4 Paired Threads: AST - How do you feel about it?

[ForsakenRoe]

Like I get that Scholar and Sage couldn’t stack shields because it’d break the game, but the current situation isn’t much better lol. Not sure how Astrologian’s being able to shield stack doesn’t break the game lol, Neutral Sect has the same cool-down as Deployment doesn’t it? It just takes away some of the small fun that’s left on Scholar. All the divide has done is made every healer suffer (in different amounts lol)

Lastly I want to give a shout out to my main man Sleeve Draw. I loved being able to produce a bunch of cards for ‘burst support’ in addition to the consistent support from standard Draw. It was a huge pain because of APM (I think?) but I miss having additional draw options. Though, it wouldn’t be very useful now considering it’s all the same lol. Maybe they could have it draw like a ‘more powerful buff’ on a 120 cd. Or throw out a card that affects all party members. I want to throw cards at people more Yoshi

I'm not entirely sure it would break the game, to be honest. Having two stacking shields on demand would trivialize mitigation checks, yes, but it comes at the cost of throughput from easily accessible, zero CD Regen effects, and the pure throughput of something like Cure3. If those things that you're losing out on, are not enough to cause issues by being missing (or, the SCH/SGE combo can handle 'pure healing checks' just fine with their own kits), then that's not 'shields stacking would be OP', thats 'the devs did not design the fights to actually test the pure healing output enough'. It's part of the evidence of why the split is a failure in it's current state. SCH SGE can heal everything still, WHM AST can't do jack in raids until they vastly overgear it to make up for the missing mitigations.

I also miss Sleeve Draw. I'd bring it back in an AST rework too, as a button to 'force the RNG to favor you' in regards to the strength of the card effects. After all, if it's named after the idea of having an 'ace up your sleeve', I think that it'd be fairly fitting for it's effect to be 'sneakily swap out your weaker 'dud' card for the cheaty Ace you sleeved earlier' right? This does require that cards have an actual hierarchy to them (ie, you are able to draw any of 54 cards from the deck of 60, not just Lord/Lady of Crowns), but that's for SE to work on with their 'sorry we had to delay the rework' rework