How could you do this to AST?

[ASkellington]

Well here's the thing, the AST playerbase complains about how the old cards were taken out. As it was pointed out by you, ALL THOSE CARDS WITH THE EXCEPTION OF 3 WERE SITUATIONAL. You don't want situational, yet you want the old card system back? They changed it to the current one BECAUSE YOU PEOPLE DIDN'T WANT SITUATIONAL. But people want the old one back. Here's the thing... IF YOU WANT THE OLD CARD SYSTEM BACK, YOU'RE GOING TO GET SITUATIONAL CARDS. NOW EITHER YOU WANT THEM BACK, MEANING YOU WANT THE OLD SYSTEM, OR YOU DON'T, MEANING YOU WANT THE CURRENT SYSTEM. THERE IS NO IN BETWEEN!

Now that I've had ample time to think about it, there is a way we could have the old cards back by lessening RNG. I'll even give two ways to go about it:

Chronos' passive from SMITE
or
Drawing cards on a set rotation

* Note that both of these options straight up require Divination be separate from the seals system like it is in PvP

So for tl;dr of Chronos' passive: in SMITE he has 4 quadrants with his 2 ability used to activate them. The passive acts like a clock and when you press 2 you stop on which ever quadrant it lands on and use it's effects while underneath the duration. Same thing could be applied to AST cards. You control when the draw happens and what card you draw. Does this mean we'll get more consistent Balance uses instead of everything else, yes. But, it also gives us a greater chance of being able to use Ewer/Bole when we want instead of hoping to draw it at the right time.

Drawing cards on a set rotation (i.e. Balance--->Arrow--->Spear--->Bole--->Ewer--->Spire repeat) is also an option. You know when you're going to draw X card cause its in order. Redraw could be used to skip over a card. "I don't need Ewer or Spire at this time", Redraw x2 you're now at Balance, or w/e rotation you want to use.

Neither of these are really perfect. With the card cycle you still have a bit of RNG to factor because it could be missaligned very easily (I played alot of Chronos, I should know) and personally I haven't found away to make Sleeve Draw/Redraw have uses with this.
With the rotation, depending on what order its in could have some problems. Again, Sleeve Draw has no use in this system, or I haven't thought of a good one since I've booted Seals out, and it also doesn't fix the problem of "redraw til you get what you want" aka Balance.

Point is, we could have old cards, with adjustments, we just need to think outside the box.

As for OP's post, I called Nocturnal being removed in 6.0 ages ago. Neutral sect exists, Noct was heavily critizised (either for how much mana its abilities costed at the beginning of 5.0 or for being less efficient than Diurnal), and even the community wanted it to be removed. I don't like it since AST is already WHM but with cards and more lore purging (also, wtf are they going to do for the SB questline? doesn't it call for Noct Asp. Benefic?) and there's 0 news on if they're going to alter/change the card system again. /shrug Here's to hoping we get a unique healing playstyle come 6.0

[ssunny2008]

As for OP's post, I called Nocturnal being removed in 6.0 ages ago. Neutral sect exists, Noct was heavily critizised (either for how much mana its abilities costed at the beginning of 5.0 or for being less efficient than Diurnal), and even the community wanted it to be removed. I don't like it since AST is already WHM but with cards and more lore purging (also, wtf are they going to do for the SB questline? doesn't it call for Noct Asp. Benefic?) and there's 0 news on if they're going to alter/change the card system again. /shrug Here's to hoping we get a unique healing playstyle come 6.0

That´s actually the biggest issue. That 100 guys here or some streamer doesn´t represent the whole community. There are millions of players of players who were fine with certain class mechanics. Of course you can´t count voices, when nobody is saying a word. But it´s in nature of humans to stay silent if they´re staisfied and to moaning if something goes wrong.
We´ve elistists, decent players, casuals and completely noobs out there. Everyone has an own opinion and everyone should be catered in some way. I´m fine with it. But i´m not fine with the fact, that every subclasses are going to be the same. They could always go the way to pick one subclass for each category of gamers. A simple one for whose who can´t or don´t want to do better. 1 or 2 who have some unique mechanics. The last one could be way more complex to cater the upper 10% of players who enjoy more challenging classes. FF14 has enough classes to go that way, but no, everything is getting simplified until everything plays nearly the same.

Nocturnal might haven´t been always perfect, but it´s something which is up to the players decision. If someone doesn´t like it, why should it get removed? Just stay on Diu and let the players play Noc, who actually wants to play it. It´s not even a big work in the background since it´s implemented and SE just had to adjust some numbers here and there with new patches.

Btw we´ve a similar discussion in the DPS section already. This guy nails it in some way: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post5502976

I personally can´t see the need of AST and SGE if we just get WHM 2.0 and SCH 2.0 with new animations and another gimmick, which is there just to create the idea/feeling of ​​uniqueness, but isn´t one. (SGE and SCH can´t be played together anyway. If barriers can be stacked, then certain boss mechanics are going to get cheesed hard.)

[ASkellington]

That´s actually the biggest issue. That 100 guys here or some streamer doesn´t represent the whole community. There are millions of players of players who were fine with certain class mechanics. Of course you can´t count voices, when nobody is saying a word. But it´s in nature of humans to stay silent if they´re staisfied and to moaning if something goes wrong.
We´ve elistists, decent players, casuals and completely noobs out there. Everyone has an own opinion and everyone should be catered in some way. I´m fine with it. But i´m not fine with the fact, that every subclasses are going to be the same. They could always go the way to pick one subclass for each category of gamers. A simple one for whose who can´t or don´t want to do better. 1 or 2 who have some unique mechanics. The last one could be way more complex to cater the upper 10% of players who enjoy more challenging classes. FF14 has enough classes to go that way, but no, everything is getting simplified until everything plays nearly the same.

Nocturnal might haven´t been always perfect, but it´s something which is up to the players decision. If someone doesn´t like it, why should it get removed? Just stay on Diu and let the players play Noc, who actually wants to play it. It´s not even a big work in the background since it´s implemented and SE just had to adjust some numbers here and there with new patches.

Btw we´ve a similar discussion in the DPS section already. This guy nails it in some way: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post5502976

I saw that post and I agree with it, but I don't think it fully applies here. For one, the whole reason people wanted Noct removed wasn't just because it was inferior to Diurnal. The hope of Noct's removal was to give things back to SCH and rebalance the healers (why anyone thinks it would force SE to do this I have no idea but that's the idea) not to get rid of it because they hated it.

For another, even if they kept Nocturnal it still doesn't change the fact that AST is by design a 1:1 copy of WHM (and in some ways SCH with Noct stance). While I'm not in favor of Noct's removal at all, nor AST's concept of switching between shield/regen healer if it means this gets changed, you can bet I will happily board the train that gives us more unique healing abilities like Horoscope and Synastry.

The issue is the word "if".

If Square actually decides to make 4 unique healing playstyles.
If Square gives AST something to replace Noct sect that isn't just potency fixes we don't need.
If SGE actually plays differently to SCH and isn't a reskin like AST.

If, if, if, if. Noct being removed itself isn't the problem, at least in my opinion. Its still an unwanted change, but not the underlying problem. The problem is that Square keeps removing things and not changing or improving what's left so there is no good trade off.

[ssunny2008]

snip.

I´m fully with you.

What i care about are those "if´s" aswell. Too many if you ask me and SE has proven more than once, even in the recent past with monk, that they´re not willing to go deeper with the classes. In the last years, too many classes got simpler and similar to others. I would lie if i say, i still trust in Yoshi and his team.

Yes Noc is just a little thing cross over the board, but it let the player decide. It´s pretty much the last variation SE gave us, which is in our hands. Synastry is cool, but tbh... i don´t use it that often. Even when i heal savage here and there, i normally has one instant heal up. The rest is getting carried by horoscope or the star anyway. Yes, all of them are unique in some way and you can use them for "what´s coming". But it´s still too similar to the other classes.
I would highly welcome more deeper class mechanics or directions like "tank healer, group healer". Maybe even with buffs here and there and a rework from the role-skills.

I can just give swtor as example here again. You had only 3 healer, but all played completely different. e.g. Sage had shields, an aoe with a hot similar which worked similar to whm shield. If you wanted to heal a tank, you had to cast for some seconds, meanwhile the tank got a heal tick each second. If you ran oom, you had to sacrifice your own HP to gain force again. On the other hand you´d the mercenary with less aoe, but a lot of single target burst heals and less casts. But you had to care about overheat. The last one was a mobile hot-healer with a drone you can lead to players, but you still had to take care about your energy. All of them had some raidbuffs.
In the early days you even had 3 debuff types and each heal was only able to cleanse one of them. Two were able thanks to the skilltree, but the Sage was the only one who was able to cleanse force debuffs. But that was too hard at some bosses if you had double classes or whatever with you, so it got changed later.

Of course, this is not swtor. But any MMORPG i´ve played has way deeper and unique playstyles related to the background of the jobs. The soul was real and any healer was different from the others, not just 2-3 buttons barely within the whole kit. SE should take other games as example to improve the classes and to adjust the boss-mechanics to it. AOE heals every 30s, here and there a tank instant and lucid dreaming on cooldown isn´t that big of deal right now. As i said, if you can play 1, you can play all. Maybe not perfect in DPS directly, but heal is definately not an issue.

[Absurdity]

The issue is the word "if".

If Square actually decides to make 4 unique healing playstyles.
If Square gives AST something to replace Noct sect that isn't just potency fixes we don't need.
If SGE actually plays differently to SCH and isn't a reskin like AST.

If, if, if, if. Noct being removed itself isn't the problem, at least in my opinion. Its still an unwanted change, but not the underlying problem. The problem is that Square keeps removing things and not changing or improving what's left so there is no good trade off.

Pretty sure this is gonna make or break the next expansion for a lot of people, it certainly will be the deciding factor for me.
Because we all know content in this game rarely lasts until the next patch, so the only thing that keeps me playing is whether or not the gameplay is engaging enough, and for a lot of jobs it currently just isn't.

[Deceptus]

Nocturnal might haven´t been always perfect, but it´s something which is up to the players decision. If someone doesn´t like it, why should it get removed? Just stay on Diu and let the players play Noc, who actually wants to play it. It´s not even a big work in the background since it´s implemented and SE just had to adjust some numbers here and there with new patches.

Because it's been hell to balance since it's inception. It's either too strong and then replaces WHM or SCH, or too weak and AST gets replaced. One of the two needed to go.

[Recon1o6]

Because it's been hell to balance since it's inception. It's either too strong and then replaces WHM or SCH, or too weak and AST gets replaced. One of the two needed to go.

you need to stop saying this, they've never had a problem balancing it and never said as much.

what they have is a problem with refusing to make it equal to diurnal sect because they keep penalising noct sect users

[RyuDragnier]

you need to stop saying this, they've never had a problem balancing it and never said as much.

what they have is a problem with refusing to make it equal to diurnal sect because they keep penalising noct sect users

*looks at join date*
You joined around when the AST buffs occurred in HW's 3.4 patch that brought it up big. Had you been here at HW's launch, you wouldn't be saying such.

[Mahoukenshi]

*looks at join date*
You joined around when the AST buffs occurred in HW's 3.4 patch that brought it up big. Had you been here at HW's launch, you wouldn't be saying such.

The forum join date has absolutely nothing to do with how long someone has been playing the game. These are two seperate dates.

[Recon1o6]

*looks at join date*
You joined around when the AST buffs occurred in HW's 3.4 patch that brought it up big. Had you been here at HW's launch, you wouldn't be saying such.

incorrect, and you shouldn't make such assumptions anyway.

I only joined the forums in 2016

I joined this game on august 23 2013 in the beta. Bought the collectors edition for myself back on the ps3 ended up on adamantoise because all the eu servers were full
I played when stone 1 had a heavy!

I mained whm till 3.0, used it and astro in savage at one point (my group made the mistake of taking me the ast into the infamous A3s...not that it mattered. We killed it eventually killed it as whm first, ast second)
didnt do midas on account of irl but still mained my cards and time fiddling pre buffs. Because it was fun even if it was weak.

Even though I mained astro, I was in horror at what they did to whm and dark knight. two fo my beloved alt jobs butchered.
Come 5.0 I didn't even make it to level 71 before I became disgusted enough with my globe to throw it in my saddlebag.
I used whm again and then ditched it last year after a few months why? because I am sick of healing been treated as an afterthought at best. I want my old healing experiences back. I want to enjoy the game again for more than just story and glamours and that means engaging downtime and interesting healing challenge