I miss old AST cards

[Mithron]

I don't care if it was a nightmare to BaLaNcE, it was fun. It had soul. Giving BLMs Enhanced Arrows and BRDs Extended Spears for more procs was so much fun. It wasn't all just AoE Balance. Throw a Ewer on your co-healer that just died and got res'd, laugh as you draw 6 Balances in a row and start dumping Enhanced Balances on your best DPS then extend it with your OGCD buff I forget the name of, Time Dialation?

I miss it so much. SB AST was best AST.

[Payadopa]

I agree. It was way more fun.

[SweetPete]

Let’s see what they come up with the rework of the cards in 7.0

[Garten]

I miss them too

[einschwartz]

Same. The decision making with the cards were more meaningful. Do I want to save for spread or enhanced? Extend buffs gave huge satisfaction. Now, the job is just a shallow busywork that rewards you carpal tunnel with that cursed opener.

[VentVanitas]

It had such a neat gameplay loop to it. Got a useless card like Ewer or Bole? Recycle it with Royal Road, roll with what you got. Poker's no fun if every card in the deck is an ace. Trying to fish for nothing but Spears and Balances was just self inflicted torture.

[Limonia]

I agree. It wasn't perfect, but it was much more fun. I liked having AoE Royal Road or extending the duration of the card. I even liked giving Bole to the tank. Now it's just bland because every card is basically the same. The only decision to make is whom to give it to which is always the same. Even if you only got "bad" cards, it still was more fun than now. I only didn't like Spread very much as it was kind of clunky.

I wish they would have just reworked them slightly. Make balance not as strong compared to other cards, tweak their effects a little, but keep the system the way it was.

[Recon1o6]

Fun trumps balance any day and the old cards were more fun. Not only did you have to put a bit of thought into your cards, every card was useful and felt useful when done right which is something the game lacks- visible feedback that makes it feel like your buffs are doing something

the people who whinged that they wanted balance only were the ones wanting big parses

[ForsakenRoe]

I do find it so ironic that ASTs padding one person for 'the god parse' was apparently okay, but DNC being able to give a permanent 5% dps buff was so outrageous and abuseable that FFLogs had to create the RDPS metric to address it. If we had RDPS back in SB as the default metric, what would it have revealed about the AST vs WHM balance? Would SE have needed to change the cards at all if it turned out they could tune WHM's output to be comparable to the average AST's luck with balance draws? I'm going to say 'probably not' because the 'hardcore' with huge air quotes players will see Class X does 4 dps less than Class Y and declare 'CLASS X IS DEAD AND TRASH AND GRIEFING' whereas actual hardcore players will just change to Class Y if it's that big a deal for the purpose they need that extra damage (speedruns mostly)

We unfortunately have to wait until it all blows up in SE's face before they will realise that chasing after 'its easy to balance' at the cost of fun is not sustainable

[Payadopa]

We unfortunately have to wait until it all blows up in SE's face before they will realise that chasing after 'its easy to balance' at the cost of fun is not sustainable

Yeah. I wonder when they'll realise. It's a vocal minority yet we all play boring jobs because someone said so on the internet when they did the math.