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

[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.

[MitsukiKimura]

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

When you have to think about it, AST card abilities allowed for different kind of play for different kind of situations. Leveling up AST with those card abilities felt amazing, fun and enjoyable. Now for anyone leveling AST, having all their cards just be a damage boost.. you have to ask yourself.. why? Dungeons you don't need damage boost, all of them are easily done as it is. For a development team to break a class lore because so called "Fishing for balance" was only for a small minority of players. They couldn't handle the RNG element of the class nor be bothered with other cards of its class. Your cards aren't worth using until level 70+ and with the DPS classes being buffed all around, we should get our lore and different card abilities back.

[Gruntler]

When you have to think about it, AST card abilities allowed for different kind of play for different kind of situations. Leveling up AST with those card abilities felt amazing, fun and enjoyable

No, when you actually think about it, it did not work that way in practice.

You had Balance, you had attack speed balance that fucked up rotations sometimes, you had crit balance, you had a defensive buff only good for dungeons, and then you had 'redraw this bullocks.'

You did not have more decisions than you do now. You were just fooled into thinking you had options by that Spire sitting there.

Be honest.

You never used Spire.

[Averax]

No, when you actually think about it, it did not work that way in practice.

You had Balance, you had attack speed balance that fucked up rotations sometimes, you had crit balance, you had a defensive buff only good for dungeons, and then you had 'redraw this bullocks.'

You did not have more decisions than you do now. You were just fooled into thinking you had options by that Spire sitting there.

Be honest.

You never used Spire.

Spire was royal road fuel and that was okay. And with the TP removal this expansion they could have made it something else. If we had kept the old card system we could have gone:

Balance = Damage Boost Direct Hit
Bole = Damage Reduction
Spear = Crit
Arrow = Attack/Spell Speed
Ewer = Refresh
Spire = TP Refresh Direct Cooldown Reduction (not passive like old spear)... or maybe even an OGCD HoT.


The problem with old Arrow is no longer existent with the removal of TP

[MitsukiKimura]

No, when you actually think about it, it did not work that way in practice.

You had Balance, you had attack speed balance that fucked up rotations sometimes, you had crit balance, you had a defensive buff only good for dungeons, and then you had 'redraw this bullocks.'

You did not have more decisions than you do now. You were just fooled into thinking you had options by that Spire sitting there.

Be honest.

You never used Spire.

Actually Spire had uses back when TP was a thing and yes it WAS used. You either burned it for Royal road, threw it on a DPS that gave them TP or turned it into a instant heal card. Seriously did you even play Astrologian?
There was WAY more choices given to the player than now. You basically throw whatever card is best for what class and that's it for the measly 6% damage buff or if RNG hates you, 3%. It's horrible and needs to be changed.

[HyoMinPark]

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

There have been several raiders on here that have complained about the new system, and expressed that “Balance fishing” was not the only way to play the job. Hate to break it to you, but raiders can’t be scapegoats for everything.

Balance fishing was only really important in competitive speedkills—which, fewer raiders competitive speedkill than clear Ultimate. I have seen excellent ASTs utilize more than just AOE Balance, and have listened to them talk about excellent ways to use the older Arrow and older Spear (4.x Spear on a good BRD was monstrous if given to them while they were bursting). The worst instance of Balance fishing was likely attempting to speedkill A9S back in Creator: you were basically required to have AOE Balance on the pull, and you had to get another AOE Balance afterwards. If you didn’t, you wiped. And there have been raiders that complained how stupid that actually was. Of course, that was also back when the developers made Balance +20% for single target and +10% for AOE—essentially breaking the card.

Ultimately, there was a misconception that Balance was the only “good card” and all the other cards were crap. But those complaints likely came from ASTs that didn’t know how to play the job.

So some of the more useless cards got turned into DPS boosts. Then in 5.0... everything is a DPS boost.

The only card that was changed in this way was Spear—and that was because the old effect was incredibly bad and very hard to effectively use. It only reduced the cooldown of abilities used while it was applied to a target—and single-targeting it on a DPS would cause their burst windows to misalign with raid windows. Changing it to +10% crit/+5% crit for AOE was so much better than “ability cooldown reduction”.

Even Spire had more use (in HW, at least) than OG Spear. Because HW actually required DPS jobs to monitor their TP, and we didn’t have TP refresh on as many jobs as we did in SB. Only NIN could use Goad, Invigorate couldn’t be cross-classed on every DPS, and BRD/MCH TP song came at the cost of their personal damage rather than being a freebie.

Essentially, SB AST had 3 offensive cards and 3 utility cards; and I liked it that way. I’d give anything to have Boles back for dungeon pulls or Ewers back for my MP—because AST still has the worst MP economy of the healers, and they only have 1 way of regenerating the resource (compared to WHM, which as 2; and SCH, which has 3).

[darcstar62]

One thing I don't see mentioned as much is the reduction in duration. By dropping card durations from 30s to 15s, (and dropping draw time as well) I feel like I'm just slinging cards around and don't even really care who gets what because it's so short anyway and new cards are coming soon. So then AST got so busy, it needed more oGCD space. I would've rather had fewer cards that last longer so they became more meaningful.

[Maeka]

I like ShB's AST over StB's.

I did not ask for a change specifically, but now that the change has been implemented, I would have to say I like it more.

Sure it is "dumbed down", but yet overall it just seems to flow better and easier. AST was already the most frenetic healer class to play, and StB's card system just seemed so weird. We had buff cards that nobody cared about (who cared about Spire or Bole cards? Seriously. And Ewer was usually LOL as well), which were only RR fodder.

Given there's what, 6 cards? and 3 of them are junk? That's 50% chance that any card you pull is going to be junk.

With the new system, the first card is useful 100% of the time, 66% the second time, and 33% the third time. Yes all cards do the same thing, but at least you're not throwing away the vast majority of the cards you pull unless Divination is on cooldown and you somehow got lucky and got another Divination ready before the cooldown arrived (and even then you're not "throwing them away", you're simply converting them to Lady/Lord cards to save your Div progress).

Every now and then I'll get this spurt where I'll need (insert type here) and not get that for 8, 9, 10 draws but these are thankfully rare. Usually I'll get the full Div stack within 5-6 draws. It's certainly better than trying to fish for Balance back in StB and usually having to settle for Spear (or that other one) instead at times because it just won't give you Balance when you need it.

For a development team to break a class lore because so called "Fishing for balance" was only for a small minority of players.

I'm a very casual player, and even I know that 20% Damage Buff is way better than the other 5 buffs. Why on Earth would I want anything other than 20% damage buff? I mean... 20% recast on something that takes two seconds... um.... ok? That's not even noticeable hardly, and besides, most things you use either have no cooldown, or the cooldown was the same as the GCD. 20% GCD? Eh, maybe? I'd say that was the only real competition Balance had. TP regain? Who ever cared about that unless you were spamming AOEs back in HW? MP Regen? I can't remember ever running out of MP unless things really went south (then MP Regen wasn't going to cut it anyhow). That just leaves 20% damage reduction. If I was solo as AST, well I'm a healer. I got Aspected Benefic, which would pretty much heal me through anything I was meant to solo, anyhow.

And throwing a Bole card on a tank in a dungeon? I remember the Bole Card being referred to as the "Card of Shame" because the only healers who threw those cards around did it to either insult the tank, or they were a newbie healer, or the tank genuinely sucked at mitigation usage.

So I highly doubt a "minority" of players was Balance Fishing because it just seems so.... obvious.... that 1 card was far more powerful than the others. Ironic they chose to call it "Balance" when it was anything but Balanced.

EDIT: I am obviously talking about StB, I do not know how it was in HW because I didn't play AST back then.

[HyoMinPark]

Sure it is "dumbed down", but yet overall it just seems to flow better and easier. AST was already the most frenetic healer class to play, and StB's card system just seemed so weird. We had buff cards that nobody cared about (who cared about Spire or Bole cards? Seriously. And Ewer was usually LOL as well), which were only RR fodder.

The only card out of these that was arguably fodder was Spire. TP stopped being an issue in SB—too many jobs had access to TP refresh tools (either personal or party-wide), and there were very few instances where Spire could actually be used for its intended purpose. Having a Ewer for yourself was actually very nice, because AST had the worse MP economy of the three healers in SB (and still does in ShB). Especially if you were killed. Bole on a tank in dungeons was amazing.

Given there's what, 6 cards? and 3 of them are junk? That's 50% chance that any card you pull is going to be junk.

None of them were “junk” when you take into account Minor Arcana. That was the best skill AST got in SB because it turned cards you didn’t need at the time into something more useable. You no longer had to throw them away as useless.

With the new system, the first card is useful 100% of the time, 66% the second time, and 33% the third time. Yes all cards do the same thing, but at least you're not throwing away the vast majority of the cards you pull unless Divination is on cooldown and you somehow got lucky and got another Divination ready before the cooldown arrived (and even then you're not "throwing them away", you're simply converting them to Lady/Lord cards to save your Div progress).

While all the cards are now “useful”, your percentages are not really how the Seal RNG works. And, personally speaking, the Divination+Seals mechanic is just transferring the “Balance fishing” to “Seal fishing”. Nothing really changed.

The cards are all the same and it’s boring. There’s no decision making to them now—it’s “highest melee DPS card” and “highest ranged DPS card”. No more giving BRDs Spears to give them insane bursts. No more giving BLMs Enhanced Arrows for more explosions. And Minor Arcana is just more of the same. No more free damage card or free mini-Tetra. I’d rather variety, even if you have that one card that’s basically fodder. Makes things far more interesting. Of course, the theme of ShB was to dumb down jobs that had any sort of complexity to them....

You weren’t throwing away the vast majority of cards before because you should have always been Minor Arcana-ing cards that weren’t being used on a party member, for a Spread, or for a Royal Road modifier.

I'm a very casual player, and even I know that 20% Damage Buff is way better than the other 5 buffs.

Balance hasn’t been 20% since early SB. That was quickly reverted before the first Savage tier released. It was +10% for single-target and +5% for AOE since AST was released (3.0) until 3.4 when they broke it in an attempt to draw people to the job. The 20% was reverted back to original potencies in the same patch Deltascape dropped (4.05).

Mathematically, it was the best because nothing beats straight damage increases. But that doesn’t mean that the other cards were useless because Balance was “the best one”. If you were throwing all of your cards away to fish for just Balance, then you were playing the job incorrectly. Balance fishing ultimately only mattered for top-tier speedkills and for people seeking Balance-padded parses.

I mean... 20% recast on something that takes two seconds... um.... ok? That's not even noticeable hardly, and besides, most things you use either have no cooldown, or the cooldown was the same as the GCD. 20% GCD? Eh, maybe?

Are you talking about original Spear or Arrow here? Because Spear was changed from cooldown reduction sometime in SB to +10% Crit (+5% for AOE). The cooldown reduction was literally worse than Spire—and they changed it. A Spear on a BRD or a MNK was a good play—it was insane how good it was on those jobs, especially if they were bursting (BRD + Minuet/Raging Strikes + Spear was an unbelievably good thing).

Arrow was arguably only good on certain jobs (SAM and BLM usually) because it could cause clipping with other jobs and mess with rotations. But that was part of playing AST properly—knowing when and where it would be effective.

MP Regen? I can't remember ever running out of MP unless things really went south (then MP Regen wasn't going to cut it anyhow).

SB AST (and ShB AST) had the worst MP economy of all the healers. A Ewer was far more useful than you’re giving it credit for. ShB AST would kill to have it back, honestly. They seem like they’re MP negative if you try to keep up with ABC.

That just leaves 20% damage reduction. If I was solo as AST, well I'm a healer. I got Aspected Benefic, which would pretty much heal me through anything I was meant to solo, anyhow.

The damage reduction was less beneficial in solo play and more in party play. Giving it to a tank in a large dungeon pull was pretty great. Whether they were a great tank or a poor one. And, as cheesy as it may sound, my UwU clear had an AOE Bole during the primal roulettes before Ultima begins charging up his enrage. It might have been RNG, but it saw some use.

And throwing a Bole card on a tank in a dungeon? I remember the Bole Card being referred to as the "Card of Shame" because the only healers who threw those cards around did it to either insult the tank, or they were a newbie healer, or the tank genuinely sucked at mitigation usage.

LMAO. No. Having an Enhanced Bole on a tank for a large pull was a godsend. It basically gave you free reign to AOE the trash down—especially if you stacked HoTs on them and extended the durations with Celestial Opposition. I could do that even to the worst kinds of tanks and not have to heal them most of the time. Giving them a Bole wasn’t an “insult”—I have no idea where you even heard that from. It was literally a free cooldown.