I have to rant about AST cards

[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