Old AST: diversity was great in the cards but at the end of the day you were still fishing for a Balance or a spear. In many situations you didn't need anything else making most of the deck effectively useless during a lot of basic and some high end content.

New AST: Cards are streamlined to allow everyone to benefit from damage while other skills and stat increases replace the need for the 5 other cards. For example:

  • - Crit dependent jobs are a little less crit dependent/have received or come with their own powerful self buff crit/DH skills. Spear has been replaced.
  • - LD has been reduced to a 60s CD which, after playing since launch, I can tell you has made a huge difference even with the worst of tanks. Ewer has been replaced.
  • - whether you're healing in Noct or Diu Stance both Celestial Intersection and Neutral Sect have replaced Bole via Aspected Benefic and CI's heal. The increased amount of healing from using either at this stage of the expansion pack helps due to the amount of bad tanks that don't rotate CDs correctly and generally higher damage going out in situations where your DPS/Tanks aren't interrupting high damaging/high buff enemy skills. Looking at you Twinning.
  • - You have enough skill speed/spell speed/instant use/cast abilities to make Arrow useless. BLMs aren't going to die without it.
  • - TP is gone. Spire is useless.


I feel like many ASTs are confusing missing the old card mechanic for missing Royal Road which increased the ease at which cards went out by determining if someone got extended buffs, superior buffs or a party-wide buff, instead of having to throw cards to people individually. The biggest kicker is that last one. We can't AoE our cards anymore. Regardless of any situation, most ASTs fished for AoE cards, especially in 8-man content, so they could drop it, extend it with CO then go back to DPSing. This is what ya'll miss. but at the end of the day, we were all fishing for the same thing so what's the point?

Now, the cards have been replaced by our own new skills or the skills of other jobs leaving us to manage a multi balance single target mechanic without the ability to spread those cards easily.

If there's anything I want back, it's just Royal Road. I would love to have that back with a few tweaks to match the new system.

Also in regards to what AST's biggest advert was, it's not the cards. It's the dual healing type system via stances granting them the ability to adapt to any healing set up/situation. The cards are flair because you can clear any content in this game without the use of those buffs. They're not as important as people will lead you to believe and act as an unnecessary boon only used for the purpose of DPS padding and speed clears.