The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[Renathras]

As a person who actually went through Shb and EW as an AST though, I'll respectfully disagree. Its by far the worst of the three healers considering half your cards don't benefit you and you do the lowest damage because buffing healer.

That's fair, and moving forward, I wouldn't want to just return to that format either. I've spent a lot of time trying to crack the code to the perfect card system

Not that this is a good idea (it's literally a "just popped into my head" idea), but I'm curious what you'd think about either of these:

1) Making Cards (Draw and Play) GCDs. If you have a hostile target (not friendly), Draw deals damage equal to a Malific (more or less) to the targeted enemy. (If we want to make things wild, we could make it do a Benefic's healing to a friendly if targeting a friendly, but it could also just do nothing. Play grants the card buff to the targeted ally and grants the AST "High Malific Ready" where their next Malific is upgraded to High Malific, identical to Malific in cast time and MP cost (and takes up the Malific button on your hotbar), but does 2x damage (damage neutral for Play being a GCD) and has a more explody/grand/pretty visual effect.

This would break up Malific spam with two buttons every 20 seconds, Draw and Play, with Draw dealing damage and Play boosting the effect of your following Malific as well as making it have a different VFX to change up the monotony some. I'm not sure this would break things up a ton, but it would make juggling cards in buff windows slightly less insane, and since Draw does damage and Play grants High Malific, you could take some time to consider who you want to apply them to (that is, you wouldn't need to Draw and only have 2.5 sec to think of and target the party member you want to apply to, you could put a Combust or Malific or two in between if you really felt you needed to and still be damage neutral). Would that make solo things a smidge more interesting and/or group play a little more fun and less clunky in burst?

2) Introduce the ability "Offensive Play". The AST inverts their Arcana card, playing it as a curse rather than a blessing. This outright turns cards into damage spells. Could also make it where doing so doesn't generate a seal (like old Minor Arcana use in ShB if you were fishing for your 3rd seal or were sitting on 3 and didn't want to muck that up before the burst window) if that would be nice, but could still generate a seal. Not sure which ASTs would like more. Either way, This would let the AST break up their rotation a bit with Draw and Play/Offensive Play being GCDs, and in solo play, the AST has another DPS button to press. Once you've buffed yourself, you could burn the other cards for offense instead. They could be designed to do more damage than Malific (a DPS gain) without changing group play since buffing a DPS (even with 3%) would always be worth more than, say, 2x or 3x Malifics. But in solo play, Offensive Play being 2x Malific worth of damage (or even 3x) would help speed solo encounters, where AST suffers from low DPS while also breaking up their rotation and giving the Job a niche (solo play only) optimization of using Offensive Play intelligently in buff windows.

Might something like that be useful?

Again, these were literally "just popped into my head", so I fully anticipate they could be really horrible ideas. Just curious your takes on them. If we actually had cards with different effects, Offensive Play could work differently, but even just being an attack would help AST kill things faster in solo and break up the monotony of the rotation, and Draw/Play (with or without Offensive Play) being GCD would break up the Malificspam metronome. Even if oGCD, Offensive Play would reduce the time to kill in solo encounters.

I dunno, it was just a thought...

Oh, and on Gravity - with a 5% damage reduction, how would you prevent this from just being kept up entire fights? Is there falloff/immunity on damage downs on bosses like how Stun works? I was thinking there wasn't because of the way Feint/Addle/Reprisal/Dismantle work and can be stacked/chained. Which is why they all have lengthy CDs to prevent just keeping the boss damage down-ed doing 5% less damage for entire fights. Didn't think there was an immunity to that...is there?

Not to mention the one thing I like about AST (my least favorite healer by a mile) is that it's the only one that doesn't have to stand in the center of the enemy pack in order to AOE. I like that Gravity doesn't require that. I wish SCH or SGE had a ranged option just to make them not identical with a different visual being the only distinction...

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The reason the cards were all changed to boring damage is because people only fished for Balance before ShB, with a few exceptions if Royal Road (I think the name was) was up.

One possible solution I've seen before is if all cards did the same damage buff (so no matter which is used, they all confer that "optimal" benefit), but they have some secondary effects (things like MP refresh) to make them distinct while not trading damage for those other effects. Granted, I'm not sure what the effects would be now that the 2 min window exists and so Spell Speed and Skill Speed buffs are bad, and TP no longer exists, etc.