I’m not a huge fan of the DT AST card rework. I know that I will always be biased towards HW/SB AST because I adored the job during HW and SB, and played it more than my main job at the time—but even ShB AST wasn’t that bad in retrospect, despite how salty I was about the card rework and the loss of things like Royal Road and Time Dilation. I really enjoyed AOE deployment of cards back in “original AST”, or enhancing or extending a single card on someone. (As a BRD, I LOVED getting an enhanced or extended Spear back in SB.) It just felt more fun and engaging, and while there were still “useless cards” (looking at you, old Spire), at least Royal Road and Minor Arcana “put them to use”.

The current cards still have useless cards that I just toss out at random because what’s the point of them, and I have no system to turn them into something better like Royal Road or OG Minor Arcana.

Like sure, in theory, the idea of a mini-shield in Spire sounds good—but content also has to not hit like a wet noodle first. Plus, it’s redundant considering we already have two mini-shields in the form of CI and its charges. Lady of Crowns has been redundant since it was brought back, and it’s still redundant now. We simply have too many other oGCD healing tools at our disposal that using a Lady feels unnecessary, compared to SB where we didn’t have COpp as a regen, CU on a 60s timer, Horoscope, and Macrocosmos. We had Earthly Star and CU was on a 90s timer at the time, and those were our oGCD heals; so getting an oGCD heal in the form of Lady at least felt more useful and less redundant in my opinion.

Ewer being a single-target regen is actually kind of useful; I never thought of that and it’s nice to toss it as extra chip-healing on a tank or a DPS that greeded irresponsibly. But Arrow being increased healing potency? When healers are already incredibly strong in terms of their healing and content already incredibly weak in terms of their damage output? Seems unnecessary. For memes, I’ve been tossing it on my friends when they play WAR because I have no use for it.


I guess I really shouldn’t have expected much else. I think the idea of a split card system is good—but not in the current form. I have always thought having separate systems for damage cards and utility cards while keeping Royal Road and allowing the two systems to coexist would be better. A lot of the problems with HW/SB AST was just that damage cards were inherently better than the utility cards, and since both existed within the same system, the utility ones would always come up short. Separating “offensive cards” into one system and “utility cards” into a second, and allowing both to operate and exist independently of one another, and I think that would have solved the original issue. But that’s just my opinion.

Sorry if this was not explained well—it was written in between doing other things; so it might not be all that cohesive.

Tl;dr — I don’t like the rework. I still miss HW/SB AST. I would even take back ShB AST despite being salty about the death of my favorite iteration of the job being replaced with it.