Thread: The AST changes are nice, but.....

The old card system, or at least the cards them self should come back, the new cards are just....bleh, I feel like a bot throwing them out, at least I could decide before if I wanted to buff a card or not.

If balance is causing the problem, change it, change it to direct hit rate increase like how spear used to be, if spire's TP effect missing is a problem, make spire a heal pot increase on the target or the target's abilities, if them being UP with these cards is a problem, make the duration of the cards 30 seconds again and give them the old pots.l There ARE other things that can be done, I liked giving a BLM arrow cause it felt like mobile laylines.

The seal system is....alright on paper, but in execution, it's repetitive and just boring.(though, divination itself has a pretty effect!)

Everything on AST feels fine now (in my opinion) but it would be a lot more fun if the old cards were back.

i still want to believe the AST will still get additional fix on future patch. the same goes with NIN and DNC.

It's probably more likely that they thought Spear and Arrow were the problem, given that's what they removed.

Crit scales exponentially, over the course of an expansion.
Same reason they got rid of BRDs crit procs. Makes it harder to balance, and balance was their main concern for healers.
And Speed is detrimental to some jobs.

Meanwhile, Bole, Ewer, and Lady were all parts of a core healer kit, but tied to an rng mechanic. That also poses a balancing problem. How can you balance healer toolkits when one of them is rng based?

AST is just too much of a busy bee with too little return on all the target switching (even if you use a bar of macros for playing a card to each party member or a mouseover macro). It feels a lot like you're playing whack-a-mole the whole time.

The short card buff duration is the culprit, I think. The 5.0 design wants us to put more emphasis on cards, but instead ended up forcing us to just waste more clicks and keypresses on cards.

If we really have to put this much emphasis on cards, I would imagine a system like this to be better:

• Draw a card, play it on a selected DPS depending on the card to buff that DPS.
• As we play the card, we automatically sleeve-draw a second card (in a manner similar to RDMs getting an instant cast after every hard cast). This is a trait learnt at the same level as the Draw ability.
• The series of cards that can be sleeve-drawn can be used in two ways: (1) kept unplayed for some self-buff effect with a duration limit depending on the card; or (2) played to an enemy target for direct damage that scales down as the self-buff runs out. To avoid raising the complexity of the job, the sleeve-cards can just be the existing cards but up-side down or something like that.
• Drawing the next card will clear our sleeve-card. But having a sleeve-card on us will affect the card we draw. For example having the next card drawn to always match either the symbol or the melee/ranged aspect of the unplayed sleeve-card. This gives us more control over the next card drawn for our Divination. (If we have already played the sleeve-card, then obviously the next draw is just pure RNG.)

This way we're always making split-second decisions, while efforts spent playing the cards always give direct returns in the form of the sleeve-card that will contribute to higher personal dps.

I mean as ASTs who draw cards all the time, it's only reasonable that we develop the ability to sleeve-draw a second card after each card, right?

Originally Posted by Alrin

Yeah potency changes are nice. AST perfrormance is much better but I cannot suppress the feeling that I am playing different class than in SHB and Its not as enjoyable playing it as it was before. At least not for me. It seems that potency changes wont fix that.

Because you are. AST is still a healer, but you can't change a job's core mechanic and prune as drastically as they've done to AST and expect it to play like it did previously. I would expect even further changes to AST as the moons pass, and it is doubtful any of those will revert the card system back. There aren't many ways to sugarcoat that players need to let go of the old card system. It's gone.

It's gone and with it the players. The proof is in the pudding also known as population and party finder.