Quote Originally Posted by Valence View Post
The problem is that we're trying to find interesting effects on support cards but the battle system is too thin to offer actual options to feed the concept beyond damage. Healing and mitigation is already covered by AST's toolkit (like all healers). What's left? MP? Nobody cares about MP anymore. Mobility? Sure maybe, but again, very niche especially if it's not AoE.
I think this is the problem. AST itself is fine, possibly the best it has ever been. But the game only cares about damage buffs because we have 180% of the healing and support we need for any given encounter and everything is so heavily scripted that after a couple of runs you memorize the steps and stop thinking about what to do.

If we had more dynamic content with higher healing demands the current cards, or something similar, would shine. I don't want to revert to EW's system as I found nothing interesting about it. The same card over and over, but with a forced melee/ranged divide to prevent putting one card on the same player, though even that may have been unnecessary since cards don't stack.