What do you want in your AST?

[PyurBlue]

The other cards had a place and time for every day content. Giving an Arrow to a caster or a Spear to BRD / MNK felt more impactful and empowering to both the AST and the one who receives it, same a Bole to a tank or a refresh to someone that needed it. If you ask me, I would have rather 100% the removal or rework of Balance, than what we got every card being it.

Changing the Balance wouldn't have done much. Every good AST knew that Spear and Arrow were Balance-lites. Bole, Ewer, and Spire would have still been situational and tied to random availability, making them difficult to use. It was those three that were the problem, not the Balance, in my opinion. I don't think they were better in every day content either. I played AST for fun and even on my main class there is a point where I don't bother to chase down the last bit of efficiency. I do however find playing at a fair efficient level fun. I never really needed the Bole's mitigation for anything. Ewer and Spire were on rare occasions useful, but if those rare occasions didn't line up with actually drawing them, they served no purpose outside of Royal Road/Minor Arcana.

All that said, I also think the devs went down the wrong path in trying to fix the issue, but seeing how nearly all classes were simplified I guess it's not surprising.

[VictorTheed]

Easily put I'd say go back to exactly how astro was at the end of stormblood, plus give us a 2ndmove for mp regeneration like how whm has thin air as well instead of just having access to lucid dreaming, that mp card was handy that astro had as well.

[Sabrenn]

I want my time mage skills back, that's what I liked the most about AST. Being able to extend the buff on someone, being able to extend everyone's buffs, being able to extend regens, being able to extend my lucid dreaming so that I didn't go oom. Just reading fates isn't AST for me, that's just another psychic. AST was the combination of fate reading and time control. Now it reads fate and can't do anything else about it.

Yes I was one of those balance fishers, but that felt good. My own luck of getting them felt good. If i got a bole? fine minor arcana it and hope for a lord card. All cards WERE viable because you could minor arcana them into dps/heal ogcd which was great. If you wanted to use the ewer for mp? sure go for it, I would have used it for RR or minor arcana, but that's fine because the option was there, the controller of fate, not the slave of fate!

I also want my controller friendly job back, the only reason I picked up AST to begin with in HW was because of how controller friendly it was, AST had 0 ground targets (which are annoying on controller, and I wasn't very happy with earthly star even though I used it because of how powerful it was, I still got used to it because of the <t> macro which made it one button press).

Yes it had single cards BUT you could opt to make that an AOE effect instead, making it easier on controller.

If you use kbm let me explain: on kbm you can press F1-8 to target a player instantly, or you can mouseover macro with <mo> and press the key, or you can use that fancy macro that people place to the left of the party list with <2> <3> <4> etc that gives to card to a specific player in a much easier manner.

On controller, you HAVE to press down/up until you reach your desired player then you can press the skill, then you press square/B to return to your last target. That could be just one up press, or 2 or 3 or 4 depending on who you have to target.
It was fine for single heals because you don't have to do that as often and most of the time you just go down 1/2 to target the tank. Draw is 30s. that's 1-4 presses just to select a party member EVERY 30S!

I've cleared all the current fights as AST so I'm not complaining that it's unusable, I've done it. It's just so overly complicated for controller players, it used to be much friendlier and honestly it makes me sad because it was the job that made me pick up healing in the first place. AST was my first healer coming from being a NIN main prior to that in ARR/start of HW.