Developers : Healer design mentality needs to change

[Aomine1992]

No one is entitled to a group.

If someone is starting a group and one of the requirements is for a healer to DPS, that is their perrogative.

If a healer doesn't want to DPS, they can start a group advertising such.

Perhaps if enough non-DPSing healers see that not many groups get filled due to others not wanting their playstyle they might get a clue that the game directly TELLS them MULTIPLE TIMES to DPS when people are not dying.

And I agree but people were loud with the complaints so the devs sought out to make changes in favor of healing. Which has messed up everything else

[Saefinn]

When you think about it. AST had 8 separate cards that all did different things, 6 of them could be used to trigger 3 separate enhancements, 1 could do damage and 1 could heal. You could tactically hold onto a card you may wish to use later. There was meaning to how you played it and it was about how you adapt and use RNG to your favour.

ALL 8 of those cards offer you 1 effect and without being able to use them for enhancements, instead your RNG just affects potency.

I would argue than none of these really mean anything. The seals on the other hand just change your potency of Divination. That is the most meaning they have.

As illustrated by Laphicet, this is at the cost of its lore meaning, of how you use your cards in play, your decisions/choices in how you play them to your advantage. Sure people fished for the Balance (card fishing remains an issue, so making everything The Balance hasn't solved it, but 5.3 alleviated at least be allowing you to bypass some RNG).

And it's not longer about manipulating the hard that fate deals you to your advantage.


Dare I say the best change the could have made to avoid The Balance fishing would have been to remove Redraw or reduce its uses. Make players try to use their cards meaningfully instead of trying to fish for one to give the biggest numbers. And in its evolution, think about ways you can have AST taken advantage of whatever card is drawn. For me that'd have been a good progression for AST instead of "all your cards now have the same effect".

[RyuDragnier]

Dare I say the best change the could have made to avoid The Balance fishing would have been to remove Redraw or reduce its uses. Make players try to use their cards meaningfully instead of trying to fish for one to give the biggest numbers. And in its evolution, think about ways you can have AST taken advantage of whatever card is drawn. For me that'd have been a good progression for AST instead of "all your cards now have the same effect".

Or they could have changed the Balance from a straight damage potency buff to something else, since that was the main problem.

[Saefinn]

Or they could have changed the Balance from a straight damage potency buff to something else, since that was the main problem.

Possible, but I suspect the problem that'd then follow is a different buff gets fished, like The Arrow. If the pay off for fishing is greater than using the card you've got then fishing will happen because there are people who will try to optimise their best numbers.

[Recon1o6]

Ignoring cards for the moment, it doesn't change the fact that Ast was stripped of its Time magic as well- the other big element of its playstyle. That could have been expanded on so much: extending dots, stun/silence/slow, instant cast spells for other casters etc instead of being deleted

Fishing won't go away no matter what the cards or seals are changed to, but a bad Ast fishes, a good Ast makes use of every card. The cards changed to be a miniscule dps buff people who don't parse can't even see was why so many Astro's quit.

There are plenty of anti fishing measure that could have been placed that didn't require burning the whole thing to the ground

Going forward, a minor arcana that acts like it currently does while restoring the other cards to what they were and limiting redraws and preventing same card pulled for at least 1 draw would make everyone happy. Parsers could get their numbers, everyone else can get their job back, fishing is prevented.

[Crushnight]

The problem with healers is more specifically the communities fault, it all started in HW with the shunning of non dps healers, and the over use of dps, healers. There wasn’t a good middle ground so people complained about the lack of healing and less about the lack of healer dps.

Along with the devs making all healers alike has pushed us to this bad point to where healing needs to be completely new for the next expansion.

I personally play AST and though many dislike how it is now, I like the card system now. Simply every card means something and less button bloat. That is purely my opinion not every other AST. I wish healer dps was a little better or had healing baked into some kind of dps combo like how earthly start and assize operate but more like a dps combo.

Actually it all started due to the developers, the community just adapted to design they had created, the developers made Gordias savage so stringent that no Dps healers were 100% useless to raid groups(t9 I was told to just heal until you see an opening, but Gordias reversed that to dps until you need to heal even had to force our Whm to spam stone1/2 spells) this trickled down the chain along with phase pushes being rampant in HW as well, No dps healers were shunned more and more until it is like it is today where pure healers are 100% lazy players if still at it by lv60(No excuse anymore it is so dumbed down you have to actively avoid certain abilities to get 0 dps No assize, no star etc, I was more forgiving when Cleric Stance was a thing but not anymore).

The devs have tried to change the communities attitude about it and have failed every time almost like they don't really understand why we have that mentality to begin with and why it still prevails almost like they have gone about healers in the completely wrong design direction.

[tdb]

Fishing won't go away no matter what the cards or seals are changed to, but a bad Ast fishes, a good Ast makes use of every card.

I'm not sure if "fishing" means specifically waiting for the right card to come, but it hardly makes sense to leave redraw unused either. If I get the wrong seal (or wrong type of card in case I only have one kind of dps in my party) and redraw is available I'll use that and try to get a better suited card. If not, then I play the card as minor arcana on an appropriate player. Even back when the cards were different I sometimes played something other than AoE balance if, after using all the rearrangement tools at my disposal, I still didn't get the optimal combination. But there was and still is considerable leeway for trying to get the optimal result without wasting cooldowns.

[Saefinn]

I'm not sure if "fishing" means specifically waiting for the right card to come, but it hardly makes sense to leave redraw unused either. If I get the wrong seal (or wrong type of card in case I only have one kind of dps in my party) and redraw is available I'll use that and try to get a better suited card. If not, then I play the card as minor arcana on an appropriate player. Even back when the cards were different I sometimes played something other than AoE balance if, after using all the rearrangement tools at my disposal, I still didn't get the optimal combination. But there was and still is considerable leeway for trying to get the optimal result without wasting cooldowns.

"Fishing" is the spamming of redraw until you get the card you want. My point about removing or reducing the use of redraw is that if every card has a means of being adapted to being useful then it's more engaging to try and adopt the use of the card you've got, than spamming to find the *most* efficient choice. This of course is in relation to the old system. But I think new Minor Arcana mixed with the old system as previously mentioned would be a good way of making use of "useless" cards without relying on redraw spamming. It seems because people kept fishing for The Balance they've now made all cards into The Balance, when it was just those people being efficient as possible with their numbers instead of them specifically wanting the balance and that being the demand.

[Semirhage]

In order to fix healers, the devs need to ditch this pure healer mindset as it flat out doesn't work. They tried it in SB with WHM and the job was abandoned in droves. They've doubled down on it again this expansion and healers have been making threads like this since shb launch. Yet STILL the devs don't listen.

Healers need to be developed along their previous lines, but have their flaws from previous expansions fixed.

Sch having lots of dots and debuffs, a pet that assists their healing. Not this clunky mess thats glitching out constantly
Whm having proc based or buffing based high potency attacks using the elements. Direct and powerful, but fun
Ast having varied buffs and the ability to extend the duration. They could also allow dot extensions too to put more emphasis on the time portion of their identity that was stripped

This is what healers want as a minimum going forward. Ask around and you won't find a healer whose opposed to having to heal more

Having a fun downtime doing dps and having plenty to heal are not mutually exclusive

This is essentially my opinion. I've been arguing against "It's 100% the encounter design" for a while now. Changing encounter design would definitely fix some things. Here's what it wouldn't fix:
- Boring Glare/Broil/Malefic spammy solo duties
- The reward for gaining skill (i.e. when you've figured out how to cut down on your healing uptime, your reward is....spamming one spell over and over again)

I have no idea how anyone can look at design based around one single attack spell and one single dot and think "Nah this is fine, it's just encounter design that needs to change so we can ignore how much of a joke this offense kit is"

Change them both.

[Morningstar1337]

It seems because people kept fishing for The Balance they've now made all cards into The Balance, when it was just those people being efficient as possible with their numbers instead of them specifically wanting the balance and that being the demand.

I see it as a distinction without a difference. Raiders are always gonna want more DPS because that is what the game is designed around and also because the Tanks already have activate mitigation tools that make Bole redundant (and ideally they are the ones you want to use it on bar edge cases where the less squishy players have to Tank certain adds)

That said I do think the card fishing problem could've been mitigated by ensuring the Balence did something besides a damage increase (like maybe Bloodbath?) and making Redraw impractical to use.

Why I do like Divination and especially its animation, it was a lateral move at best and a step in the wrong direction at worse concerning card fishing as and would better be addressed by having it be a flat damage instead independent of Seals, but that would erode what little depth AST has, so that is a change I feel should be pared with other changes to bring AST closer to where it was.

incidentally I do wonder if many of their recent changes were borne our of a desire to be the anti XI of sorts?