Thank you for the Astro changes coming in dawntrail!

[Kissune]

We also have this response from YoshiP regarding healer dps and healing requirements from one of the EW Media Tour interviews

tldr they claim they try to increase healing requirements, but they also don't plan on going so far that the healer has to constantly cast healing spells and keep track of their mp, or else that makes clears too reliant on how good your healer is. Increase in Item Levels as content ages lowers healing requirements too, and it's "inevitable" that leaves healers with less things to do.

If they're telling us it's inevitable that we will eventually not be healing much, if at all, then what is with their continued refusal to give us stuff to do that isn't healing? AST's card system was 'stuff to do that wasn't healing'. Ppl may not like EW/ShB system but the thing it did better than StB was be that added complexity to a dps rotation. It wasn't so overly important that if shit hit the fan or prog needed extra attention that you couldn't just drop it to focus on healing without being completely fucked over by not drawing cards that could potentially help with a bad scenario, but it wasn't so useless that once you did have a fight on a smooth lock that you were left without something to engage in and optimize. That's why I prefer the ShB/EW card system, bc of where it actually fit into your kit. It wasn't part of your support toolkit, bc that would mean AST would either be a weaker healer base with a random chance to be average, or a decent healer base with a random chance to be stronger than average. Both of those have major flaws, due to how fights have been continually designed. A weaker AST who relies on RNG to make up for it is needlessly punished by bad luck, and a stronger AST who doesn't have to rely on RNG to make up for it ends up at a point where the only thing they're drawing for is for something that immediately impacts the situation, and outside of prog the only situation is 'optimize more damage' bc you've solved everything else. The ShB EW kit definitely had room to grow, and have 6 flat% raw dps buffs could definitely have changed and become more unique, but rather than expand on it they decided that it would be better to remove the illusion of choice that stb cards in current fight design would have had, and just not even make the lack of decision making they provided as clear as day. And this might just be me, but I don't think that's a step in the right direction.

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.

I am absolutely gonna tell people how the deep magic works when it's pretty clear they forgot if they think DT cards are the best thing ever bc they took one aspect of StB card design, dropped literally everything else, while parading this around as a good thing. It's just yet another 5 steps away from stormblood but this time with the illusion of a step forwards. Unique effects mean fuck-all if we can't do anything with them but use or do not use them. They've got more in common with exaltation and essential dignity than anything that came out of stormblood cards. But I guess I needed to 'play stormblood' in order to see cards as, idk, more than just their effects and instead as the sum of their parts, huh? Because they aren't going to add complexity. They're gonna look at all the former WHM mains and misled stormblood AST players picking up the job, think 'rework successful', and then dance around the idea of adding complexity and skill back to the job bc that's a risk and they do not take risks. How do I know this? Well, considering we've had 3 expansions now of simplifying AST, I think at this point expecting the 4th to magically change the pipeline when it's worked for them so far is just like, the definition of insanity.

It just reads as extreme delusion and cope to look at DT and think 'omg stormblood cards yaaaayy' and thinking about all the ways you're gonna think soooo hard about how to use them when the answer is 'the exact same way you used ED and exaltation but now a card shows up over their head'. But hey, what do I know about healing design? I've only been maining the role since shadowbringers, right? I can't possibly know how current fight and healer design work.

Do y'all remember how fun it was to heal the end of e12s when it's just destroying the raid constantly? Like your first clear, not farm when the phase got so short it didn't matter. Can we have more of that happening and preferrably not the final mechanic of a fight.

God I miss Aspho. Curtain Call, FoF, Death's Toll... (the macrocosmos cheese felt like an oversight, and that a genuine healcheck was intended there). It gave me hope that rapid AoE healing checks and enforced GCD burn would be more commonplace.