Thread: 5.0 AST is a failure

Originally Posted by Crushnight

the question still remains though is the dps buffs from the cards > the dps gained from killing faster? the answer should always be a yes but SE has made weird design choices in the past ho knows what the future holds

No, but people will still want Ast because they only care about their own DPS.

Originally Posted by Ftail

No, but people will still want Ast because they only care about their own DPS.

Well, good news, FTail: that's what DNC is for. AST would not be ideal for that position because of the potential downtime between applied buffs, as well as the insignificance of their output.

Lately, I've been thinking that it's time for Squeen to accept that they've created jobs which don't fit into their roles as precisely as they want, for the sake of their contrived balance, and just create a Support job role for those classes. The support job role would be able to provide the party with a variety of advantages while posing potentially as off-DPS and/or off-healing, but wouldn't necessarily be the strongest. I'd imagine that jobs such as BRD (though, not in the current not-so-bard-like state that it's in now), DNC, and AST would fit into the role, and each jobs skills/spells/abilities and potencies would need to be revisited in order to make that work. To that end, I'd think that 4-man parties would be formed with 1 each of Tank, Healer, Support, and DPS, while the 8 mans would ideally be comprised of 2 tanks, 1 healer, 1 support, 4 DPS.

Otherwise, regarding this topic directly: it sort of feels like they wanted to use AST as an experiment. They've previously decided that they wanted the healers to spend more time focused on healing, and, for the most part, they've achieved that on AST, but now they get to gauge if this is an effective strategy for the other healers, or if their experiment was a failure. Regarding cards, they probably thought about it from a DPS perspective (more damage up = better, right?), and figured that was enough.

Originally Posted by MintnHoney

Regarding cards, they probably thought about it from a DPS perspective (more damage up = better, right?), and figured that was enough.

Considering how many players screeched at 4.0 ASTs that +damage is the only card they should ever be using, it's hard to imagine how Square got that idea...