AST feedback

[ty_taurus]

the stormblood cards are not equally beneficial in PVE vs. PVP. Skillspeed and Cooldown reduction are either really nice for a job or more often really terrible for a job. It would actually be extremely bad for everyone in PVE right now with the 2m meta.

Bole is a bad card in pve as well because its damage reduction was not impactful enough to adjust how you healed encounters. The result of using it was almost always the same result as not using it.

Crit card was good because it was a damage gain.
Balance card was broken. you can't balance a damage gain against non-damage gains.

The old cards were really bad. It was fun to be able to cycle them and turn some cards into buffs for other cards but ultimately the system was impossible to balance.

That is why we have all damage cards now. The alternative is to have none of the cards be damage cards. The problem with no damage cards is people could not play them and things would be relatively the same. role specific damage cards mean you have to actually play them correctly to do well at least.

edit2:
Cards could be way more interesting however if they were mostly personal. There is a lot of potential in changing cards from buffing party members to effecting the astrologian. You could do anything from augmenting astro spells, to opening up access to certain ast spells, or just buffing the astrologian. Minor Arcana affecting other party members would also have a place in that system. I wonder if they have thrown these ideas around at all to see what kinds of intersting things they could come up with.

One thing I think would help utility cards have use is rather than the effect of the card being immediate, you're instead laying that card on someone for later, then you can activate all cards on all party members at once. Like laying a trap card in Yugioh, fittingly.

That said, offense and support cards can both exist, but need to exist as separate resources. Any time they compete, it creates an unhealthy interaction where offense is superior as the support cards are not and can never be essential for survival.

Ultimately though, I would much prefer something that is unbalanced but fun to play over something that's perfectly balanced but stale and inconsequential to gameplay feel. At the end of the day it's a game that's meant to be enjoyed, and that should be all the time, not only some of the time. I agree that the old card system doesn't work, but I would be willing to sacrifice some amount of consistency if necessary to create something that feels more fun and engaging to play and work with. It still needs to be mostly balanced, but even the old card system didn't throw old AST out of whack. The Balance buff of 3.3 was overkill, but that was eventually retconned, and the main thing against WHM during SB was it constantly feeling like Diet AST rather than offering some type of unique support, utility, or advantage over AST or SCH.