Quote Originally Posted by Poppet View Post
The whole issue with Astrologian has been that it takes too many actions for how little value those actions give.

Draw Card -> Redraw Card -> Target player -> Use Card -> Retarget Boss is an awful experience when you only get 100 Potency for it. But in HW/SB you got 300+ Potency pre-number inflation. So instead of 1/3 a gcd it was worth 2+ gcds. But that's not problem area. It was even less actions then. Royal Roaded AoE cards. Could be done in as little as Draw -> Royal Road -> Draw -> Play for 1k+ potency PNI. 6-10+ gcds worth for 4 actions to just 1/3-2/3 a gcd today. While not always that convenient or as cooldown similar. It feels absolutely awful.

So now with 7.0 cards using Arrow will only give a 10% healing buff for 3 total actions and 1/3 Astral Draw: Target player -> Use Card -> Retarget Boss. The action bloat that AST has today is so bad. That any level of gcd clip will lose you the value of the cards you would play. Considering that the healing buff might not even be fully utilized or even used the value of the card is sub 0.1 second average worth of gcd clip for it to have been negative value to even use it over other mitigation options.

Cards should just be aoe. That's what made them good in HW/SB era was that they didn't take so many actions use them. 1 total action and 1/3 Astral Draw: Use Card.

Cards should just be valuable. 10% healing single target or even aoe still feels pretty bad.
A lot of the issues you mention would be fixed by the game letting us cast on target of target. I swear it's the only MMO that doesn't have this feature.