Is it fun?

[Karen_Cerfrumos]

I think AST is reasonably satisfying to play. The cards are uninteresting, but I enjoy being able to weave something every GCD, and the cards still require some attention even when there's no healing to be done. It plays smoothly and the kit feels holistically designed, if bland, which is not something that can be said for the other two healers. Not having to worry about double weaving also helps because it allows the first half of the GCD to be spent on planning and triaging. Not to mention having the best movement tools out of the three. Sure, the flavour isn't there, but the kit fits together.

The other two are rather miserable though, with no real good movement or weaving options as well as clunky resource mechanics. WHM is the least fun for me, while I can't enjoy the optimal way to play SCH but at least ruin 2 exists and art of war is satisfying in dungeon pulls.

I genuinely feel people don't pay enough attention to how absolutely garbage the new card system is. If there was an ever an example to give of Shadowbringers cutting class design features and fun for the sake of reaching nebulous balance at too great a cost, this would be it. There is absolutely ZERO feedback for Astrologian using the cards. The impact each individual card brings is so miniscule you can't even feel it without analysing the log (which is, you know, logging is against TOS and all that). And even when you do look at your logs, turns out that even all cards combined will at most amount to the impact of trick attack. The new limp 5% trick attack. Applying individual cards? You feel nothing. Before, yes, cards were random, but when you got that 45s AOE Balance going you could visibly see the boss losing an extra % of health compared to when you don't, and that was satisfying. Balancing the game into a perfect flatline when you throw the baby out with the water and make abilities unfun is bad design. The new cards are busywork for the sake of busywork and nothing else. This is a shining example of how balancing choices in 5.0 cut too much substance that was deemed troublesome and then replaced it with nothing.

[lbr]

I genuinely feel people don't pay enough attention to how absolutely garbage the new card system is. If there was an ever an example to give of Shadowbringers cutting class design features and fun for the sake of reaching nebulous balance at too great a cost, this would be it. There is absolutely ZERO feedback for Astrologian using the cards. The impact each individual card brings is so miniscule you can't even feel it without analysing the log (which is, you know, logging is against TOS and all that). And even when you do look at your logs, turns out that even all cards combined will at most amount to the impact of trick attack. The new limp 5% trick attack. Applying individual cards? You feel nothing. Before, yes, cards were random, but when you got that 45s AOE Balance going you could visibly see the boss losing an extra % of health compared to when you don't, and that was satisfying. Balancing the game into a perfect flatline when you throw the baby out with the water and make abilities unfun is bad design. The new cards are busywork for the sake of busywork and nothing else. This is a shining example of how balancing choices in 5.0 cut too much substance that was deemed troublesome and then replaced it with nothing.

I definitely agree. While I still think AST is the best of all three in terms of how it plays, the buffs are tiny and uninteresting. I'm afraid I cannot comment on how they were before ShB as I did not play AST before then, but from what I have read I sure do think the options were much more interesting. If they were so afraid of people fishing for balance all the time, they should've just removed the damage buff from it and put it on something similar to the current divination where it's something you get as a payoff after playing a few cards.

I may be a new player but reading about how the jobs used to work back in the day make me sad sometimes because I never got to experience them, especially with SCH.