A summary of healer issues

[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.