AST fix ever?

[Mansion]

"preparing" a Bole meant a DPS loss. You can call it what you want, FFXIV endgame is just DPS. More DPS is less things to deal with, that's it.
I'm having a hard time believing AST planned Boles for prog (at least, I didn't) when shields (espiecially with a SCH) and mitigation are 1 reliable 2 not a DPS loss 3 arguably more efficient.

As I said, if it popped at the right time, great. On the tank in a dungeon that you outgear, outlevel, so you can perhaps sneak one more DPS spell (if the tanks plays correctly too), fine.
But using all card tools for DPS (be it Balance, Spear or Arrow) was more efficient in the mindset of raiding.
Now if you think healers should heal and buff defense, well you are free to think so. That's not a commonly shared opinion in FFXIV though.

[KDSilver]

"preparing" a Bole meant a DPS loss. You can call it what you want, FFXIV endgame is just DPS. More DPS is less things to deal with, that's it.
I'm having a hard time believing AST planned Boles for prog (at least, I didn't) when shields (espiecially with a SCH) and mitigation are 1 reliable 2 not a DPS loss 3 arguably more efficient.

You are right. I agree. I can't disagree, this is true.
However... except if you're running with the same (good) static 100% of the time and only stick to savage as the content you do...
Most FFXIV experience "sadly" can't be summed up by that.

When you help least experienced player, when you run other content such as dungeon, r24, deep dungeon, eureka.
I understand it might not matter to a lot of people (precisely raider only), but for me, it does.

As much as I enjoy raiding and optimizing myself (so, going for the full dps cards and balance fishing with some of my old static), I also enjoyed "saving" the day with some bole and ewer elsewhere for some progging or anything else.

What I'm trying to say is, as much as it's true that dps is king in this game, the first requirement for this is playing really good (mitigating damage, performing your rotation well, good oGCD healing timing, doing mechanic properly...)
And perfect scenario is not what you meet everyday if you play this game with several player on different content.
I can't suddenly make them play better in 2s. Instead, I had some option to cover these situation. And I miss that flexiblity of gameplay with AST.

That's all.

[Mansion]

snip

I got a bit derailed by the flow of the discussion, but essentially I'm on that side. While I did not rely on bole effect or whatever, I did enjoy having 6 cards, 3 royal roads and two Minor Arcana.

I agree with QooEr about how they thought they fixed AST when in reality they created even more problems. But it would be very difficult to make support other than DPS boost in a game like FFXIV where everything boils down to DPS.

[QooEr]

"preparing" a Bole meant a DPS loss. You can call it what you want, FFXIV endgame is just DPS. More DPS is less things to deal with, that's it.
I'm having a hard time believing AST planned Boles for prog (at least, I didn't) when shields (espiecially with a SCH) and mitigation are 1 reliable 2 not a DPS loss 3 arguably more efficient.

obviously dps is all that matters once you can reliably kill a fight, but just as you didnt save boles for prog i know people who have, including myself. the dps loss does not matter during prog Because youre trying to see more of the fight. once you know how to deal with mechanics without that bole you can go back to holding the dps cards.

instead of fixing the issues by giving us a way to be able to use the utility cards without sacrificing RR, give more uses for cards so cards other than the balance could get legitimate use, or force every card to appear in cycles so one can rely or actually plan around certain cards, they just threw the whole system to the trash.

kind of reminds me how instead of just making aetherflow have no cooldown when outside of combat so ppl didnt have to wait, they just decided to make it impossible to use it outside of combat.

[Ilenya]

They should probably rename the entire role of "Healer" to "Combat Support" or something, to better reflect their actual playstyle.

Why do I feel like this would get more people to play healers?

[Zolvolt]

playing astro is way more fun than it ever was before shb. The old card system was extremely frustrating when you got anything that wasn't balance, or crit when crit replaced CDR. While its nice to pretend TP, MP, Damage reduction or skillspeed were useful cards it was ultimately more than pretending they were useful was fun. I'm tired of seeing threads of people asking to fix a job that is incredibly fun to play with a plethora of decisions to make. One of the biggest most frequent decisions is who to use cards on and how to use the cards you draw and I hope they never go back to what we had before.

[Nhala_Levee]

playing astro is way more fun than it ever was before shb. The old card system was extremely frustrating when you got anything that wasn't balance, or crit when crit replaced CDR. While its nice to pretend TP, MP, Damage reduction or skillspeed were useful cards it was ultimately more than pretending they were useful was fun. I'm tired of seeing threads of people asking to fix a job that is incredibly fun to play with a plethora of decisions to make. One of the biggest most frequent decisions is who to use cards on and how to use the cards you draw and I hope they never go back to what we had before.

We all know this is a bullshit. Cards have no meaning in shb. Im a healer not a bard. My job is not dps boost. And i will cry until they fix what they broke.

[KDSilver]

Im a healer not a bard. My job is not dps boost.

You are an Astrologian.
That's the purpose of diversity within a role.
You are playing a healer that boost DPS.
If you can't accept that, you're on the wrong class and WHM exist for that.

Buffing allies is not just a Physical Range DPS thing.
Cause same goes for mitigation with that mideset.
Every role has a least one tool or more to mitigate incoming damage. But that's not their role to do so right? They're not healers, why would they bother ?

[Ryd]

We all know this is a bullshit. Cards have no meaning in shb. Im a healer not a bard. My job is not dps boost. And i will cry until they fix what they broke.

DPS boosting is what the cards were predominantly used for in previous expansions.

• Balance was a dps boost.
• Arrow was a dps boost unless felt the need to use it on yourself while turret-healing (pretty much never required, especially with Diurnal's old baked-in spellspeed buff).
• Spear (crit) was a dps boost unless you threw it on yourself for some reason. Spear (cooldown reduction) was typically Royal Road fodder.
• Spire and bole were almost universally RR'd/minor arcana'd.
• Ewer saw rare use if it popped up when someone was desperate for MP and their other options were down, but was otherwise treated as spire/bole (RR fodder).

I will agree that the 5.0 revamp made the cards incredibly lackluster, particularly since we can no longer manipulate the kind of buff we're giving out (RIP Royal Road, the real victim), and losing Time Dilation + the revamp to Celestial Opposition were insult to injury, but if you weren't using the cards as a dps boost 99.5% of the time previously (assuming you weren't drawing all spire/ewer/bole), you were doing it wrong.

[Gravagar]

We all know this is a bullshit. Cards have no meaning in shb. Im a healer not a bard. My job is not dps boost. And i will cry until they fix what they broke.

Your objective, whenever you enter a fight in FF14, is "win the fight," not "heal lots of HP." If your goal is to heal HP, then optimal healer play would revolve around soaking up as much avoidable damage as possible, as opposed to avoiding it. You've got Lv80 jobs, so I think you understand that isn't the case.


"Win the fight" means reducing the enemies you're fighting to 0HP. The actions you take in a fight should guide your party towards this goal, and my deeps friends agree that giving them cards helps us win. Gonna have to agree with what others said and ask- what is it that you like about playing AST instead of other healers? If you don't like buffing damage, wouldn't WHM suit you better? They don't have any party damage buffs at all.