Dawntrail - What abilities do you think need to be trimmed from the game?

[Avoidy]

Game's already kinda bare bones so I wouldn't remove anything. Instead I wanna give more meaning to what we already have. There're some abilities that just get used to be used, but they don't feed into a gameplay mechanic or anything. You just sorta tap them every minute or every 30/45s or whatever for the potency. For example, you know how bard's empyreal arrow gives you a free proc on your songs? It'd be cool if more of those "USE THIS WHEN IT'S UP" abilities did stuff like that. That same job, bard, has an ability called sidewinder that just gets used to be used. And it has 2 dots that you just apply with a single skill and those dots don't even affect your songs anymore. Stuff like that feels so limp and forgettable. I'm not saying there shouldn't be fluff or that everything has to have a tightly controlled purpose, but the skills that don't feed into anything at all just feel aimless. Purposeless.

Also whoever thought removing the card mechanic from AST's main party buff and putting it towards a self buff that makes the opener feel giga-scuffed and also removing lord/lady of crowns as buffs again and turning them into a feckless heal and a feckless damage spell and also removing noct/diurnal sect should please please please never touch ast again. Whoever redesigned AST for EW completely missed what I enjoyed about playing AST, which was supporting my team, having 2 different gameplay styles (regens and shields), and having a semi-luck based system that fed into my signature raidbuff. I hate these new changes. I tried to like it because AST used to be the only healer that felt engaging for me, and they completely ruined it. I hope they don't "trim" anymore. They've trimmed enough.

[AnotherPerson]

Also whoever thought removing the card mechanic from AST's main party buff and putting it towards a self buff that makes the opener feel giga-scuffed and also removing lord/lady of crowns as buffs again and turning them into a feckless heal and a feckless damage spell and also removing noct/diurnal sect should please please please never touch ast again. Whoever redesigned AST for EW completely missed what I enjoyed about playing AST, which was supporting my team, having 2 different gameplay styles (regens and shields), and having a semi-luck based system that fed into my signature raidbuff. I hate these new changes. I tried to like it because AST used to be the only healer that felt engaging for me, and they completely ruined it. I hope they don't "trim" anymore. They've trimmed enough.

What they really need is to bring more interactivity back and make classes more unique rather than trim stuff out.

AST is pretty much entering a breaking point in job kit from how empty the toolkit feels relative to certain encounters. I'm glad they took a chance to try to address the AST concerns, but the attempt they tried didn't really address any of the issues. The amount of solo-play ability AST has is abysmal because a big portion of its DPS is all siphoned into party-play buffs and balancing that out with supposed 8 other members who do higher and optimal dps -- which may or may not always exist. Not to mention, the amount of support from solely DPS buffs doesn't need a convoluted system to do what it needs to do. Literally 6 cards can be simplified into 2 different cards and due to how lackluster Astrodyne itself works, it still doesn't do well to justify fishing for the remaining seals when the cards themselves is the core mechanic of AST's job gauge. What AST needs is a lot more than what healers are afforded. More than what the entire healer role is afforded, really.

The abysmal effect of Astrodyne could've been way more impactful if it was designed to support both party play and solo play so it plays more into the support-oriented style and simultaneously doesn't make AST actually the hardest job to clear solo duties with DPS-check enrage timer, but it became the biggest joke of all by being the weakest buff and having one of the ridiculously dense weave window to execute it in due to the need for lightspeed to make those windows doable. The amount you get out of the skill simply isn't enough to really justify its design in the current toolkit.