Quote Originally Posted by Seraphor View Post
FFS... I guess I am repeating myself then.


Bole - A 10% damage reduction ability that you only have access to 1/6th of the time. This means that the healer kits can't be balanced around having this type of single target damage reduction ability. It is either considered essential, which puts AST at a disadvantage 5/6th of the time, or it is considered useless.

Ewer - Crucial MP regeneration, that impacts the balance of MP maintenance. With it (again only 1/6th uptime and totally RNG) AST has too much MP, without it, not enough.

Arrow - Speed increase. Some jobs NEED this, some jobs have their rotation thrown off by it making it actually detrimental. Most jobs however simply do not feel the benefit of it at all. On paper you can math it out and say that it should be a ~12% DPS increase or whatever, but in practice, players clip their GCD's, and unless it results in getting a whole additional GCD in the 30s window that it has an effect on (which it doesn't) then it's useless.

Spear - Crit buff. Crit scales logarithmicly, making less effective at the start of an expac and more effective at the end, making it disproportionately effective for some classes than other, and completely screwed with Bards job mechanics pre-Shadowbringers to the point where it was proccing way more Bloodletters, etc. than the devs ever intended.

Spire - doesn't need mentioning.

Balance - ironically the only balanced card in the set.

The whole picture, has AST players either constantly fishing for expanded Balances (so the whole RNG thing is a waste of time) or having their core healer kit (Bole and Ewer) at the mercy of RNG (objectively detrimental to them as a Healer)
ASTs kit was set up in such a way that you didn't need bole for mitigation in raid content, they had enough baked in mitigation, same with ewer it wasn't necessary if you were good.

Spear, Balance and arrow were all dps gains. The only job arrow majorly threw off was mch and that could be adjusted around if you noticed you had the buff, and this adds to what i was talking about earlier about balancing around the averages.
You weren't only fishing for expanded balance in normal play, you were fishing for expanded (damage buff) be that spear, balance or arrow which you had a very high chance of getting, sure balance was better but not all that much better than crit, and if arrow had been adjusted that could have been another desirable counterpart. Bole and Ewer and Spire weren't their core healer kit, using them for their play effects were an added bonus if you got them, not core to their kit, they were designed for burning and rng manipulation. The only way a good rng class works is by having a less desirable option that can turn up, and if the player adjusts around it they still get a gain out of it, just not a large one. Balance was was massively overhyped in SB as fflogs ranked off of DPS not RDPS, going for the damage buff every min approach would be a pretty desirable effect this expac. I aggree arrow was a tad weak, but they could have turned it into a dhit buff.

You're placing way too much emphasis on some parts of the kit and being overly reductive about others. Basically every card was useful before just to differing degrees, spire/ewer were royal road fodder, balance spear and arrow were damage buffs and bole could be adjusted around if you got it, but really was the most useless out of the pack.