Quote Originally Posted by HyoMinPark View Post
Balance was what made AST so unbalanced—and now every card is a crappier version of it. That’s where the irony comes from.
It wasn't, though, or at least no more so than 5.0 Repertoire makes Bard unbalanced. Its RNG-based rDPS; that's all. It alone did not make AST unbalanced, the surrounding toolkit did.

Yes, so long as so much of its rDPS was RNG based, just as with Deep Meditation or Repertoire, there was going to be significant deviation between its runs, but that doesn't make its average parse impossible to balance. At worst you end up with an inflated presence in top 10 or top 20 fflogs ranks because of the sheer number of times they can run the encounter to get up there, but that's not fundamentally different from any other compositions rerunning an already perfected fight until they get their highest possible crit rates on their strongest possible skills and so forth, by sheer luck.

Again, you're preaching to the choir here in regards to wanting varied card effects back, but it's in no way ironic that when the lead complaint was too much RNG variance and too much waste, they then removed what both the JP and NA communities (idk about EU, as I can't read French or German with any real proficiency) declared "non-optimal" or "trap" card effects and gave more means by which to control that RNG. That is a sensible solution, given the complaints. We could perhaps call it "malicious" acquiescence, but it was at the very least in keeping with what was requested.