Potential AST Rework: Cards = Heals

[Vitreus]

What would this solve? Healing isn't a problem with astro, all the healers have plenty of heals and are fully capable of outputting enough healing. The problem is that they gutted all the variance from astro and made every card the same because the did not want players to "fish" for balance, now they fish for seals and every other card goes to minor arcana and their gameplay is boring and has no variance.

I don't understand why they didn't just nerf balance or buff the other cards. Even if you get bole or ewer when you didn't want to you could royal road them so it wasn't a waste.

[RyuDragnier]

I don't understand why they didn't just nerf balance or buff the other cards. Even if you get bole or ewer when you didn't want to you could royal road them so it wasn't a waste.

The only nerf Balance really needed was a change in effect. Changing it to a True North effect would have still kept the card useful (for melee at least), and would have dropped AST from being mandatory in all parties. The only thing that kept it mandatory was the damage buff on Balance. Removing that buff would have balanced AST out quite a bit.

[YusiKha]

The only nerf Balance really needed was a change in effect. Changing it to a True North effect would have still kept the card useful (for melee at least), and would have dropped AST from being mandatory in all parties. The only thing that kept it mandatory was the damage buff on Balance. Removing that buff would have balanced AST out quite a bit.

Everyone saying 'Balance is the issue' is completely forgetting that Royal Road was the true problem.
With Expanded Royal Road being the best effect (~3x pot, vs 2x extended & 1.5x enhanced) meaning that the job-based strength of Arrow (on SAM/MNK/BLM) or Spear (on MNK/BRD) was completely overlooked for the omnibeneficial Balance.

[ForteNightshade]

I don't understand why they didn't just nerf balance or buff the other cards. Even if you get bole or ewer when you didn't want to you could royal road them so it wasn't a waste.

Supposedly, they overhauled the card system because people complained about getting "useless" cards. I'd really love to know where they got this feedback because I can't for the life of me recall any real mention of it. Not to mention, no card was truly useless because Minor Arcana existed. The issue wasn't just balance though. White Mage suffered the Samurai syndrome where it was intended to be "Black Mage" of healers yet was weaker in nearly every capacity, including damage. That wouldn't be the case now. FFlogs also going the rDPS route also changes things since what made Balance even more desired is it was downright required if you wanted those pretty numbers.