Quote Originally Posted by Crushnight View Post
As someone who has played every single version of Ast this game has gone through, my fave is still Stormblood’s Ast (post 1.5 cast time on gcds) and it won’t be changing in DT, however I personally feel DT’s version is a step back into the direction of where I liked Ast.


Initial HW Ast: worse designed Ast by far couldn’t even do its primary role to an acceptable state, actively was a hinderance to take an ast over Whm/Sch.


2.2 HW Ast: best ast of HW had good complexity and felt more balanced to Whm, Sch was still a league of its own

2.4 HW ast: Overtuned to all fuck and the starting point of all current Ast design troubles , this is where balance or bust became a thing and shouldn’t have ever been a thing, yet people parroted it long past when they fixed this overtime meant (Balance was 20% dmg up ST and 10% for party, double Ast was viable comp)


SB Ast: still had some complexity, lost a little with Spear change to crit up, but for the better, same for cleric stance removal, overall the healthiest Ast at this point, yet “Balance or bust” remained prominent outcry and due to this ShB changes happened


ShB Ast: do you like vanilla ice cream? Do you like it with nuts or jimmies? Sorry not allowed the old strawberry or chocolate flavours here anymore only vanilla but hey we can give an extra scoop for you personally


EW Ast: 2nd worst Ast by a fair margin instead of improving ShB or reverting back to SB they somehow made it feel worse.


DT ast to me feels like the devs are trying to merge SB and ShB Ast but the thing had to give up was rng.

Can’t do balance or bust memes still but it looks like it is trying to add strawberry or chocolate back into it, just instead of a server deciding which flavour you get, you are getting all 3 regardless whether you like them all or not.


I personally see more growth potential in DT Ast than I have done with ShB and EW Ast, it doesn’t feel like it is fixed in its design of “you can only buff damage with cards”

I still remember so many leveling dungeon runs with no mit tanks and the Bole card was the best card in the deck for those scenarios, and it feels DT version is moving back to actually feeling like me the Ast can do clutch heals/mit vs bad players again (bad players will always exist and Ast having ways to mitigate it for yourself I loved)

Now if only they could bring back buff manipulation again, like RR and Time Dialation (still stings they are referenced in Ast questline)
The thing is, even at the most generous interpretation, this isn't a step forwards by any means. If anything, it's purely a step to the side. They're restoring a modicum of the effects of the cards, at the expense of the interesting and fun gameplay of having to make do with what you get. It's all well and good to cope and pray that they'll add manipulation back to the job, but even then... would it even matter? Part of the joy of AST, I felt, was having no two pulls feel the same, even on reclear duty where everyone was on the same page and mistakes were extremely uncommon. Saying that you think the DT version lets you feel like AST can do clutch heals/mit vs bad players seems like such a hollow statement to me, bc it tells me that you don't like... idk, process the rest of the kit? Is EW AST suddenly unable to do clutch heals bc it doesn't have an extra 60s mitigation/heal button that every other healer does? Giving cards unique effects but making them completely static utility buttons doesn't do any more than giving us an extra charge of ED or Exaltaton, at the end of the day. You're not going to have access to more on demand spotting tools than you would have if they just increased the amount of our currently existing tools. And people who say this are really starting to confuse me.

It genuinely feels like people just see card vfx on generic, static healing tools with less complexity than aetherflow and just get excited about some fantasization about a return to stormblood when all the things that made stormblood cards aren't coming back. Like, this might be a hot take, but I don't think the effects of StB cards were what made them interesting. It was the randomness, as well as all the manipulation and control you had over them. All we got now is draw, and then playx4. And you can hope for more manipulation, or more buff transferral on the cards but... does it even matter, when you aren't going to have to even think about whether to burn a card with something like royal road or play it wholesale beyond the initial prog of a fight? How is this any more decision making than a scholar deciding if they're going to sacred soil or energy drain?

DT AST might have potential (like, a lot of it. It has to have a lot of potential, bc this base is so boring and simple that it really can't get much more braindead) but square enix has shown that they can only remove complexity from the healer role, and not add it, so I personally expect this job to just be boring, static, and painted with the illusion of the most fun mechanical system this game had. I'm not gonna ask people to like the ShB/EW system as much as I did, but I am going to say... do people really think this is more like stormblood, and is there anything the systems have in common beyond 'card do thing' in the absence of any kind of manipulation, RNG, or other system that ensures that the class continues to give you a unique experience several dozen pulls into a fight? I played AST bc I wanted each pull to feel different, to keep a long night of prog from blurring together from just pressing the same button over and over. With square enix's committal to killing any deviation from their assigned standard of play (goodbye non-standard BLM), I'm extremely unlikely to believe that AST will escape that same fate, and insisting that these DT changes are a step in the right direction when all we get is 'unique card effects' in exchange for 'literally everything else but the vfx' tells me that people excited about this only see AST's cards at their most superficial level. This isn't a brand new baseline, this is the best we're gonna get.

I would love to be wrong, I really would. I would be so overjoyed at playing an AST that once again requires me to think on the fly every pull without settling into a dull, spreadsheeted routine bc that is what all iterations of AST have had (yes, even ShB/EW. Even you have to admit that optimizing those classes took on the fly thinking) that the sting of being wrong would be completely irrelevant. But like forsakenroe said, I'm just gonna be a realist here. We aren't getting more than this, and just adding royal road to the 4 static cards we got wouldn't change a thing. You'd get a bump of decision making in prog, maybe, assuming that it doesn't just turn into 'buff the balance' and then once you settle into your routine you press your malefic rotation until the end of time.

And ultimately speaking, I still shouldn't have to pray that something goes wrong in a fight in order for me to have fun. AST had something for me to do, now it doesn't. And I don't think I'm ever getting it back.