Endwalker Job Actions- Astro

Hey guys. Are you excited for Endwalker? I sure am.

So the last skill the Astro used in its trailer seemed to be a time rewind skill. I mean that’s what I got from it. So the Astro applied a beautiful moon shield and it was destroyed. Then the Astro used another new skill that looked like a clock then after a few seconds the moon shield appeared back on the reaper.

I mean maybe I’m seeing things but I believe that’s what I saw. If what I saw was true then that was cool. Maybe it will only work for Astro buffs because that would be pretty OP if a paladin used hallowed ground and you reverse time and reapply it after it’s duration.

What did you guys think? Is the kitchen hot, warm or cold? Haha I think it’s pretty hot since I believe I’m onto something.

Take care everyone and see you all in Endwalker!

Looking at Ast's trailer, its either a time rewind (please ;n; ) or just an aoe version of the moon shield. Which again makes one wonder why they deleted noct sect when ast is getting another shield and sage has barely any barriers.

When they removed time dilation "it didn't do anything on noct" well it could have restored a bit of the shields every tick for its duration like how diurnal got extra ticks.
If anything, ast needed slightly more time magic. I always felt Ast should have less normal heals, and use time magic to make the most of it rather than a whm clone.

Astro's really come off with the best trailer of the healers. They got lord/lady back to the original effects and boosted to aoe. They got a self buff which is nice since giving away your card buffs all the time feels a bit thankless when the party is pants on head stupid (not to mention if its a personal damage buff, it could make solo potd/hoh actually viable) they got whatever that last effect is and the meteor shower ogcd attack. (on demand echo in npcs XD)
Gravity now upgraded to gravira. and maleza is a kilonova.

(for those that dont know, in ff history, each spell has a tier of suffix. SE thought english were dumb in ff14 and changed it to numbers while every other language gets the suffixes. It goes none, ra, aga, ja, sometimes za unless its flares which rank by computer terms eg mega, giga, tera, exa all the way to zettaflare atm)

just got to hope the cards return to being varied and fun and it might be in an acceptable state for some of the old ast mains to return.

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Originally Posted by Recon1o6

SE thought english were dumb in ff14 and changed it to numbers while every other language gets the suffixes

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No, FR got numerals on some spells (Malfaisance --/II/III/IV) and size words before some spells (--/Extra/Méga/Giga Glace/Feu).

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Originally Posted by Recon1o6

Looking at Ast's trailer, its either a time rewind (please ;n; ) or just an aoe version of the moon shield. Which again makes one wonder why they deleted noct sect when ast is getting another shield and sage has barely any barriers.

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The whole Noctural / Diurnal sect thing is bad because they can't be used in combat which is what matters the most. Initially, when I unlocked AST I was excited about the sects because I thought I could swap sects in combat and use that to reset the timers of some of my abilities or something. Nope. I had to either pick Diurnal or Noctural and that's it.

I believe devs mentioned all healers will have a skill or two that shields and a skill or 2 that'll regens and a skill that buffs in some way, sooo I assume sch/sge's shields are just more potent?

I'm personally gonna miss the giant Gravity Ball, but the new AoE animation is really cool, and the Star Shower/Lord of Crowns will likely make AST feel more powerful in dungeons. I'm excited to see what kind of self buff AST grants, and that Divination is no longer linked to seals.

Oh man... a Time Rewind sounds scary in practice, actually. They had something similar in one of the Bravely games, and while you could rewind damage that a person took, you could also rewind healing as well. The potential for Benediction→Super Bollide→PANIC style shenanigans is... super strong if that's how the ability works.

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Originally Posted by Recon1o6

Looking at Ast's trailer, its either a time rewind (please ;n; ) or just an aoe version of the moon shield. Which again makes one wonder why they deleted noct sect when ast is getting another shield and sage has barely any barriers.

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Considering how few shields the game's only shield healer has right now... and how many HoTs Sage was revealed to have, I'm honestly not entirely sure what the pure/shield healer labels are supposed to even mean.

AST gets a hold of one of the infinity stones, eh?

I like it.

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Originally Posted by ItMe

Considering how few shields the game's only shield healer has right now... and how many HoTs Sage was revealed to have, I'm honestly not entirely sure what the pure/shield healer labels are supposed to even mean.

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I feel this. I would really love to hear from the devs directly what the difference is supposed to be because I don't really understand what's meant to differentiate the healers. The other example of where a role is divided into sub roles comes from the DPS role where Melee, Physical Ranged, and Magical Ranged DPS all have clearly defined different playstyles. Let's not forget that they each also have a completely different set of role actions outside of a Arm's Length and Second Wind. From what we've seen so far, both Pure and Barrier healers are looking to continue having a relatively similar playstyle outside of nuance mechanics like AST's cards and the same selection of role actions.

My best guess is that Pure Healers are meant to have high-potency GCD healing and Barrier Healers have barrier GCD healing, but if that's literally what the difference is supposed to be exclusively, then the devs are just really out of touch with how healers play. GCD healing is what we actively avoid using as much as possible and thus the least defining qualities of our gameplay. The only example of where I could see these sub roles actually mattering is in wanting at least one Barrier Healer during the early stages of Savage or Ultimate prog where having an AoE barrier on the GCD can help the party endure mechanics longer and thus learn the fight more quickly, but that's it.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

The only example of where I could see these sub roles actually mattering is in wanting at least one Barrier Healer during the early stages of Savage or Ultimate prog where having an AoE barrier on the GCD can help the party endure mechanics longer and thus learn the fight more quickly, but that's it.

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Or mechanics that require shields to survive. A low damage AoE with a knockback that can't be ignored with Arm's Length but can be blocked if you take zero damage because of a shield, or a two part AoE where the first hit deals low damage and applies a Vuln Up Debuff that needs to be blocked by a shield to survive the high damage second hit. There's some things they could do to make shields mandatory, but the frequency of damage is low enough that I wouldn't be surprised if Seraph and Shake It Off handle such mechanics, assuming SE even bothers to create such mechanics in between the various stack/spread/protean.

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Originally Posted by Beddict

Or mechanics that require shields to survive. A low damage AoE with a knockback that can't be ignored with Arm's Length but can be blocked if you take zero damage because of a shield, or a two part AoE where the first hit deals low damage and applies a Vuln Up Debuff that needs to be blocked by a shield to survive the high damage second hit. There's some things they could do to make shields mandatory, but the frequency of damage is low enough that I wouldn't be surprised if Seraph and Shake It Off handle such mechanics, assuming SE even bothers to create such mechanics in between the various stack/spread/protean.

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In theory, there are lots of situations in which barriers could be extremely helpful if not mandatory. That said, there has never been a situation where barriers were intentionally required to survive (there was that whole midas issue, but that was due to poor testing and was quickly nerfed). Also, many of the barrier interactions we've had in past content have failed to make any reappearances in recent content. It's pretty unlikely at this point to assume that anything like that will actually be utilized, though. They're pretty dead set on keeping the game as approachable as possible. I won't say it's impossible, but I'd say to not raise your expectations in that regard at this time.

Who knows, maybe I'll eat my words. They did drastically increase the amount of barrier actions and usage across all healers and tanks, so it's entirely possible they're preparing us more more barrier-intensive mechanics, but it could also just be more fluff without actually matching the content to the level of our support options. We'll just have to see come November.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

In theory, there are lots of situations in which barriers could be extremely helpful if not mandatory. That said, there has never been a situation where barriers were intentionally required to survive (there was that whole midas issue, but that was due to poor testing and was quickly nerfed). Also, many of the barrier interactions we've had in past content have failed to make any reappearances in recent content. It's pretty unlikely at this point to assume that anything like that will actually be utilized, though. They're pretty dead set on keeping the game as approachable as possible. I won't say it's impossible, but I'd say to not raise your expectations in that regard at this time.

Who knows, maybe I'll eat my words. They did drastically increase the amount of barrier actions and usage across all healers and tanks, so it's entirely possible they're preparing us more more barrier-intensive mechanics, but it could also just be more fluff without actually matching the content to the level of our support options. We'll just have to see come November.

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Yeah I don't have any expectations either, and I am in agreement that the dev team is dead set on keeping the game as approachable as possible. I was just tossing out some possible ways they could make that on demand GCD shielding mandatory, but I just don't believe the raid team will properly execute the split between Pure and Barrier Healers given the Eden series. They don't design content for Tanks because if they did we'd likely see more mechanics involving Tank Swaps, more boss manoeuvring out of danger areas rather than bosses that just auto-position themselves, and more add spawns while the boss is active to keep the OT occupied. I don't think they don't design for Physical Ranged either, since there are no baitable mechanics like Liquid Hell from UCoB, nor do they take advantage of light CC such as Leg Graze and Foot Graze which could be used to Heavy or Bind an add that will do something bad if it reaches a certain place (think True Heart from A7S, something that could've been useful to maybe Bind an Aqueous Aether in E8S). I'd love to see them design mechanics that require a Barrier Healer, I just don't think they will and I ain't about to get my hopes up. Time will tell though.

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Originally Posted by ItMe

Considering how few shields the game's only shield healer has right now... and how many HoTs Sage was revealed to have, I'm honestly not entirely sure what the pure/shield healer labels are supposed to even mean.

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The frequency to reduce damage as opposed to healing raw damage, it seems. Not so much as soaking raw damage like shields. Shields are just one aspect of a healer. Sage has more low cd mitigation + overall more mitigation than pure healers. Scholar has a bit more shields it looks like (consolation x2, Seraph's Embrace shield, GCD shields), as well as more cd mitigation (soil, fey illumination) + new AoE mitigation in Endwalker.

Sure, AST and WHM has shields, but they're all tied to a pretty long cd generally (Neutral Sect, Temperance). Everything else seems to be mainly healing potency output, so pure healers just have more tools in healing damage whereas shield healers have more tools at lowering or reducing incoming damage. Both healers still have the general healer toolkit though - which is to heal damage.

I don't know. They are reducing, instead of expanding the job and giving it one new skill. It really felt like they are not changing much, other than giving it an "updated" visual effect to some habilities we already are familiar with.

After writing all this, I feel like if the job indeed hasn't changed much, it will be the last nail in the coffin for me and drop the class completely to the point of not even acknowledging its existence. Same with scholar.

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Originally Posted by ItMe

Considering how few shields the game's only shield healer has right now... and how many HoTs Sage was revealed to have, I'm honestly not entirely sure what the pure/shield healer labels are supposed to even mean.

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I suppose that it's possible for 2 of the healers to be somewhat "hybrids" in the Pure/Shield "system" (in this case, Astrologian and Sage respectively), while the other 2 healers to lean in heavier on the Pure/Shield distinction. But that still means that their labels are kinda-sorta bullshit.

As for Astro specifically, I'd been sending in a single suggestion once a month for a long while (probably since Stormblood, but I don't really remember when it started), specifically to introduce a starfall-type of ability. So that much, I'm excited for. I also like that they've minimalized some of the spell FX a bit, so that they're pretty but not intrusive, for the new/reintroduced abilities and spells.
Otherwise, since we don't know exactly how the stat squish is going to affect gameplay, and since we don't really know potencies across the board just yet, I'm not exactly "excited" for Endwalker just yet.

AST has lost more of its identity than any other job. If it gets a few "time" abilities in 6.0, as well as some sort of variety in card play, the job might survive another expansion. Otherwise, it will fade into obscurity.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

My best guess is that Pure Healers are meant to have high-potency GCD healing and Barrier Healers have barrier GCD healing, but if that's literally what the difference is supposed to be exclusively, then the devs are just really out of touch with how healers play. GCD healing is what we actively avoid using as much as possible and thus the least defining qualities of our gameplay. The only example of where I could see these sub roles actually mattering is in wanting at least one Barrier Healer during the early stages of Savage or Ultimate prog where having an AoE barrier on the GCD can help the party endure mechanics longer and thus learn the fight more quickly, but that's it.

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I mean, as far as I can tell, shield healers have some shield GCDs and pure healers can only shield with oGCDs. Which... yeah.

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Originally Posted by Side-Eye

AST has lost more of its identity than any other job. If it gets a few "time" abilities in 6.0, as well as some sort of variety in card play, the job might survive another expansion. Otherwise, it will fade into obscurity.

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It won’t fade. Astrologian is a very popular job. Allot of the veterans and newer players love the card system. I don’t but hey I’m just one person lol. Yeah, the job won’t fade though.

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Originally Posted by Jandor

I mean, as far as I can tell, shield healers have some shield GCDs and pure healers can only shield with oGCDs. Which... yeah.

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Actually, with Neutral Sect, AST can still apply barriers on the GCD and to the whole party. WHM is the only healer who will not be able to apply a barrier to the whole party. Granted, Neutral Sect is on a long cooldown, but in some cases that might really be all you need.