A summary of healer issues

[ForteNightshade]

If you look back at that time, I can guarantee that almost every complaint about not getting The Balance and the SCH not using Selene all came from DPS mains. The rdps metric didn't exist back then, so the only way to get the funny number on the funny number site is for an AST to feed you The Balance. I personally remember a lot of DPS mains whining about not getting The Balance, but I most certainly have never seen any AST main worth their salt complain about the cards.

This shows that the card changes aligns with their aim of making sure the DPS players have as much fun as possible, regardless of what this does to the healer role.

You were in different circles then. I know several players of varying skill levels who despised the old card system because it essentially boiled down to "Balance fishing". This opinion is especially prevalent in the speed kill community as Balance was king. A lot of people also disliked how certain cards were worthless. Bole, for example, was never worth using as you were never going to rely on inconsistent mitigation. It's no different than current Lady, which every Astro hates drawing. With all that said, I do think they could have done a better job adjusting the system than scraping it entirely. I, personally, liked old Astro a lot more than every other iteration.

Alas, the old Astro would never work in today's landscape. Arrow would completely destroy nearly every job, Spear is just a baby balance that would be even weaker due to the insane value of the two minute meta, Ewer and Bole are both worthless and we'll assume Spire would be turned into a Direct Hit boost given TP is no longer a thing. Which would just be an even weaker Balance. So old Astro would be even more of a "Balance or bust" job today than ever before. That's the problem with FFXIV's design philosophy. Damage is overwhelmingly the best option. Anything that sacrifices damage for resources or defensive benefits seldom has any value.

[Shurrikhan]

You were in different circles then. I know several players of varying skill levels who despised the old card system because it essentially boiled down to "Balance fishing". This opinion is especially prevalent in the speed kill community as Balance was king. A lot of people also disliked how certain cards were worthless. Bole, for example, was never worth using as you were never going to rely on inconsistent mitigation. It's no different than current Lady, which every Astro hates drawing.

...So we replaced those actual gamble elements with "Which melee|ranged each has the greatest burst dps during their 2min, their 60s mid-burst, and their shifted 30s between-bursts? DPad up to 3 times to target them and deliver a ST damage buff unnoticeable without a parser. If your top 2 DPS are of the same type at each of those windows, well, sucks for you and your rDPS, I guess?"

The Seals aren't, in themselves, a bad system, and we should be thinking about what would be better than either, but more than a little difficult to look at the current state and honestly think, without substantial inebriation, "Yeah, this is better than it was in Shadowbringers."

The old system's main problems were simply that...

• Royal Road was preemptive and therefore forced rather than retroactive and therefore optional (cast Card, then optionally buff it),
• there were zero relative balancing passes ever attempted on the cards themselves (at least old Spear had some unique value over Balance available to it via a hastened reset for tank immunities, whereas new Spear was just a 5% damage buff trying to compete with Arrow's ~8% and Balance's 10%),
• there were zero relative balancing passes ever attempted on the Royal Road effects (Expand had twice the value of Extend, which had twice the value of Empower),
• that there was no need to split Ewer and Spire into separately TP and MP (same is true for StB Refresh and Tactician, ofc),
• and that Bole could only reasonably be used on an MT since it offered no flat eHP boost.

That it was still more entertaining and capable of nuance despite all those issues says something in itself about the current iteration of "Find the melee/ranged, and maybe do your seals if you really want to."

With all that said, I do think they could have done a better job adjusting the system than scraping it entirely. I, personally, liked old Astro a lot more than every other iteration.

Yup. Agreed.

[ForteNightshade]

...So we replaced those actual gamble elements with "Which melee|ranged each has the greatest burst dps during their 2min, their 60s mid-burst, and their shifted 30s between-bursts? DPad up to 3 times to target them and deliver a ST damage buff unnoticeable without a parser. If your top 2 DPS are of the same type at each of those windows, well, sucks for you and your rDPS, I guess?"

Oh, don't get me wrong. I never said it was a good decision. The whole shift from Astro has clearly been one failed iteration after another considering we'll soon be on the fourth rework. I do recall Yoshida outright saying players only cared about Balance, which is why they made the changes they did. Although, that was always a problem of their own making for precisely the reasons you outlined. They still seemingly operate with the idea players will sacrifice damage for utility despite them never making said utility worthwhile. If there's one positive I can give on the Endwalker job design, they have gotten better about not doing that. Even if Lady shows they remain a bit too stubborn.

I've long thought the logical step for Royal Road would have been to split the cards into two slots: Offensive and Defensive. This immediately makes resource or utility cards have actual value as they're no longer competing with damage. It also allows them to balance a smaller number of cards against each other. I also much prefer how cards like new Spear made you have to be aware of which jobs benefited from it. Of course, that's before they gutted a good amount of unique gameplay aspects like Bard interacting with Crit. All in all, I suspect the Astro changes were more about simplicity in balancing than listening to player feedback.