Quote Originally Posted by Boomsmash View Post
I do wonder if a lot of what we liked about the old card system was the fact that the RNG meant you couldn't optimize it. You had to improvise, and surf it, and lots of folks couldn't deal with that and turned into Balance fishers.

RNG bad, RNG horrible! How come so many people took up Dancer, then? It got MCH's proc RNG, and with nothing to help buffer the chances. Is it because they're able to go with the flow?
When I mentioned optimization it was in the sense of clipping GCDs, the goal in a raid environment is to get out as many GCDs out as possible. You mention that you couldn't optimize the old system due to RNG and that you had to learn how to deal with the cards you were given, that is a skill ceiling; It's similar to how a DPS who do not properly learn their rotation will deal less damage. So yes, you had to deal with what you were given to be a good AST, that was part of learning the class. There was always the option to play other healers if the card system was too difficult for someone.

As for your argument about why people took up Dancer, I don't know the answer and you don't either. This is a bad faith argument because people can take-up classes for a multitude of various reasons and discussing Dancer isn't really part of this thread. Also, its RNG elements are entirely different from AST and it's not a healer.

That being said, the old system had flaws, I'm not going to deny that. However, the development team made the decision to throw the baby out with the bathwater and now we have a worse system in place. The current system requires you to still fish for cards, albeit you are fishing for a seal. SE saw that fishing was going to be a problem and gave us three re-draws to deal with it, but in doing so made it where we spend more oGCDs fishing for a seal in an expansion where they gave us even more oGCD heals. In addition, manually targeting people every single time for every single card is exhausting in a raid environment. Next, the re-design of Sleeve Draw is terrible since you still have to resolve three oGCDs at a minimum before draw comes off cooldown. This is compounded by the fact that you are single targeting every person for each card that is produced by Sleeve Draw. AST is no longer a difficult class to play because of its skill ceiling, it's a difficult class to play because it's mechanically difficult to work with due to poor design.