Astro Card Proposal

[EaMett]

Placing offensive and non-offensive resources on the same cooldown will always result in offensive resources being favoured. This is an immutable consequence of this game's combat system.

Mitigation tools that cannot be relied upon are worthless. A decent healer will have planned how to complete a fight in advance, making extra RNG mitigation unnecessary. Unless the extra mitigation can save a healing GCD it confers no benefit, and even with a beefy -20% mitigation this is unlikely to happen outside of intense healing checks like J Waves or Terminal Relativity. This stems from how damage in this game tends towards infrequent spikes that must be mitigated to survive. If the game treated HP as a resource that is consistently drained and must be replenished using finite healing resources (like in most other games featuring healers) then RNG mitigation gains value in that it conserves resources. Utility, such as MP regeneration, falls into the same trap unless it can be converted into damage.

Unless you want to make a portion of cards entirely worthless there is no way to implement them as anything more than an offensive tool without either overhauling the entire combat system or splitting AST's cards into offensive and defensive decks that are accessed using two separate resources.

The thing to keep in mind, especially when dealing with game design, is that you don't need to use something often to enjoy having it. Having options allows players to express themselves. And player expression directly correlates to player fun.
One (barely ever used) skill that gets you out of a bad situation once and reflects on how well you know your class will be a thousand times more fun and meaningful to you than a skill you spam all day long. Defensive cards had the potential to, and even sometimes filled, that role.

"RNG was not it, RNG could stab you in the back"

There was an entire post in between those two comments lol. Context is key.
And just to be clear. SE very quickly acknowledged the negative feedback surrounding the new cards. Given how little they acknowledge anything healer, and how much people can be seen complaining about the system here, in-game, Reddit, etc. I think it's safe to say that it was a significant amount of feedback they received. They did state that they weren't going to "change it back" because that would be harmful to the players that did enjoy it so I also assume they at least estimate that a fair amount also enjoys it. But the cards have gotten the most changes this expansion out of all healer skills so they're clearly still trying to fix something.

Given how "hot potato" healers seem to be to the team (feels like they just don't know what to do with the role). I'd assume the current system is here to stay. Besides, they're probably already changing a ton of stuff on AST next expac. It would be shocking if the cards were added on top.