Quote Originally Posted by Aravell View Post
The pursuit of absolute balance is what's ruining job diversity. I don't think the old card effects were ever much of an issue. Sure, the triple Spire Sleeve Draw was annoying, but you basically just roll with it, it's like a Monk opener with no Chakra procs. The only time cards were actually horribly imbalanced was the end of HW where Balance was 20%.

AST could comfortably beat every fight back in HW/SB even with the old card system, so the complaints about balancing issues is moot. The real complaints about AST balancing back then was their healing potency being weaker and they have to work much harder for the same results as simply bringing a WHM. I feel that people who complain about not getting the Balance don't actually care about "balancing issues", they actually care about their logs, since the way to get high logs back then was to be catered to with the Balance all fight.
I don't think the cards were changed for balance. I think the cards were changed because people only wanted one card, so they changed every card to the card people wanted which took away the point of having cards...