I have to rant about AST cards

[Zeastria]

Well I mean we used to have AOE cards but you had to sacrifice another card to do it which was a good system and would have worked way better if balance wasn’t that good

Adding AOE cards that was basically just “draw 2” would just be more button bloat, if you could stack them then it’s more stuff to shove into AST’s overcrowded burst window and a massive damage buff to AST which is already hard to balance because of how buff heavy it is

It's not a button bloat if the ability is just 1 button..
Let's say you rework [Minor Arcana] into a card deck - when click on it you have x% to get x card..
The card effect would be more like: Inc healing taken, reduce damage taken, inc mp reg.. stuff like that.
It's RNG - you take what you get + can't change the card..so you must play it to get a new one..
Since ability is AOE -> it's all in 1 button that alternate itself on use. ( like one we have in PvP)..

[vetch]

It's not a button bloat if the ability is just 1 button..

How do you think hotbars get bloated in the first place? Every button added is 'just one button'.

[Zeastria]

How do you think hotbars get bloated in the first place? Every button added is 'just one button'.

True... However in this case we replace an already existing button with another one... so the total number stays the same.

[ForsakenRoe]

-WHM- GCD healing doesn’t work in this game

I think Lilies work fine, the issue is that now that they're damage neutral, they're actually damage positive because of raidbuffs, so you get this degen-gameplay come up where you're meant to purposely waste lilies to prep Misery for raidbuffs. If you mean ye olde heals like Medica and Cure, yeh they're kinda bleh. If they want to have healing be OGCD focused, they need to give WHM some more to compete on that front, like making Lilybell have a shorter CD (with less stacks to rebalance), or shortening the CD on Asylum. If they want WHM to remain the 'GCD focused healer' in an OGCD focused game, then there's just gonna forever be a conflict of design philosophy that will stick out

hard to balance because of how buff heavy it is

I'd argue the opposite: AST is easier to balance now, for sure. However, I don't think it's cos of the cards being made uniform per se, but the fact that we cannot AOE them anymore. Functionally speaking, the potential results, once per minute (thanks to draw being 30s but needing to RR a Spire or Ewer every other card) for old AST ranged from 'this is Divination (5% increased damage for 15s)' to 'this is zero damage increase' (Bole/Ewer/Spire). The damage swing was crazy, and especially because it could be once per minute, instead of once per 2min as Divination now is. By having Divination be a guaranteed, 'this happens at the 2min window', skill, and the cards be singletarget only, it's a lot easier to know how much extra DPS is going to be generated by those cards. So, I'm of the opinion that we absolutely could have interesting varied card effects again, as long as we keep them single target. Buffing allies in an AOE is what we have Divination for. Besides, when you get a tarot reading, it's a reading of 'your' fate, not 'you and also the 7 people who are nearby, including the fortuneteller', right? I don't speak for everyone, nor can I know what they'd prefer, but I imagine there's a fair few people who would make the trade of 'We get cards with unique, different effects again, BUT! they remain single target only, to keep them balanceable'. Mostly because they're already single target only, so we're not exactly 'losing' anything compared to what we're at now

It's not a button bloat if the ability is just 1 button..

When they say button bloat, I assume they mean 'its another thing we'd have to press which increases the already painful APM of the class', not 'it takes another hotbar space', although we're kinda yikers on that front too

[FlutterYuu]

I don't speak for everyone, nor can I know what they'd prefer, but I imagine there's a fair few people who would make the trade of 'We get cards with unique, different effects again, BUT! they remain single target only, to keep them balanceable'. Mostly because they're already single target only, so we're not exactly 'losing' anything compared to what we're at now

I would hope we get this in 7.0 or something fun to play. I love all these jobs in one way or another and Healers were my favorite (now its tanks cuz i can never play dps im too impatient for the dps queue) They need to be more engaging, I know a lot of us are unsatisfied and have to wait for 7.0, but i wish they'd make these changes sooner. But I trust they'll fix AST. and hopefully make the other healers fun

[ForsakenRoe]

But I trust they'll fix AST. and hopefully make the other healers fun

I'm glad you have optimism about it, but I cannot help but think 'the devs who designed AST into the hole it is in, are the ones who are going to be getting it back out (supposedly)'. If they were taking feedback from players, ie doing surveys and such, I could believe it more, but it seems like they're just gonna bulldoze ahead with an idea they've got, without looking for any external input

[SweetPete]

I’m not sure what they have planned for 7.0 with the summoner sized rework for Astro/DRG but hopefully it will be good.

Sadly SE will never win in this case. Back when healers were different AST/SCH were supreme. As Astro had crazy aoe card buffs and sch fairy was ridiculously op and you could use the fairy skills while using other skills. Whm was left in the dust and even ousted from party finder during some raids.

Though I do agree the healers need to be changed and be different again. Will we go back to certain ones reigning supreme and the others being shafted by the playerbase because they don’t bring more than the others?

Honestly, this has been the most balanced the healers have ever been and none are shafted from raids. They all get to shine. It’s just took them being ridiculously homogenized. Sadly.

I want them to find a healthy balance so all healers can be different again yet all bring something special to raids so all can shine.

Just my opinion.

[Sebazy]

Sadly SE will never win in this case. Back when healers were different AST/SCH were supreme. As Astro had crazy aoe card buffs and sch fairy was ridiculously op and you could use the fairy skills while using other skills. Whm was left in the dust and even ousted from party finder during some raids.

That's an unfair oversimplification IMO as that certainly wasn't the case in HW at least as far as AST vs WHM was concerned (SCH was indeed king though).

3.0 AST was obviously way undertuned and not in any shape ready to tackle Gordias, remember that it's issues weren't as simple as 'Balance wasn't strong enough yet and it's heals were weak'. It ran out of MP faster than WHM, it had horrific enmity issues that were hilariously even worse still and it was tripping over it's GCD trying to weave everything.

By 3.2 and the release of Midas, IMO WHM vs AST was about in the right place for Savage. WHM was the comfy healer that offered 0 group contribution and mobility but brought a ton of raw healing potency to the table with the caveat of enmity and mp as well as offering a huge safety net with Media IIs reach which was a genuine concern in a lot of Midas turns.

By contrast, AST was still behind on raw potency plus reach and as a result, made things a fair bit sketchier at times. But in turn it brought the cards whilst also offering advantages in self sustain and enmity by that point. Remember that the AoE Balance meta really didn't kick in until 3.4 when SE inexplicably woke up and chose violence at a point when the 2 jobs were actually somewhat balanced.

It's genuinely interesting to think about how different things would have panned out off those 3.4 AST changes hadn't gone through.

[ForsakenRoe]

Yeh, I wasn't into raiding at the time of 3.2 being around (I was levelling, only started doing raids in 3.4) but my understanding (which I learned later) is that WHM and AST were super close in effectiveness at the time (in midas), and that the 3.4 changes to AST were basically SE just throwing the towel in and saying 'look we'll double the damage card's effect, PLEASE try AST we're begging here', because the playerbase still had it in their heads that 'AST bad, WHM good' from the Gordias incident

I do actually recall having to explain, with maths, to a raid leading figure from an FC I was in at the time, that actually no, we do not need a SCH 'for Succor shields', because Noct AST shields were as strong/slightly stronger

"we understand some people want Heavensward healer design to return but we won't do it"

and that's why I'm onboard with 'ok we can't have 3.0, 5.0+ is contentious, why not the middle ground of 4.0', it's after a lot of pain points for healer ease-of-use were addressed, like damage scaling from MND was a SB change, Cleric Stance dancing was removed and it was made into a flat 2min buff, etc. But we still had some stuff to play with, like Aero 3, 4 DOTs on SCH (well, one was used for mobility), AST had fun with unique card effects, etc. If that was 'fun, but imbalanced' and now we have 'not so fun, but more balanceable, but not perfectly balanced because the top 50 speedruns are still running mostly AST SCH', then I'd say the solution is not to remove more stuff to make balance easier, but to try and balance what was fun, as best as possible. People are always gonna find 'the one that does more damage', it's the nature of doing content with a time limit (enrage). If you balance, say, AST vs WHM such that the difference in damage for an AST is 95-105% of a WHM of equal skill (based on factors like RNG of cards and skill of allies during buff windows) then who cares if the AST is doing a bit more than the WHM on SOME pulls?

That's the issue I think, at the end of the day: People compare classes based on 'the best pull recorded'. It's possible that, should I run a 100m sprint over, and over, and over, maybe I get a run that rivals Usain Bolt's, by sheer coincidence arising from how many times I repeated the sprint. But that doesn't mean I can challenge him in a race, because that one run was just a lucky fluke, and I should be comparing my average run time, to his average. Here in FFXIV though, people compare their best time to Usain's best time, and then complain that they don't match up regardless of any other factors

[Gullis]

Because the sad truth is that dmg is the only thing that matters.

All those other choices would just be worse options compared to getting dmg card.