Endwalker AST has too many buttons, and other issues

[rewd]

I think this is incorrect. The developers have proven that they can consolidate while also immediately triggering the cooldown of an ability—and on AST, no less. The second you place Earthly Star, its button changes into Stellar Detonation. Regardless of when you detonate it, if you do it manually or let it go off naturally, the cooldown has already been ticking down for the next Star usage. It’s not like HW or SB Draw where holding a card delayed Draw’s cooldown reset.

Minor Arcana could absolutely be programmed the same way as Earthly Star.


Re: Cure I/Benefic I having niche usages—

All of the base single-target heals (Cure I, Benefic I, Physick, and Diagnosis) stop being useful around level 40—a bit higher for WHM due to their poor MP economy pre-Assize and Solace, but you really shouldn’t be using Cure I beyond level 50 at the very latest. It is impossible to maintain a tank in leveling dungeons beyond ARR with Cure I spam. The potency simply cannot keep up with the incoming damage the tank is eating. Even for SGE you spam Eukrasian Diagnosis over regular Diagnosis (if you’re ever in a horrible situation where you have to resort to that); Diagnosis is way too weak to sustain.

Earthly Star works because the detonation timer is shorter than the cooldown of the skill. As you said, the star will explode after 20 seconds, regardless of what you do, and the cooldown of the skill will be at 40s at that point. This wouldn't work with Minor Arcana because cards don't have a timer. You could draw a card and hold it for the whole fight. With MA and CP merged, you would draw a card and be unable to see how much is left on the cooldown because nothing would force you to use the card in the span of 60s. This would be easily fixable by giving cards a timer (something like 50s), but that was my point: simply merging the two buttons would be problematic without an additional fix/change.

Regarding healing spells: I'm not saying those skills are enough to heal whatever you want to heal or that you should use them. I'm saying that if we are getting nitpicky enough to say that Helios totally deserves to be a skill because there are those niche scenarios in which you really, really need that additional potency from Helios or need to spam so many GCD heals (on AST, of all healers), then we can make similar arguments for things like Benefic and Benefic II and I've been in those situations (usual cursed mentor roulettes). Still, I would be more than happy to see Benefic gone, merged or whatever, as well as other skills. We simply don't need so many healing skills - especially skills we don't want to touch -. Just take the Blue Mage approach.