Yet Another AST Card Redesign Concept

[Risvertasashi]

Thank you for the feedback. I made this concept up during the days of "Draw Balance or bust" so it was built with that issue in mind.

I can't help but suspect maybe this is why SE didn't touch AST in 5.2. There's a lot of dissatisfaction with the current system, but there's also definitely a divide in the community on what's wanted. It will be interesting to see what changes they make before 6.0, if any.

It's a pretty safe rework, but it's perhaps too conservative IMHO?

I'm firmly of the opinion that SE should suck it up and go full yolo on a card rework.

Remove Malefic entirely (This will make more sense in a moment), Put draw on the GCD with an instant cast and little (Maybe 2 or 3 GCDs to slow things down if it's too hectic) to no cooldown but only usable when in combat. Give us a a variety of buffs akin to 3.x-4.x AST in a much more watered down but stackable form. It's critical that these buffs have a clear visible and audible cue to distinguish them from one another. Make it so with a card drawn, we can either apply the buff to a teammate OR throw the card as a nuke ala Malefic on a mob target with the same hotkey.

Give us a medium length cooldown to spread our buffs from one player to the rest akin to Deploy. Perhaps CO could be resorted back to it's former glory via this and the re-addition of it's stun effect.

This gives us a healer that can get legitimate value out of buffing at the expense of it's own personal DPS making things massively easier to balance and refine. I'd also hope this would go a long way towards appeasing those that dislike the current meta of healers being bland DPS with some support abilities to throw between Rocks.

At this stage I honestly don't think SE have anything to lose.

The downside is this kind of rework is almost certainly a "next expac" kind of thing, while more conservative changes at least have a chance of coming to fruition before then. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be done.

That out of the way - I like your idea. With WHM SE already tied its gimmick to the GCD and this did make me nervous at first, but it seems to have worked out pretty well. Adding a GCD buff system to make things more interesting than bland nuke spamming sounds... well, interesting. It would probably make me pick up AST more often.