Regarding AST

[loreleidiangelo]

For a greater focus on cards they could maybe possibly look at using them more to support healing and damage a la minor arcana (without sacrificing buffs) maybe, instead of just making them do buff stuff.

I mean, that's a pretty risky path to tread, considering the developers said they didn't want AST's healing power to be tied to cards whatsoever. People originally thought it would be neat if the class would get a buff depending on what card they just drew but SE said they didn't want core components of the class's power tied behind RNG. So this means that a similar system would either be a.) pretty unimpactful, like Minor Arcana is now, or b.) a renege on that philosophy (which seems unlikely given SE's hardline stance on accessibility).

Even then, assume they add new cards that are basically heals with x potency or nukes with y potency. Why build those around the card middle man, then? Why not just give us that x potency heal and that y potency nuke as abilities? All tacking them onto cards does means that they're subject to RNG, and makes them another layer of crud you have to manage for what is likely minimal payoff, and also makes them significantly harder to balance because they're a random effect. If you make it a 1k potency DPS card with the idea that an AST will only draw one once every 3 minutes due to laws of probability, that means a run where an AST gets absurdly lucky and gets one every other draw could possibly seriously tip the balance of an encounter. It also means on a run where an AST draws none of those they'll be missing a portion of their power.

Frankly, this is why cards like Bole/Ewer/Spire are decent ideas in theory, but terrible in practice. Unless you're RRing the Spire/Ewer they're basically dead cards that do absolutely nothing for a team. Can't rely on them for heavy damage or mana/TP management (especially with stuff like Refresh in the game, lol), whereas Balance/Spear/Arrow/any damage up card will ALWAYS get value and don't require specific criterion for their use. Unless there's a period where the boss is literally untargetable for 30 seconds straight a damage increase card will never be a bad card to use. But Bole/Spire/Ewer don't work like that, and that's why RNG buffs in general are a huge problem.

Would much rather you get to select the card you want to draw when you want to draw it, but each card has an internal CD relative to its power so you're not encouraged to just cycle Balance/Spear/Arrow over and over again. Just get rid of RR, Shuffle and Draw, get rid of the three "Undraw" abilities and put one each of the 6 cards we have there in their place, with internal CDs relative to their strength to match. It would kinda suck to be "forced" into using Bole/Spire/Ewer but I think it's a lot healthier than what we have now, which is buffs feeling unsatisfying because they're too impactful if you get good draws (and just feel bad if you get bad draws). If there's an element of consistency to how cards can be used, they can actually be buffed to feel impactful, like old 20% Balance used to feel (basically Raging Strikes on target of your choice). You'd lose the old Royal Road enhancement factors, but maybe that could be implemented by "combining" cards kinda like what RR does already - activate Bole, you have a few seconds to combine that with another card to make a boosted effect.

The more I talk about it, the more I feel like that's the key to saving this class (aside from completely re-tooling their healing moves so they're not just a dollar store WHM/SCH, but that's a different can of worms). Give ASTs control over their buffs (within limits, so they're not DPS-boost bots and actually get some variety), and then they're significantly easier to balance against the other two healers in this game. On top of that, you remove the random button fluff we get from getting tools to literally do nothing but "fix" the RNG of the class, and we can see more interesting card abilities/improvements in the future.