but you'll have defensive/healing cards too', completely glossing over the part where most content will not hit hard enough for those cards to actually feel like they're making a difference. In fact, the content that most benefitted from AST having 'more going on' compared to other healers, the low-end no-failstate stuff like EX roulettes, is the same content that least 'demanded' the correct use of the cards. You could play the cards on anyone, at any time, including not playing them at all, and still clear the roulette.

Without the full picture provided by seeing the whole range of tooltips from the media tour, we have to go off of what we see in the Job Action trailer, and the small amount of talk about the job they gave during the slides. That is, they're removing the RNG because some people said they don't like the RNG (on a job who's identity is predicated on something that inherently is made up of RNG, Tarot), that there will be three kinds of cards drawn, Offensive, Defensive and Restorative, and that you'll draw cards once per minute. Being able to manipulate the cards was never mentioned, and is just wishcasting until we see tooltips that show it's a thing again. It's fine to want card manipulation back, but we haven't been given it back, and what we are given may well turn out to be 'EW cards, but you can only draw Balance and Bole, and the cooldown is doubled'.

I understand your points, I've said before if we are lacking the card manipulation it's gonna be the first thing I ask for! I hope it's there in some form, I don't think that it is already there. I have some hope that with drawing four cards at once we keep some feeling of higher tempo the AST has also. I'm not gonna repeat myself again and again, but in the end for me I feel this is a nice base to start from and I expect to enjoy AST in DT and I am hopeful for 8.0 where they want to add the individuality back to jobs also. Overall positive outlook for me.

[ForsakenRoe]

I understand your points, I've said before if we are lacking the card manipulation it's gonna be the first thing I ask for! I hope it's there in some form, I don't think that it is already there. I have some hope that with drawing four cards at once we keep some feeling of higher tempo the AST has also. I'm not gonna repeat myself again and again, but in the end for me I feel this is a nice base to start from and I expect to enjoy AST in DT and I am hopeful for 8.0 where they want to add the individuality back to jobs also. Overall positive outlook for me.

See, the problem with that is that we can see what happens when SE reworks a job, makes it 'more simple', and we think 'oh there's room for them to add complexity to it going forward': they don't add complexity to it going forward. Look at MCH, which was considered quite technical in HW, 'so overly technical that a single GCD out of place screws your burst entirely' in SB, 'simple' in SHB, and 'just as simple again' in EW. SMN's rework has been widely criticized for how little depth it has, and with the Job Action Trailer details, we can see that it's functionally not changing, just that instead of Baha, Phoenix, Baha, Phoenix, we'll have Baha, SolBaha, Phoenix, SolBaha. So when I see that AST is losing a lot of the complexity it currently has, and that 'oh it's a good baseline to build off of', I know that the last thing that will happen is that 'they'll build off of the baseline'. What we see is what we'll get, and it's exceptionally unlikely we'll get more in 8.0, I'd sooner expect another rework before they add anything to the system they showed.

I can't stop you from being optimistic, but I'm going to be a realist on this one

At the start of EW we got a bunch of extra healer bullshit that made everyone think 'oh man the fights are gonna be so hard now' and then we ended up having no uses for them. What makes anyone think dawntrail is gonna be different?

You just know some goobs are going to insist 'wow Seraphism so cool, clearly this means we're going to take so much more damage that we won't even have time to spell the word Broil, let alone cast it!' and then the content hits as hard as currently (that is, not enough to require a healer in dungeon runs), it's like a broken record

[Kissune]

See, the problem with that is that we can see what happens when SE reworks a job, makes it 'more simple', and we think 'oh there's room for them to add complexity to it going forward': they don't add complexity to it going forward. Look at MCH, which was considered quite technical in HW, 'so overly technical that a single GCD out of place screws your burst entirely' in SB, 'simple' in SHB, and 'just as simple again' in EW. SMN's rework has been widely criticized for how little depth it has, and with the Job Action Trailer details, we can see that it's functionally not changing, just that instead of Baha, Phoenix, Baha, Phoenix, we'll have Baha, SolBaha, Phoenix, SolBaha. So when I see that AST is losing a lot of the complexity it currently has, and that 'oh it's a good baseline to build off of', I know that the last thing that will happen is that 'they'll build off of the baseline'. What we see is what we'll get, and it's exceptionally unlikely we'll get more in 8.0, I'd sooner expect another rework before they add anything to the system they showed.

I can't stop you from being optimistic, but I'm going to be a realist on this one



You just know some goobs are going to insist 'wow Seraphism so cool, clearly this means we're going to take so much more damage that we won't even have time to spell the word Broil, let alone cast it!' and then the content hits as hard as currently (that is, not enough to require a healer in dungeon runs), it's like a broken record

Thank you for finally putting into simpler terms what I've been trying to get across so, so badly. Square Enix does not 'build on a base'. They do not simplify jobs to give them more to work with. Complex jobs get simpler, simple jobs get simpler, and the simplest jobs just get bloat. There is no upwards scale anymore. It's just a downwards slope of easier with each successive expansion. ShB AST was easier than StB, EW AST easier than ShB, and all signs point to DT AST being easier than EW. Is it so unreasonable to assume that the company that created reaper and sage, jobs so easy and safe I was bored of both just by looking at the tooltips, is going to continue to make things easy and safe? Like I'm not gonna fault anyone for being optimistic, but I *am* going to call them delusional and out of touch with the design philosophy they've been running with for literal years.

The healer development pipeline!
Step 1. Healers are unpopular. Deemed too hard. Remove complexity and depth from healers, add bloat.
Step 2. Have your devoted fans claim that the fights will surely be harder with all these new mit/healing tools!
Step 3. Don't make fights harder.
Step 4. Have your devoted fans claim that the mass simplification to jobs will surely be so they can build off of this brand new base in the future!
Step 5. Don't add onto jobs.
Step 6. Get ready for the next expansion, and continue to wonder why the role is still, if not more unpopular. Repeat from Step 1.

[LynxDubh]

You don't need to tell me what happened years ago, I was actually here for it unlike yourself.

Gosh I would give up so much of modern AST's kit to go back to HW/SB AST's card kit. At least we get unique card buffs back. I will not miss ShB/EW's card kit.

[Rozeee]

Threads like these makes me wish for a more active moderation team for EN. I literally saw this exact exchange happen in JP but the people arguing got nuked instead.