Quote Originally Posted by Azbroolah View Post
This is true to an extent, but only because the other cards were really just not very good most of the time. Balance and Spear (after it was changed to crit) were just straight-up better than the other choices. Spire was basically a dead draw (Royal Road/Minor Arcana fodder only), Ewer was only very situationally useful (making it also Royal Road/Minor Arcana fodder), Bole was not possible to intelligently play around (because if you need mitigation you need it on-demand, not RNG), and Arrow was actively bad for most classes other than BLM because it resulted in misaligned burst windows. AST players weren't Balance/Spear fishing because of "elitism" (whatever that means), but because it was the only choice that made sense 99% of the time.
Was speaking about the idea of specific buffs leading to the exclusive practice of those or else. Not anything specific within the AST community. While the other AST buffs were niche it does not change the fact that balance and to a lesser extent spear fishing contributed to the “X” or go home attitudes that part of the ffxiv community held in terms of stacking utility.

Personally I liked the original AST card system. Was really enjoyable. But it was a bit over powered in comparison to others. I wish they had taken the utility and spread it around but unless everyone had the same potential for utility as their role counterparts it wouldn’t have fixed the issue.