What do you want in your AST?

[Kye]

All I really want is for AST to be controller friendly again.

AST's new card mechanic is flawed at a fundamental usability level. FFXIV is a game where a large portion of the population plays using a controller, and although there are varying degrees of difficulty between controller and keyboard/mouse users when playing certain jobs, every job's optimal rotation can be performed on either with the exception of AST. This is due to how FFXIV handles targeting party members.

Using a mouse and keyboard, to target a party member the player needs only click the player in the party list using their mouse (or mouseover if preferred), and WHILE they're doing this they can Shuffle and Minor Arcana their cards.

On a controller however, the act of selecting a party member and the act of using an ability like Shuffle are MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE. You cannot shuffle and target a party member at the same time, you must choose to do one or the other, and to choose a party member you must physically press the D-Pad up or down the requisite number of times AND press enter to hard target said player each time or the targeting will reset and cause you to need to press the D-pad multiple times again. To do all this within a GCD is just insane.

This is not to say that I think it is impossible to optimally play AST on a controller, but I argue that maybe only about 1% of the playerbase can, and they do so with a much higher APM than m/kb users. It is this incredible disparity in difficulty between controller users and m/kb users that leads me to believe that AST's card mechanic was rushed and not play tested, and that it is a fundamental flaw that far exceeds any concerns on any other job at the moment as it is a physical bar on players that use controllers. The fact that this issue isn't even acknowledged as a problem by the devs is a slap in the face.