Ast Cards

[RhiaCeallach]

Healing will always be secondary to DPS in FF14 unless there are drastic changes made, but the cards never become entirely useless. People do make mistakes and even late in a tier you might encounter new players, unless you never play outside of a static. I consider the separation of DPS and support cards to be a fair solution. The DPS cards are the main cards and always will be while the support cards don't feel like a hindrance since they don't cost you a DPS card.

They do cost you dps cards though since they made 4/6 cards utility. As people have said in the last few pages, the utility cards COMBINED might give you 200-250k healing during the course of a 9 minute fight. Celestial Intersection on its own does 500k healing with its shield + heal.

Unless they massively buff the utility cards or give abilities that let you buff them during the fight, they are useless and will continue to be useless. You brought up an example of people making mistakes or having new players in your group but a random 400 pot shield or 15s regen isn't going to save them nor is it going to be your first choice when trying to save them considering how many better tools you have at your disposal. If you're so desperate that you need to use the cards to save them, you are most likely out of everything and about to wipe considering even a benefic II would do more healing.

Optimizing the DPS cards gave them some extra depth but even with that they didn't feel all that significant to me. The gains stood out the most if you're going for a speedkill but otherwise they'd be hard to spot. This is absolutely a case of differing opinions but the support cards feel more meaningful, outside of the role wide issues with healing which are external to the cards themselves.

It doesn't need to be a speed kill/ parsing group for the DPS increase from the cards to matter or feel significant. A freestyle samurai might do more than enough damage to clear a fight but someone doing their rotation properly would still help you clear faster and help you avoid later mechanics.
Randomly throwing out cards isn't going to feel impactful but if you know how many cards you're supposed to give out at the 1/2 minutes and time them with when people start their burst, it will add up and help you kill it faster, which in turn helps you avoid mechanics during prog/ reclears.

Even if we're talking about doing your last reclears and everyone having almost all the gear they need so you'd end up skipping mechanics anyway, what sounds more fun: i) Learning to spot when people do their burst so you can buff them and use your cards at the right time or ii) Have two cards that you play every two times that you always put on the same people every single pull?

Lastly, this is slightly off-topic but everyone complains about how easy healers are to play and asking for more buttons, which is fair, but Astro was the last played healer in Endwalker even though it was (arguably) the busiest and most complicated one until you learned when you're supposed to give out the cards. Is it a replacement for more dots/ dps abilites? No, but it sure is more interesting than spamming 1 and giving out a whooping 2 cards every two minutes.