Did people even ask for changes to AST, like they do / did for MNK and MCH?

[Recon1o6]

Yes, they do.

My favorite go to example is Bard. I got into bard right towards the end of ARR, when it was pretty good and pretty fun. Then heavensward dropped. Oops. As the expac went on, people on the forums just went "git gud and adapt" and fans of the class lost more and more hope. But come Stormblood they - thankfully - completely ditched the "bard mage" concept. And both bringing the concept about and then abolishing it again pretty much completely changed how the job worked and played.

With the enormous amount of feedback on AST cards, I don't think there's any doubt at all that the current system is a dead card walking for 6.0. Of course, I do understand waiting for the next expac is painful. WHM is the healer I play most and we just got out of Stormblood which was a hellish time for the job. But then, WHM serves as another example. SE was told many, many times what a terrible, horrible system lillies are, and in Shadowbringers it was thoroughly reworked and overhauled.

Back to AST cards again, the dev team already apologized in one of the earlier... interviews or LLs? I don't remember which exactly. They know people don't like it. Chances are they're already planning a redesign. It's just a matter waiting though again, I do relate to how waiting can be painful.

The problem here is that they have been fairly inconsistent with addressing some classes. Bard seems to be a favourite of the devs. They got a pretense of support back in 5.1 (2% buff? you can't even see that without a 3rd party tool) and they got their bowmage scrapped in Stormblood
Monk has had long standing issues since 2.0. They haven't really acquired anything since 3.0 as all the new skills seem to be replacements of the ones they lost over the years. (elixir field an ogcd that hits enemies around? that sounds familiar...)
Dark knight is another example, it used to be high skill class with lots of debuffs and altering properties of your attacks with dark arts. Two expansions later and we're a clone of warrior except with Fray instead of healing)

And the cards mentioned? that particular interview was 5.05, they had seen the feedback but they would not be changing the cards or adding mp back to noct, but they did apologise for how terrible AST's potencies were at launch. (IE unplayable)

[Reyna_Balmore]

More like they just have a disconnect with the playerbase as a whole, but especially healers its most prominent given they never answer urgent questions and the huge threads we have since 2 expansions in a row all 3 got shafted in someway majorly.
Look at how dark knight, summoner and monk have been ignored as well, the devs have a massive disconnect because they are focusing too much on "balance" and homogenisation for accessability rather than diversifying and improving skillsets and identities

The devs really need to implement some sort of in game feedback, because at this rate their experimentation and dumbing down is going to cause more problems than they can ignore, particularly when there are lots of other big issues that are riling players that haven't been answered. The playerbase is gaining new players but at this rate, all they will be doing is replacing long time fans who have become too disgruntled

Yea, it's pretty unfortunate they're making changes to make things "easier" / "dumbing" it down to "please" the entire base by lowering the skill ceiling. There are enough classes for people to pick if they want an easier time. People who want to excel will study and look at guides to become better. People who want to play more casually will choose to play at the bare minimum will continue to do so. Those casual players may get some heat from other players, but hey, it's an MMORPG, somebody is going to say something you may not like.

The "dumbing" down of classes seem to have hit both the tank and healer role pretty hard. 5.0 looks like it was a great expansion for the DPS.

[Risvertasashi]

The problem here is that they have been fairly inconsistent with addressing some classes. Bard seems to be a favourite of the devs. They got a pretense of support back in 5.1 (2% buff? you can't even see that without a 3rd party tool) and they got their bowmage scrapped in Stormblood
Monk has had long standing issues since 2.0. They haven't really acquired anything since 3.0 as all the new skills seem to be replacements of the ones they lost over the years. (elixir field an ogcd that hits enemies around? that sounds familiar...)
Dark knight is another example, it used to be high skill class with lots of debuffs and altering properties of your attacks with dark arts. Two expansions later and we're a clone of warrior except with Fray instead of healing)

And the cards mentioned? that particular interview was 5.05, they had seen the feedback but they would not be changing the cards or adding mp back to noct, but they did apologise for how terrible AST's potencies were at launch. (IE unplayable)

So, look. I get it.

Bard is another class I like. 5.1 took away about 2k personal DPS while only giving me about 700 DPS back in raid buffs - though I'm not a particularly high end bard player and I hardly raid on it so that may be a factor. In any case, I hate it. I've hated other changes in the past too.

I'm simply making observations from how SE has acted in the past. When something like AST cards get this (high) level of negative feedback, in the past SE overhauls it for the next expansion, so I think that's most likely what will happen here. In the interim, you are right, typically they only make relatively minor changes - duration, potency, cooldown, maaaybe adding an ability or a slight mechanic change.

It's also not impossible they might overhaul it before 6.0, but they've never done something like that before. The pattern is such changes come with expac launches. It's also possible they could ignore it completely for 6.0, but that also doesn't fit SE's established modus operandi.

[MOZZYSTAR]

I haven't read all the posts in this thread, but in regards to the original post: no, I don't think anyone actually demanded for AST changes. There were and always have been "Balance fishers," but they were (in my opinion) bad Astrologian players and should not have represented Astrologian as a whole - enough to warrant a total change to the class, anyway. I think Balance fishers were/are bad mix for AST because they completely missed the point of Astrologian as a class/concept and thus played it in a way that wasn't optimal for a class. Whenever I saw a Balance fisher in a raid (with me as cohealer because I used to play only AST until a few months before SHB came out), they would shuffle their cards more often than using them and then would either use them right away or hold onto the card until it was "strategic" to use, which ultimately made them not very useful... because they were rarely ever buffing. Using Arrow should have been fine on its own, because speeds up the players (i.e. more damage per second), or Spear which increased likelihood of critical hits (which was especially useful when BRD played songs), and so on.

In my 4 years of playing AST, I really never heard of anyone complain about the cards after their initial fix (because they did get fixed right after its original release - for the better, mind you) except for people who fished for Balance. But I think they were likely in the minority because I didn't see/read it come up that often in the forums or in the game. So, by and large: no, I don't think AST players asked for this change. Some disliked RNG, but again: same issue as Balance fishers, still in the minority.

For scholar, I think the main complaint was actually a lack of fairies (because SMN has/had so many egis whereas scholar only had two fairies) and the fact that Selene was basically useless even in situations where she would have been ideal because her CDs were just way too long and some other stuff. But they didn't ever ask "take away my DoTs! I can't handle all this DPSing! Take away my blue orby thingy! I have no desire for it!" If anything, I learnt from SCH in my early days was that sometimes DPSing was another healing tool in that the faster monsters went down, the less damage your teammates would like take. Which totally fits with the preventive healing style that is SCH.

As for WHM, I hate WHM so much that I just stopped listening/reading about it. x'D But the loudest thing that started to pop up (after the endless complaints of lack of DPS tools) was something to do with the lily system.

[Crushnight]

The big problem people never see to get with 'balance fishers' is they were playing sub optimal trying to be as optimal with the cards as possible.

Every redraw was 30s and every draw 30s so to not get either ewer, spire or balance in 1st draw is 50% then getting either balance or spire/ewer on second is 1/6 or 1/3 not the greatest of odds .
So anyone refusing to use the other cards except balance were not doing their job as an Ast.

You fished for balance within reason ie the draw/redraw and sleeve draw timeframe if you held off using cards for >30s to get balance you were sub optimal this is why I say balance was the best card but not the only one.

[Ceasaria]

Exactly ! Imagine we have AOE Royal Road waiting for Balance.
If the player discards Arrow, then Ewer, for example, He would have lost one buff already.
That's why, in my case, I was waiting for Balance and Arrow, or Spear if burst time was coming.
It's already happened I launched a lot of Arrow, and my team did very well during speedkill.
From my calculations (with the help of a website), I estimated the Arrow being approximatively equal to 80% of Balance potency which is pretty good.
Even in some cases our best bursts (for example on Ultima Ultimate after Lahabrea) were done with an Arrow.

[Averax]

People complained because the balance was OP and the other cards were "useless". A simple solution would have been to simply change the balance to something else like direct hit, and adjust card durations so that AST would no longer be the king of healers. But they, in their infinite wisdom, decided it would be way better to completely overhaul the card system, and make every card into the balance.

The changes to redraw and celestial opposition were great and needed, but the new card system as a whole was not

[LukaRoselia]

Savage raiders moaned about balance fishing so as per mmo devs, they were bloody listened to. Pretty sure everyone else loved the job.

[QooEr]

Savage raiders moaned about balance fishing so as per mmo devs, they were bloody listened to. Pretty sure everyone else loved the job.

why does everyone keep blaming the savage raider boogeyman? people raid with the classes they enjoy playing. there also couldve been a million other things to deter or trivialize balance fishing but instead they chose to change everything

[Risvertasashi]

why does everyone keep blaming the savage raider boogeyman? people raid with the classes they enjoy playing. there also couldve been a million other things to deter or trivialize balance fishing but instead they chose to change everything

Averax was actually closer to the truth.

Even on these very forums where people are (now) claiming it never happened - so many people called anything other than balance useless. So some of the more useless cards got turned into DPS boosts. Then in 5.0... everything is a DPS boost.