Ast Cards

[RhiaCeallach]

The SB cards are the only case where I'd say support cards could come at the cost of DPS cards. It would be possible to have as many DPS cards as we did in EW with the current system if draw's CD was reduced or if DPS cards auto refilled a couple of times.

Utility cards would be fine if they didn't replace the DPS cards. What you suggested would have been fine since the shield/ hot would have been a small bonus you could play if you needed it but instead it has replaced a more useful card.

As for the ranking of total healing values, I don't see why it's so important. There is always going to be a mix of contributions from different abilities and they won't all contribute an equal amount. The ones that top the list are more often than not the ones that can be used more frequently. Which ever skill ends up healing the most through the fight isn't necessarily the most important. With enough incoming damage any amount of skills can have a use. This is true even when it comes to DPS. BLM is a prime example. Fire IV is going to be the biggest component of damage because it gets cast the most. Despair, Flare Star, and Xenoglossy are all stronger and more important to get under buffs. A healing example would be Collective Unconsciousness. The HoT has a lot of uptime so it's going to rank high but that doesn't mean it's the only heal needed.

It's important because all healers have a plethora of ogcds they can utilize, so having an extra random tiny shield or hot isn't going to make a difference in keeping someone alive or not nor is it going to make a noticeable difference in how many heals you have to throw out/ if you have to gcd heal. If we're talking about doing a level 70 ultimate where you have a very limited selection of tools/ you're missing traits then sure, the extra free heals are nice but the game isn't balanced around that niche case.

Even during week 1 savage, the cards didn't make a noticeable difference in the amount of heals we had to give to the tank and they also didn't prevent anyone from dying to raidwides/ damage since the only time that happened was them either instantly dying from failing mechanics or from not being healed back to full fast enough in time for an AoE.

They either need to be buffed, the healer kits need to have a ton of free healing removed or they need to change them to the system you proposed for the cards to not feel like the aliexpress version of endwalker or even the stormblood cards that everyone seems to love. It's like the lady card back in endwalker, the extra heal was nice but everyone would rather draw the lord.

There is a massive difference between performing correct rotations and applying buffs. The maximum damage boost that an AST could provide would be to maintain 100% card uptime on the entire raid with the appropriate cards. That would be 6% damage for the entire group. Over a 12 minute fight that's a difference of around 45 seconds. That's a lot, but card uptime is closer to 10%. So a realistic perfect AST is going to subtract maybe 5 seconds from a fight through cards vs an AST that doesn't card at all. To cross check that with data I looked up a random EW log on fflogs and the cards count for about 600 DPS out of 86000 in P12S. Any amount of DPS may be just enough to push the group over a threshold to skip mechanics but in most cases it takes a group effort and subtracting any single component doesn't change the outcome by a lot.

Sure, it won't make you kill the boss a minute faster but every bit helps, especially on prog and helping to skip a mechanic or raidwide will help you out more than the utility cards. The problem with them as they are is that unless they gut the healing kits of all healers, they're never going to help you out more than being able to buff your team's damage.

When it comes to how cards are played since FF14 is so scripted card plays may end up being memorized which I don't find the most engaging, but I can understand the desire for it to return. Personally, having a lot of options for the support cards is about the same for me. I don't mind that they don't always have to be used and I actually welcome that ambiguity that the DPS cards don't have.

You knew who you were supposed to give the card to, but there was still RNG as to if it was a ranged or melee card, plus you might have had to redraw because you needed a different sign so you couldn't exactly memorize the same way you could memorize a dps rotation for a given fight. The whole reason people who liked the endwalker version of astro hate the current iteration of astro is because you had to think on your feet and adjust to the situation depending on the card you got and either redraw it or give it to the right person when they're about to burst.