Quote Originally Posted by ASkellington View Post
And while you are right to say that moving from the cards to instead distance AST from WHM in its healing deparment would be a better idea, the fact remains that what makes AST AST is the cards. Yes we had time magic (when I wasn't even playing the game). Yes I personally enjoy the idea of time based healing (Horoscope/Earthly Star). But what drew me and many other ASTs to the class was the cards. They have to be addressed. Either they should be outright removed, or changed from its current system.
Changed to what though? All I've heard is "dps cards are boring" and "utility cards are fun" and no one touches on the fact they're also useless in the current game design. They don't even care. It's similar to how healbots don't care that spamming overheals is actually useless and they're denying their party about 5-8k rdps if they'd just spammed damage instead, because they feel useful and that's fun to them. I don't feel like designing a class to have useless abilities but "feel" useful is a good idea. There are other areas to look for adding fun.

Cards could use some tweaks, but you have ranged, melee and 3 flavors of seals that become a minigame to match 3 different colours on the correct role. The idea that every card does the exact same thing is flawed, although the basic cards are quite similar.

I'm sure there are some ideas you could do to spice it slightly. For example, occasionally drawing an empowered range or melee card that gives double/triple benefit to healers or tanks, or changing Lord/Lady into a card that causes the target to deal X potency damage with weaponskills or casts, with a bloodbath or small mana drain effect, so you could pass it to a tank/healer sometimes. Even then it's hard to balance it to being useful. Perhaps you could also only give a seal if you apply a card to the correct role, align sleeve draw with Divi but make Divi far worse without 3 seals so playing the seal minigame right becomes more important.
But mitigation, movement speed, reduced cast/recast, crit/DH/Det divides are all generally bad ideas.