Why so much complain on AST?

[MPNZ]

In summary: 5.0 releases a very weak, carpal-tunnel inducing, High APM with equally conflicting pressure (cards versus healing), a completely foreign card system that threw away the lore of the cards and capacity and utility to save the party in a pinch for high raid performace and leader board numbers (the random fate aspect was like one of the main hooks of the job), and the buffs took way too long to be implemented.

Added to the overall extreme simplifications, and the role is literally only active when players are new or just phoning it in and going through the motions because of the stark difference in just encounter & job designs, add in like two new jobs and trusts, and that's resulted in a hlr exodus to roles that literally feel like way better designed to keep players interested in playing them. And, TBH, every tank but PLD feels like that as well, IMO.

[Truen]

When it comes to this game, I realize I can't get too attached. I play with others who enjoy the story, and so do I. But, really I've lost faith developers care what the population thinks about the direction they're taking jobs in this game. Going on almost a year they've been mum on the dissent from the healing community; largely, we and our concerns don't exist.

And, I actually fear it's going to get worse in patches to come b/c this game works to cater to a fairly large crowd of gamers who use a controller. I wholeheartedly expect they're going to continue gutting classes, simplifying character/skill designs, and work to homogenize game-play so everything is basically the same across jobs, minus cosmetic differences of course.

While Jobs might look different and have varying animations, functionally they'll increasingly be more of the same.

[Crushnight]

When it comes to this game, I realize I can't get too attached. I play with others who enjoy the story, and so do I. But, really I've lost faith developers care what the population thinks about the direction they're taking jobs in this game. Going on almost a year they've been mum on the dissent from the healing community; largely, we and our concerns don't exist.

And, I actually fear it's going to get worse in patches to come b/c this game works to cater to a fairly large crowd of gamers who use a controller. I wholeheartedly expect they're going to continue gutting classes, simplifying character/skill designs, and work to homogenize game-play so everything is basically the same across jobs, minus cosmetic differences of course.

While Jobs might look different and have varying animations, functionally they'll increasingly be more of the same.

Don't blame controller players they are not an issue Ast and Sch never were issues on controller prior to 5.0, I mained sch during ARR/early HW (the time where they had their largest toolkit) where I became Ast from Midas onwards they were very manageable and they added things like the cross hotbar which made it even easier to have access to all skills.

The changes done to healers were to do 2 things
1.Force a more healing focus gameplay (prior to ShB Yoshi P said he felt it was unfair that sch made other healers do the healing more so they could dps, which was especially bad as sch was the one healing the most at the time)
2.Make it easier for new healers to get into the role without feeling overwhelmed

1 Backfired spectacularly when their encounter design team didn't compliment the changes and in fact caused a greater emphasis on Dps as we have more downtime than ever before this expansion, Whoops.

2 worked made a lot of people try out the new versions of healers but it created another 2 problems a lot of the veterans only play out of obligations then just set them aside when not needed if they didn't outright drop them and there is barely any hook for the healer jobs, I cannot in good conscience say Cnj(whm) will get better at 80 to a lv 20 sprout who is bored of it after 3 dungeons nor could I recommend Ast or Sch as the gameplay while slightly different with how they handle healing their downtime/dps is the exact same tedium Cnj has and that is for 78 levels (dagnabit this is so bad why were the healers alone designed around group play only).

And if they truly dumbed things down for controller players pray please explain why current Ast who has the worst controller issues this game has seen not been dealt with at all to ease said issues.

[Limonia]

Ignoring the boring dps rotation that all healers share for this, but the reason why I like WHM and SCH much more than AST is Sleeve Draw. Healing-wise I'm fine with it. I can also live with the fact that all cards are the same, even though I prefer the variety of the old card system. But Sleeve Draw is such an annoying ability, making the already annoying need to constantly target the DPS even more annoying. I just hate it and it makes me not play AST very often anymore.

[Recon1o6]

Though many others in this thread have offered various replies, it can be boiled down to a handful of fundamental problems

1. Cards and lore got stripped away, the new cards are loved by raiders, but detested by everybody else. The average player can't see the difference to dps without a parser (ps4 users can't even do that and not everyone on pc wants to break the ToS) and even then there's little thought going into the card as the colour tells you which party members its used for. The changes instead of removing fishing, encourage it with redraw stacks and divination given the seal mechanic.
2. All time magic and most unique spells/abilities scrapped leaving it bland further stripping its identity, complexity and playstyle. It was supposed to be the high skill healer with lower potencies but more flexible
3. The introduction of the play button screwed controller players incredibly badly. What takes a pc player 3 mouse clicks (draw, target, play) takes a controller player several due to how navigation in the party works. Pc players can even knock it down to 2 clicks due to how macros can be put on screen.
4. There is no feeling of reward from the Astrologian now for getting cards lined up with buffs and time magic nor does levelling result in awesome new skills, much of the reworked skills and new skills are either instant ogcds of regular gcds, clunky or not needed because the encounter damage still doesnt keep up with outgoing healing.
5. At launch, it was a horribly weak mess and the devs are still buffing it to try and bring it up to par for raiding.
6. A single death cripples it. Small bit of lag knock you off into a pit? Once you're revived I hope you like doing nothing but throw a single card for the next 30 seconds while you get mp back.
Noct ast in particular is awful as its functonally inferior to diurnal in addition to having higher mp costs so its likely you have lucid on cd a lot. At least SCH has the fairy and WHM has infinite mp played with any degree of competency

In addition all healers and tanks have suffered this expansion due to excessive homogenisation, unneeded gutting of dps skills (thereby ruining solo play and levelling) and subsequent stripping of downtime abilities.

[Renkei]

Yeah healers and Tanks kinda got tuned down /(ugh) and some dps did too, I don't think this type of redesigning was necessary as balance wasn't in a bad spot to begin with it encouraged people to work as a team.

[Deceptus]

Pretty simple:

They have the most actions per minute for equal or lesser results.

[Lilseph]

They have the most actions per minute for lesser results.

Actually, they put out more or less the same potential results as WHM and SCH, but have to work twice as hard to match them. Also to add to this, targeting party members for cards feels horrible particularly on controller. Having to put in like 5 extra inputs within 1 second just to put a card on each dps player is particularly nasty when you have Sleeve Draw active.