Quote Originally Posted by Billythepancake View Post
Which is why I argue this card system is flawed. The old card system didn't have this problem because you spent most of your cards on AoE, and when you did single target a card, it wasn't very often as opposed to doing it on the opener on here for 3 cards, and doing that every time sleeve draw is up. God help you if you need to do literally anything else during that sleeve draw window too. The fact that this card system is near unplayable without macros, especially on controller, makes it a failure, despite whatever dps benefits it gives, and that, imo, is why AST has tanked in people who are willing to play it. Through all of SB, while WHM was considered useless, it was never as unpopular as AST is right now, because it wasn't complete ass to play, or require macros.
If the saving grace of the old system was that you only really had one choice (Expand and, only a bit less obligatory, Balance)... is that not at least as flawed a system?

Take any way of balancing the old system so it wasn't just Expanded-Balance/Arrow/Spear or bust and you have the same exact problem.

And spare the discussion this "especially on controller" misrepresentation. M&KB is scarcely if at all affected. It is quite purely a controller problem.

It is not, however, a controller problem unique to AST cards. Literally any other need to rapidly target an ally other than your target or target, single focus target, or an ally immediately above or below your last on the party list runs into this same issue on controllers. When my healers in a 24-man raid have both gotten themselves killed by standing in a one-shot mechanic and suddenly my party members and I are getting chain-oGCD-healed (tetra-bene-[gap]-Asylum in rapid fire, each onto the appropriate targets) to keep us over HP margins, I can be almost absolutely certain that supporting alliance healer is using a mouse and keyboard.

XIV controller support is not good, let alone on par with M&KB. It's just been marginally acceptable because so much of healing has been purposely held back into predictable intervals on predictable targets in order to keep controller-users from noticing its otherwise glaring issues. And given how much could be done to improve controller usage, our attention should be on that, rather than just maintaining, be it by fight design or job mechanics, low demands of our controls as to obfuscate the difference.