Quote Originally Posted by PercibelTheren View Post
I liked AST because the cards were something unrelated to my healing kit that I got to keep on track of beyond mindlessly spamming Malefic while waiting for the scheduled raidwide attack. It's also a good direction to go if you want to keep the skill floor low and the ceiling high - the newbies can straight up ignore the damage buff cards and be fine while the more experienced people have something to optimise.
Ah, I get it.

Yeah, I can see that perspective.

I would personally say that while I enjoy randomness in MMORPG class design, FFXIV first needs to solve a handful of underlying deeper issues with the combat and job design system that affect all jobs and how they interact in a fight (120s buff alignment, strict job design around static rotations - dancer excepted curiously, oGCD flooding of all jobs and GCD simplification in turn, GCD healing not being needed, tanking not being an active system, etc).

But assuming these are all solved or at least partially improved, I could see space for a random-based system on a healer that's supplementary. Supplementary on a gameplay level I mean.

I think one big issue holding this all back is that the overall issues I mention above kind of force the job design to all be equal: All based around a 120s burst (which has to be reliable), and all based on a reliable, static, gameplay loop. We have no proc-based combat jobs, we have no pet jobs (and even when we had them, they weren't stuff like a DAoC Necromancer or an old TBC WoW Demo Warlock), we have no true priority-system jobs, we have nothing like that really. We need the rigid combat design massively softened up to make space for "cool stuff", tbh.