I've leveled Astro to 60, and completed the last current dungeon. My Thoughts.

how about you have a stack of cards up to 3, every 15 secs 1 gets added and you can draw from it at any time. You only see the card when drawn.

that would be much more reasonable when keeping in mind the cards need at least compensate for scholar pet or WHM healing buffs.

I would prefer the buffs get more substantial, and they add some bonus to using spread aside from holding a card, because all that does is waste up-time. Maybe when a card is used from spread, your next draw time is reduced by half? Nah, everyone would just spread first....

Try to line up RRed cards with Time Dilation. For example, a double-duration Arrow confers 30sec of +10% attack speed. Time Dilute that (45sec total) and it makes a hell lot of a difference.

Time Dilation gives the biggest bang for your buck. Extending the duration of a key buff helps evens the odds of drawing bad cards somewhat.

We don't have to use our cards straightaway and that's what Spread is for. Why cast Balance on a Blackmage when the current phase involves a lot of movement? Save it for the moment he busts out his Ley Lines. The Spire is excellent Royal Road-fodder to double your next card's duration. The Spear......... is my least favorite card. It's the card I'm most likely to shuffle away, but might see more importance in 8-man raids.... though these days some players are quite observant, busting out all their CDs when I land a Spear on them to take advantage of reduced CD. Feels like I'm pulling puppet strings xD

After running tons of 60 dungeons with AST, I realize it can be an extremely deep class. The health of the tank (which is somewhat indicative of his gear) is the first thing I look out for when zoning into a dungeon. If he has low HP pool/crap gear then Ewer becomes one of my top priority. That very first pull by the tank will decide what cards are important. If he's a speed-runner then Bole/Ewer is top priority, our 40sec lustrate saved up exclusively for him. If the other DPSes take damage during speedruns then it's not our problem. If he's the cautious type who waits for you to buff everyone or pulls mobs one at a time, then you can shift focus to DPS buffs. Knowing what enemies lie ahead in the dungeon determines what card/RR you should prepare and save up (Spread). Sometimes I use less than 10 cards during an entire dungeon, but that only happens when I have that super wombo combo saved up for when all hell breaks loose.

It's a new job, I'm sure SE is reading through all these feedback. In the meantime we'll just have to make do with what we have. These days instead of cursing my luck with consecutive Spire draws, I'll just have to suck it up and heal like a sub-par Whm/Sch.

I like your dedication to the class, and I do all of that. Its just not substantial. The power simply isn't there to justify the cards. Also, on BLM My favorite thing is Enhanced ewer+ Time dilation right as they swap into fire stance. 30% MP reduction goes a long way for black mages.

This having been said, My initial complaint is with a small subset of cards and other skills that aren't very efficient.

Yes, and receiving a powered up Card is like receiving candy. It feels really good! Well we'll just have to wait and see.

Hmm. Synastry seems like it might be nerfed in the near future. Hearing of solo bismark heal by an astrologian.

the WHMs that get me in bismarck grps all have to solo heal because i dont trust my dps to reach the checks without my help xD

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Originally Posted by Vlady

Hmm. Synastry seems like it might be nerfed in the near future. Hearing of solo bismark heal by an astrologian.

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Synastry is working completely as intended and I don't see it as being too powerful, actually its one of the better pieces of utility astrologian has.

SE really checked all the boxes for keeping synastry under wraps - Regens don't effect it and neither does aoe heals just single target heals.
Also pretty much every healing class seems to end up being able to solo heal content.

if synastry were permanent (kinda like that other game "bacon" spell)

I'm going to bump this because more people are talking about this still, and I'd like more people to see my points. Astro is really mostly fine. It has merits, there just needs to be some changes and I strongly feel this is the way to go about it.