I don’t hate the new Astro changes

[Sebazy]

Maybe I'm in the minority here, but in fights with high uptime and especially either with no ballad or if I was having to raise. I find myself running out of MP if I'm doing a good job of keeping the Malefics going. Seiryu was a good example where on many occasion I'd throw an Ewer on myself if it was going to align with my extended shroud. Doing that was borderline essential in pugs if I still wanted to aim for decent DPS output.

Bole? Meh, it was a fundamental part of my strategy in A12s (The latter part of the add phase) to the point where I'd actually save it for one of the tanks. I've never really found anywhere else where it was as impactful though.

[ForteNightshade]

That's the thing. Outside of the Balance, Spear, or Arrow. The other 3 cards where niche in their value. So while there was always a potential use for all of the cards, them being locked behind RNG meant you couldn't reliably use them, and in the situations you drew them and had no need for them? They were tossed for setting up a damage card. And even among the damage cards one of them had more value then the others due to being a straight damage buff.

I completely understand the fact that the old card system has that cycle of highs and lows that makes it very appealing to certain players. But the card rework is, too me, a nessecary evil for the sake of balancing the rdps contribution of AST.

You could accomplish such a balance in a myriad of ways that don't involve gutting Astro's main gimmick. How about allowing them to store one additional cards in their spread? Make this defensive and resource cards only to prevent the obvious Balance hoarding and you have a decent foundation to build upon. Alternatively, nerf or change Balance into something else; Direct Hit perhaps. It seems backwards their solution to Balance's power was to change every card into a crappy version of it. Conversely, just give WHM some bloody utility. Bravery already exists in Eureka. Retool that and voila. Now WHM has something to compete against Balance with. If it lacked the RNG aspect but were slightly weaker to compensate, you might actually have both jobs being competitive.

What bothers me about the upcoming changes is it turns the cards into a brain dead mechanic. Draw Balance? Throw it on SAM. Draw Bole? Throw it on a Caster or MCH. This only deviants if you happen to know when jobs are going to burst. Otherwise it's just "pad the top DPS player." As someone who endured an Astro having no idea how to properly manage her cards for Alphascape. Let me tell you, it's not exactly a fun feeling when one person gets padded up the wall and you're just a body to facilitate it.

And yes, the Seal system is supposed to keep them busy. Except it, too, is equally brain dead. There is virtually zero chance you won't have found the three seals you need before Divination comes off its insane 180s CD. If you happen to luck into good RNG early. Huzzah! Get ready to spam Minor Arcana mindlessly.

Ultimately, they took away alternative gameplay elements. If you wanted a simplistic healer WHM was your go to option while SCH and AST offered a little more complexity. Now they all seem like various flavors of vanilla. Of course, this may change once we get our hands on them but I have my doubts.

[Kabooa]

one melee and one ranged DPS in your every dungeon run!

Tank.

You.

Done.

[guardin]

That’s how RNG works. You can’t always draw the best cards—but that doesn’t make them any less valuable. If you don’t need the card, they make good Minor Arcana fodder for free damage or a free heal. But, as I said, all decision making is going out the window in 5.0, and I don’t like the idea of padding one person with cards.

op is right the class is the same but more fluid and better. also decision making makes more sense and isnt as tedious. glad yoshi is making this game and not you or healers would be dreadfully boring

[Manuka]

I mean the hate for the new system is driven by the fact that rather than sit down and think of ways of promoting the use of situational cards and changing useless (spire) and broken (balance) cards into something more manageable, they doubled down on the most unbalanced aspect of Ast while managing to remove all level of fun at once.

If the problem with situational cards was that you could never plan for them to be available at the right time, provide opportunities for them to shine. Going off Forte's suggestion, give us three spreads so that we could have a varied deck and allow those cards to sit in reserve until needed. Then to discourage spreading only damage boosting cards, put in a system that punishes constant use of the same cards. Funny enough they could have done such a thing with the current seal system; 0/1 seal you get full potency of the cards under that seal, 2 seals cut potency in half and 3 seals and you get 1% only. So here you'd have a system that involves rotating between each group of cards while encouraging you to keep a varied spread so draw rng doesn't screw you over.

Honestly I'm not even saying that idea is good, but to highlight just how poorly designed the new system is. Consider that once the meta solidifies and we know for sure which jobs have the greatest 30sec/1min burst within 15sec we're gonna be spending the next two years padding the same handful of jobs, doing otherwise would be "suboptimal". Then once every three minutes you get to enjoy the spaghetti known as Divination and Sleeve Draw where we weave anywhere from 10-18oGCD's (without Lightspeed btw, since even with hyper LS the CD's will gradually drift apart after the opener) as fast as possible to get the most out of buff stacking, all the while multi-target swapping between the boss and players. I may not have played it yet but I can't see how playing Ast optimally wont feel awful, especially on controller where they haveta scroll the party list to their target.

The worst part is that for those three minutes of tedium and 15seconds of John Madden, all we're getting is variations of the same buff. It's just poor game play design when you can just as easily reduce the 6 button bloat to 2 (single target buff/ AoE buff) and be just as effective but more streamlined and accessible to casual players.

[supaiku]

I never understood the hate for Astro’s new card system. Half the cards are situational at best and the other half were simply better.

It's pretty simple: it's boring.
When I play a game, I want to have fun. Drawing the same card over and over and over again is not fun. They killed the heart of the cards.
If balance was too op, they should have replaced it with a direct hit buff for example. If AST has mana problems as we expect, ewer would be useful. Spire could have been changed to increase healing or something else.
But the way the card system is now, it is somewhat useless. Not because increasing damage is useless, that's nice, but from a design perspective they could have gotten rid of the whole card system and replace it with 2 buff skills, one for ranged and one for melee, the end result would be the same.
That is lazy game design. I liked having the rng part of the old card system. And as I said, if balance is too strong, get rid of it, not make everything balance.

[gman1311]

From what I’ve read, most you guys hate how they BALANCED the cards(see what I did there?).
As for the rest of the cards, I won’t miss them much (burn in Hell spire). I can at least enjoy keeping my party members damage up.

[HyoMinPark]

op is right the class is the same but more fluid and better. also decision making makes more sense and isnt as tedious. glad yoshi is making this game and not you or healers would be dreadfully boring

It's dreadfully boring to pad a single person with cards all the time. As with Forte, I also suffered with an AST in Alphascape who thought the best way to use her cards was to pad the MNK (even if he died) and give Enhanced Arrows to the PLD. Let me tell you how utterly garbage it feels to do everything absolutely perfect and walk away with a blue or green because this AST practiced favoritism so much. This is a terrible way to design a job.

Not to mention the other issues, such as Divination looking to be incredibly weak and lackluster for a 180s buff, and the seals guaranteeing you'll be Minor Arcanaing every card after you secure them. Such variety.

This new way of AST is braindead and devoid of decision making, and the fact that you continue to try and contest that tells me you don't even play the job.

Edit: you have a level 44 AST. Why are you trying to tell career ASTs that our job is currently designed to be boring when you’ve barely even started it? Try actually playing it first, then get back to me.

From what I’ve read, most you guys hate how they BALANCED the cards(see what I did there?).
As for the rest of the cards, I won’t miss them much (burn in Hell spire). I can at least enjoy keeping my party members damage up.

I hate the direction they're going of "pad a single person" (this even applies to DNC, which I plan to switch to since they gutted AST and removed the utility aspect from BRD that I loved so much—I disagree with single padding, and I think it will just lock certain jobs into groups rather that open them up more as the developers want), and the simplification of job mechanics. They did the same thing to my current main (BRD) just to lower the skill gap.

Some of us prefer jobs where we are juggling things and have to make decisions. And, as I already said, if the AST cards still pull ahead, it will remain meta, so not much was balanced if this turns out to be the case.

[ForteNightshade]

op is right the class is the same but more fluid and better. also decision making makes more sense and isnt as tedious. glad yoshi is making this game and not you or healers would be dreadfully boring

So you mean forcing more healing intensity while keeping the damage aspect would be boring? How about giving healers the bulk of utility so their downtime instead revolves around buffing their party? Yep. That definitely sounds more boring than spamming Glare, Broil and Malefic for 80% of most fights; assuming the outgoing damage remains at SB levels.

[Brandedblade]

So you mean forcing more healing intensity while keeping the damage aspect would be boring? How about giving healers the bulk of utility so their downtime instead revolves around buffing their party? Yep. That definitely sounds more boring than spamming Glare, Broil and Malefic for 80% of most fights; assuming the outgoing damage remains at SB levels.

Then it should be fine if it's what we're already doing