They should just delete AST

[Mikhaill]

But when playing old AST, all you ever wanted to draw was Balance.

And this is why AST is the way it is.
Stop saying this, PLEASE.
No, YOU might have been but a lot of us didn't. Stop speaking for all of us.
Thanks to people megaphoning this we're stuck with this crappy Balance Bot
for possibly 2 years. Thanks a lot.

[Kabooa]

And this is why AST is the way it is.
Stop saying this, PLEASE.
No, YOU might have been but a lot of us didn't. Stop speaking for all of us.
Thanks to people megaphoning this we're stuck with this crappy Balance Bot
for possibly 2 years. Thanks a lot.

As opposed to the past 4 years, when you were stuck with a crappy Balance bot.

[TankHunter678]

As opposed to the past 4 years, when you were stuck with a crappy Balance bot.

Said "crappy balance bot" was what got me into healing because the class was fun and the card system thought provoking outside of the balance fishing. It is no surprise that the AST population has all but died off and people exclude it from their parties.

[Mikhaill]

As opposed to the past 4 years, when you were stuck with a crappy Balance bot.

Except I wasn't. Seems to be posts like this here.

Yes, because only who can play AST at savage level and squeeze every bit of efficience from the job, has the right to talk about the job, has the right to tell SE how the job must be made.

And guess what? Not gonna throw numbers from my bottomside, but a big portion of people...don't raid.
And those who don't have a say were ignored I guess. I don't know SE's way of thinking but it ain't it.
So listening to the minority here, pretty much killed AST's identity.
I'm really just about to say remove Balance all together.
It's obviously an issue with it because these same old arguments keep popping up.

EDIT: And before someone tells me "Well now you fish for seals" I really don't.
It's not fun. I don't give a rat's butt how much DPS you get from me. You get what you get.
Not gonna sit here and play "Go Balance +++" forever to maximize the DPS for people and trying to heal. Not happening.

[Kabooa]

Said "crappy balance bot" was what got me into healing because the class was fun and the card system thought provoking outside of the balance fishing. It is no surprise that the AST population has all but died off and people exclude it from their parties.

Except as you got further along Ast, you began to see that the 'thought provoking' card system stopped as you became more proficient. Spire was pointless, Bole was never actually needed, almost everyone disliked having Arrow, Spear had to be reworked and retuned to keep from being RR bait, and Ewer's usages hinged almost entirely on !@#% hitting the fan. Hope you RNG'd it.

Don't misunderstand me, I don't much care for the cards now either, but throwing the ole rose colored goggles on doesn't help anyone.

[TankHunter678]

Except as you got further along Ast, you began to see that the 'thought provoking' card system stopped as you became more proficient. Spire was pointless, Bole was never actually needed, almost everyone disliked having Arrow, Spear had to be reworked and retuned to keep from being RR bait, and Ewer's usages hinged almost entirely on !@#% hitting the fan. Hope you RNG'd it.

Don't misunderstand me, I don't much care for the cards now either, but throwing the ole rose colored goggles on doesn't help anyone.

Spire was in need of a rework, pretty much everyone agreed with that. Bole was very useful for me in the dungeons and 24 man raids which was the main content I did. BLMs and SAMs loved getting Arrows tosses on them. Spear was an odd one that realistically needed a mechanic fix to make it so that when the buff was on someone it sped up existing cooldowns, not just cooldowns used when it was active. The rework into it handing out crit was an ok alternative though it did not help me since I used the old spear to help with cooldowns like Lightspeed, just meant I was throwing spears on BRDs and MNKs primarily instead. Ewer was basically an extra LD and because of that it was helpful, especially in the main content I did where lets be honest... shit hit the fan a lot.

And this is not rose colored goggles talking either. I was working on getting back into the groove for healing this expansion after a long break until I read the changes and lost all drive. Things turned out as bad as I expected and the class became a pain to level so I just tried to level it in short spurts. The AoE healing feels a bit better now, but not the wall to wall tank pull healing.

[Selova]

And this is why AST is the way it is.
Stop saying this, PLEASE.
No, YOU might have been but a lot of us didn't. Stop speaking for all of us.
Thanks to people megaphoning this we're stuck with this crappy Balance Bot
for possibly 2 years. Thanks a lot.

You either fished for balance or you were a bad player, period. It still amazes me how people that have apparently played AST since HW are still under the illusion of choice when it comes to the cards. The cards as they are right now are Objectively a buff, just because you play inefficiently doesn't make the card changes bad. Every. Single. Card. you draw gets use and contributes way more than their previous iterations. People love fooling themselves because "Muh diversity". You either drew balance or you did not, the rest of the cards were inferior in comparison.

[Billythepancake]

You either fished for balance or you were a bad player, period. It still amazes me how people that have apparently played AST since HW are still under the illusion of choice when it comes to the cards. The cards as they are right now are Objectively a buff, just because you play inefficiently doesn't make the card changes bad. Every. Single. Card. you draw gets use and contributes way more than their previous iterations. People love fooling themselves because "Muh diversity". You either drew balance or you did not, the rest of the cards were inferior in comparison.

My man, I enjoy optimizing myself, but that playstyle is not for everyone. There are people that enjoy playing games causally, and in a casual sense the previous cards were great. Yes, in optimization, balance was the best card, hands down, but only a very small, and I do mean very small, portion of players play in an optimized setting. Besides, who are you to tell someone else what they enjoyed about a class? Or what they fell in love with it for?

TL;DR : get off your high horse, there is more to games than just "git gud"

[TankHunter678]

You either fished for balance or you were a bad player, period. It still amazes me how people that have apparently played AST since HW are still under the illusion of choice when it comes to the cards. The cards as they are right now are Objectively a buff, just because you play inefficiently doesn't make the card changes bad. Every. Single. Card. you draw gets use and contributes way more than their previous iterations. People love fooling themselves because "Muh diversity". You either drew balance or you did not, the rest of the cards were inferior in comparison.

Are you another one of those savage only balance only elitists who did not see the use of the entire card system in all the rest of the content?

With the old card system every card saw use, every card had use, and even if you went back and looked at the old logs from past expansions you would see this was the case. Be it in dungeons, raids, 24 man raids, open world content like eureka, treasure map dungeons, and even a good amount of savage raid logs.

But now we have balance only cards and the results do not lie: its a straight downgrade, the class is being abandoned by and large, the class is being excluded because it quite simply does not bring enough, and there is outrage in every region over what was done.

Why does it not bring enough? Because everything had to be balanced around only throwing out a damage buff which cannot be strong or the class is unbalanced.

You can screech illusion of choice all you want but it was the other non damage boosting cards that allowed us to have strong buffs. Now we have weak buffs, to go with our lack of options.

Not to mention the entire class fantasy, class identity, was built around all of the different cards and us working with what we got to shape fate in our favor.

I would rather go back to the old card system and rework balance to being direct hit then deal with the garbage we have now. Since if all this is because of balance then the old effect can get trashed.

[Sanghelios]

As a former AST main ive cleared E1S about 3 hours after patch went up as WHM. I always had instant aoe heals up for days, never even slightly dry on mana. It was just a good time. Later today ive done some attempts on E1S with my alts AST and oh boy the difference is just insane. Am not gonna lie, in comparison to my WHM clear, the AST attempts felt absolutely messy, clunky, tryhard and nowhere near efficient or good.