Astro Card system is useless!

The only reason why I use cards to generate mana.. the system is so rigged I miss how astro can switch from healing shielding in shadowbringers.

Card system was way better in shadow bringers too

Please se return the glory of astro

Agreed! It's currently so chaotic to play that even for people like me who love the aesthetic I'm thinking I'm just going to go Whm. The cards are so weird this time around. They literally just need to bring back Shadowbringers Astro!

It's hard to pin down what my favourite part of this new AST design is. Is it that 'The Spear' is a ranged card and 'The Arrow' is a healing card? Is it that they changed the card pairings AGAIN? Is it that the Spire is effectively a 3rd charge of Celestial Intersection, and the Bole a 2nd charge of Exaltation's mitigation? Or is it that they had to buff the DOT by an entire 15p per tick, to make up for the loss of RDPS we had due to using less damage cards per 2min cycle (instead of just boosting Divination's power)?

Sarcasm, if you didn't notice. It's a confused mess of a design

I’m not a huge fan of the DT AST card rework. I know that I will always be biased towards HW/SB AST because I adored the job during HW and SB, and played it more than my main job at the time—but even ShB AST wasn’t that bad in retrospect, despite how salty I was about the card rework and the loss of things like Royal Road and Time Dilation. I really enjoyed AOE deployment of cards back in “original AST”, or enhancing or extending a single card on someone. (As a BRD, I LOVED getting an enhanced or extended Spear back in SB.) It just felt more fun and engaging, and while there were still “useless cards” (looking at you, old Spire), at least Royal Road and Minor Arcana “put them to use”.

The current cards still have useless cards that I just toss out at random because what’s the point of them, and I have no system to turn them into something better like Royal Road or OG Minor Arcana.

Like sure, in theory, the idea of a mini-shield in Spire sounds good—but content also has to not hit like a wet noodle first. Plus, it’s redundant considering we already have two mini-shields in the form of CI and its charges. Lady of Crowns has been redundant since it was brought back, and it’s still redundant now. We simply have too many other oGCD healing tools at our disposal that using a Lady feels unnecessary, compared to SB where we didn’t have COpp as a regen, CU on a 60s timer, Horoscope, and Macrocosmos. We had Earthly Star and CU was on a 90s timer at the time, and those were our oGCD heals; so getting an oGCD heal in the form of Lady at least felt more useful and less redundant in my opinion.

Ewer being a single-target regen is actually kind of useful; I never thought of that and it’s nice to toss it as extra chip-healing on a tank or a DPS that greeded irresponsibly. But Arrow being increased healing potency? When healers are already incredibly strong in terms of their healing and content already incredibly weak in terms of their damage output? Seems unnecessary. For memes, I’ve been tossing it on my friends when they play WAR because I have no use for it.


I guess I really shouldn’t have expected much else. I think the idea of a split card system is good—but not in the current form. I have always thought having separate systems for damage cards and utility cards while keeping Royal Road and allowing the two systems to coexist would be better. A lot of the problems with HW/SB AST was just that damage cards were inherently better than the utility cards, and since both existed within the same system, the utility ones would always come up short. Separating “offensive cards” into one system and “utility cards” into a second, and allowing both to operate and exist independently of one another, and I think that would have solved the original issue. But that’s just my opinion.

Sorry if this was not explained well—it was written in between doing other things; so it might not be all that cohesive.

Tl;dr — I don’t like the rework. I still miss HW/SB AST. I would even take back ShB AST despite being salty about the death of my favorite iteration of the job being replaced with it.

AST has so many oGCD healing abilities now. And still spams Malefic forever. This rework has made the nuke spam even more apparent in AST.

ShB/EW AST had no card flavor.

DT AST has no card meaning or agency.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Valence

ShB/EW AST had no card flavor.

DT AST has no card meaning or agency.

---

Yeah.

Like the cards were all the same. But at least the gameplay rewarded using all of them.

DT AST had that reduced to a third, because the cards that aren't dmg are just one more flavour of skills we already had enough of. None of which were remoeved as far as I can tell.

Honestly I don't know how they can fix cards.
ShB/EW cards were boring but only made interesting by APM.
DT cards are rigid and thoughtless, the second you see your party you know how you'll use your cards theres zero personal choice.

HW/SB cards were not great either tbh, sure they were more interesting and probably the best system we had but still it was just The Balance fishing and maybe TP restoration and Mitigation during prog.

The problem is that we're trying to find interesting effects on support cards but the battle system is too thin to offer actual options to feed the concept beyond damage. Healing and mitigation is already covered by AST's toolkit (like all healers). What's left? MP? Nobody cares about MP anymore. Mobility? Sure maybe, but again, very niche especially if it's not AoE.

If they truly want to make AST unique and tied to cards, then a very wild option would be to tie up a lot of its current OGCD healing to actual cards:
- Balance: Damage
- Spire: Crit
- Arrow: Removes cast times or cuts them by an amount (like old lightspeed), casters dps suddenly best friends
- Bole? Unlocks Exaltation
- Spire? Unlocks Celestial Intersection
- Ewer? Unlocks Essential Dignity
(Bole, Spire, Ewer just one button use to immediately trigger the effect, no need for cumbersome press card, unlock ability, repress for effect application)

Reintroduce redraw with stacks to deal with rng. Keep or increase deck size to deal with rng and save cards you want. Start the battle with a semi randomized deck fill with cards.

On minor arcana while we're being wild:
- Lady: extends the card effect to AoE, smaller effects + small regen
- Lord: doubles the card duration, bigger effects + aoe damage

Stormblood AST was best AST. Nuff said.

Agreed.

Lack of RNG takes away the job flavour completely. Job gauge useless. Chuck the same cards on the same players (or just all on the tank) and move on? So boring. :(

I would absolutely prefer to have StB AST back.

That said, performance aside, I'm having more fun with AST than I did in ShB or EW, and I went into it with negative expectations.

Sure, a lot of the cards are useless or identical to tools we already have. But the fact that we kind of 'use them or lose them' makes me just burn them more and think about the most useful of the wasteful options.

I agree that there should be an element of RNG back, but all things considered, this incarnation isn't so bad.

DT ast is for me much more interesting than EW ast. And I certainly do not find the cards chaotic. If they could make the cards effects more unique and situational that would be great, alongside returning our manipulation of cards in future. All cards being damage is boring, I don't want that back. I'd like the rng back though.

Can i also add that the removal of Astrodyne means we also lost little buffs that we got as well. The RNG has been gutted for more a casual game style but having cards do 10% healing on a target seems pointless. I miss Sleeve draw and the old way divination worked. SE being SE and not listening to people seems to be its latter lately. :(

Honestly I dropped astro after hitting 97 I just can't enjoy a butchered class anymore gets butchered more and more I love the old astrodyne I loved our shield/regen healer scts, I miss having MORE THEN 1 DPS CARD it use to be 3 if you timed it right with cool downs now it's just boring and damage is painfully low compared to sage and white mage and scholar when doing solo instances. I'm like does the dev even play astro for more then one dungeon to get it before they start salad tossing a job around once more

The best thing about previous AST incarnations was that the cards added something new to their kit; bringing back the "all cards do something different" mechanic with 7.0 is meaningless when 4 of the 6 cards are redundant to what AST already has. The redundancy also reduces utility; having all cards be damage bonuses previously was boring as all get out, but they always had SOME use because you could pop the extras on the tank or yourself and add on a bit of blue/green dps. Too often I find myself hanging on uselessly to 2 of the 3 cards until I'm forced to expend them because my next draw is up.

7.0 AST also doesn't solve how meh it feels to be forced to give a card to the "wrong" class. This is particularly egregious in dungeons, where ending up with 2 melee or 2 ranged dps means half the time you're forced to give them a card they can't get the most out of because Shuffle doesn't exist anymore. (Though if we have to stick with the "only one +dmg draw every 60s" situation, instead of Shuffle you may as well make the damage bonus on Balance/Spear the same for all classes to avoid this problem, since all other RNG has been removed anyway.)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SerephinaBlossom

Can i also add that the removal of Astrodyne means we also lost little buffs that we got as well. The RNG has been gutted for more a casual game style but having cards do 10% healing on a target seems pointless. I miss Sleeve draw and the old way divination worked. SE being SE and not listening to people seems to be its latter lately. :(

---

as a casual I enjoyed the rng. Who were these changes made for? Who asked to nuke the rng? I miss my cards... I likely will never return to astro if it continues to turn more and more into white mage. I'm really baffled. I wish I could have gotten to experience old astro...

My favorite pure healer was AST, my favorite caster DPS was BLM, and my favorite melee DPS was MNK.

All got butchered in DT.

I’m really really sad with DT and makes me feel like SE doesn’t want me as a customer anymore.

I love this forum, few weeks ago posts about how the astro rng feels awful, now they've fixed that and "this is the worst iteration of ast" lmaooo.

-2 charges of lightspeed(1 for burst, 1 for movement)
-More cards that do different things (anyone who has ran the dungeons or the extreme trials appreciated these cards with the amount of tank dmg that is going on)
-Highest rDPS by far among all healers
-Proactive healer, macrocosmos, star, neutral new 10% mit, etc.
-I would rather have a good AST than a good WHM, AST is been the best healer since SHB in good hands.(Literally solo healing all savages)

Now you give 2 buff cards at 2 instead of 3 at 2m window, not end of world.

Ast is by far the least played healer and they've fixed/are fixing all its issues to attract more players, yes the job will be a bit easier but it will feel less clunky.

Let's not forget how awful the seals and astrodyne felt, and an extremely busy burst window just for the sake of it and of course only 1 type of cards, damage.

However there are things to improve, not been able to double weave cards is a big yikes.

Probably get screamed at for this but might as well make the cards themselves the buffs and abilities of the astrologian at this point. Simplify and diversify. Put Aspect, invervention neutral all as cards and give them same buffs then have one universal card be the across the board damage buff and just the job itself have its basic spells outside the cards. At least the cards will be different at this point ;/ Keep the timers same just let them all be OCD. If we are to be dubbed the time mage might as well make our toolkit as least painful on our dps rotation. You would think astrologian would be able to throw out the instant casts/buffs using OCD and keep near full time rotation from its future seeing abilities.

I was a bit skeptical trying the DT AST, but honestly?... While is not the SB or even ShB, it's still better than Endwalker's.

Granted, I'm only lv 93 but It's really nice not having RNG and having cards as a defensive/healing resource.

To note, I'm still sympathetic with the healer strike movement. I'm only leveling the job because I want all role quests completed.

I wonder if the solution for astro was to draw one card at a time but have it be one or the other and like let you save them for a burst. SO you would use draw and either get balance or spear, arrow or bole, etc etc etc. It would still have some sort of RNG but it would be much harder to game the system and it would stick with the tarot theme as when you draw tarot cards you typically draw with SOMETHING in mind already and the card will be in response to that.

I also think each card should offer a damage increase buff anyway but at a lesser value

And we still should have something to work towards- I liked the seal system personally. Perhaps drawing seals would offer a dps ability or something. IDK I still love astro but the drawing cards was the most fun aspact and now I draw once a min and play only a fraction of the cards.

I tried them out running some stuff with my FC, and... oof. They just don't feel impactful, at all. There's not a single moment where I put one of the 4 heal-or-mit cards on someone where it felt like the card did anything compared to just the background of the fight.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Payadopa

Stormblood AST was best AST. Nuff said.

---

Screaming this from the mountain top. If they had just evolved this version of AST instead, we'd get a better AST.

I don't really get the notion that RNG on AST is annoying. It's makes the job interesting. Every run is different. Sure it's not consistent in the damage buffs you want but that's why Divination exists.

If we can't have SB AST back, then I would have settled 4.5 ShB AST which was a good compromise.

Overall as an AST main, my rating is firmly...okay. The cards don't have MP regen (so now if shite hits the fan, I have lucid dreaming to mp regen) and the effects have little to no reason to even bother tossing them out anymore. Yes, the seals were a bit of a pain, but astrodyne made the speed and extra mp regen worth it.
I've started power-leveling SCH to take over MSQ because it's just not interesting enough to stay on. At this point, yay more AST players, but they lobotomized the class to the point WHM has more personality.

"Riveting" gameplay we lost two cards and now we have to save them all for the burst. Play 2, Play 3 can be straight up removed which makes AST have even less buttons. I truly dislike this iteration of AST over them all, this is not AST this is WHM. Although AST was previously WHM with the RNG element to try and change them, that nuance is what made AST, AST. Now it is just WHM in feeling, nothing to break the monotony...and heals saved for when you would use them similar to any other healer. I wanted the card system expanded not shrunk as with these changes that's exactly what happened.

Below is a spoiler dungeon, if you have not completed DT I don't recommend watching it.
https://youtu.be/gZsOGSW2vl4

Playing AST with the new cards, it felt like I had to completely invent reasons to use Arrow / Bole / Ewer / Spire. I mean, it’s not like there’s enough damage output to warrant actually caring about how you use them, and even then why bother when you have things like Exaltation and Celestial Intersection.

Literally the only use I could find for Arrow was putting it on tank and slapping them Aspected Benefic even though they didn’t really need it. Spire and Ewer frankly I just dumped on the tank every time before redrawing. There’s rarely any instances I can think of where you’d want to give a dps a small HP shield, and Ewer is kinda pointless when you can just use one Essential Dignity’s many many charges lol.

Basically we draw 3 cards every time but 2 of those three at entirely redundant. Like not only do the effects majorly suck, but they’re not even things we couldn’t do before. Every card except damage has an oGCD ability equivalent (that’s usually better)

Absolutely, cards all had different effects and with royal road and lord and lady you had enough options to dump cards you didn't want.

I don't play Astro much, but I did try the new system and I agree, 4 of the 6 cards just feel kinda pointless. They're just extra abilities we already have that are rarely needed.

I don't feel like the new cards really hit the mark for me. I thought the idea was we'd be throwing cards around at different party members instead, maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I end up just aiming to get things lined up so I can throw Balance on a Melee and Spear on a Ranged in the divination window. Everything else just goes on the Tank.

For me, at least, I also keep fumbling things when I've got an Astral draw and I use divination. I'll get used to it in time, of course, but right now I keep going... balance, divination, "ooh I should draw to get spear in", umbral draw, "oh damn I forgot lord of crowns". So it feels like it'd flow nicer if we got Spear with Astral draw so we'd have our two damage buffs with Lord of Crowns, I can appreciate potentially the desire is to allow us to mess up and make us ensure we time our draws but I'm not sure that's really "skilled" play.

That would also kinda address a nitpicky disappointment I have, they haven't preserved some of the lore they expressed previously.
We've got the cards grouped into Astral and Umbral now, but they were already grouped into the Elemental Conquests and Submissions in Shadowbringers. (Minor arcana with Balance, Arrow, and Spear gave Lord of Crowns. Bole, Ewer, and Spire for Lady of Crowns).
Similarly, all the cards are now paired into I, II, and III but... they were already paired into Solar, Lunar, and Celestial.

Rearranging the cards to align with those bits of lore while keeping their current effects... would result in us having both damage buffs ready alongside Lord of Crowns and Arrow to hit someone harder with heals. Again it's a nitpick, but it does hit a little cause I'd find it easier to work with if the cards stuck with the existing lore so it's also a bit ironic I guess.

After spending a few weeks with DT AST I agree with the general consensus that the cards don't feel impactful enough. I like the idea of having more diverse card effects, but in most of the content I enjoy the Arrow is super niche, and Ewer/Spire, while somewhat useful are never necessary. If the plan was to impose the same four cards every minute, I'd rather have two DMG+ cards, one utility, and Lord/Lady. But I'm also among those who much prefer HW/StB Astro. DT AST has been relatively enjoyable, but my least favorite iteration of the job thus far.

I feel like cards are better than EW AST in some ways, namely that outside of 8 mans the system is more lively, but the effects are so redundant with AST's (and increasingly your other party member's) kit(s) that it feels even more tacked on overall.

For starters, cards feel even worse solo, the only way they could feel better without reintroducing Royal Road is to make them ALL have an amplified effect on the AST themselves imo. It also bugs me even more that healers have so many tools they just cannot aim at non-party members, it's gonna feel worse in the 24 man than ever when most of my cards are centered on utility the one tank I have that's not even tanking right now doesn't need.

You can completely ignore the system now except for MP, which was the same as in EW, because the biggest utility you bring is Divination which is wholly untied to the cards like it was when the new system was conceived in ShB. So now cards have even less of a reason to exist now that their effects are all things AST already does without them, where it used to be the devfining aspect of the job.

Instead of the cards building up to a lacklustre Astrodyne the cards themselves feel lacklustre instead.

I really think the interactions of the cards between themselves and the rest of the kit is where old AST shined, from Celestial Opposition/Time Dilation and Royal Road/Spread to Shuffle and Minor Arcana being consolations (my favorite Minor Arcana was in ShB when it just became a 'stronger' basic card for no Seal gain -- again this interacted with the cards further by turning good Seal luck into an even stronger burst phase on the teammate you chose, letting even a normally non ideal card shine in certain circumstances, which is what stars are all about).

I don't see why this couldn't be further improved with DT's kit as it stands -- if they were to let each card card you play amplify the effect of the rest in the set based on the order you play them then there could be some more fun to be had I think. Problem I see is that as they are now, 4 of the 6 cards are just oGCD cooldowns that you have to unlock every minute, a sort of contrived and very weak Aetherflow system, while the other 2 just get used in the 2 minute window. But like, if I play Spire before Spear and that made Spear suddenly the melee damage card or something, and then the arrow after that has a group wide effect because of the Spear... I guess it would be more complicated and possibly pointless and probably 'solved' as well since there's no RNG, but at least you'd get some more variety and cards interacting with each other.

Tbf. Even a solved 'card Rotation ' would be better than the 'dps buff+ unneeded oGCDs ' it is rn.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Payadopa

Stormblood AST was best AST. Nuff said.

---

I miss it so much. The last time I enjoyed healing.

Sleeve Draw in Stormblood was Christmas morning. Everything on AST after StB feels like a fake, pretend version of the job.

I remember hoping for a little targeting QoL going into Shadowbringers and instead they took soul out of the job :(

I need someone to explain to me why I should even bother using the new cards over Aspected Benefit, Essential Dignity, Celestial Intersection, Exaltation, or literally anything else on our already packed healing kit? At least dps buffs added something, now I just toss out the dps card to the melee and spam Malefic for a full minute until I can draw for MP again. Literally falling asleep on it last alliance raid (Aglaia) 'cause there's rarely anything that would warrant that many spot heals/mit in casual. Maybe it could have been slightly more interesting if they were aoes, but then we've already got several of those too. Switching back to the single-card draw with a redraw option would at least help to make it feel more active, but I still wouldn't find spot mit or heals super useful. I can't speak for how it is in high end content or pre-SHB, but I mained it through SHB and EW for healing casual content and had a great time, but this...ain't it. This is soulless and boring.

I know people being vocal about it mostly don't like.

I personnaly have no problem with it.
Originally, I'm a HW/SB AST lover (for cards). I accepted the new system, it was fun it's own way.

Now, I was also looking for a way to make both defensive and offensive cards work together.

I think this AST version is a good middle ground between what I like about the old and the new system.

What I like the most I think is making Lady finally a good choice and a reliable healing skill to plan in the rotation.

I like the healing boost from arrow coupled with spire shield.
Most of the time, it's good for tanks, but I had situation it was great for DPS.

The 2min burst still stay satisfying to do.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Valence

The problem is that we're trying to find interesting effects on support cards but the battle system is too thin to offer actual options to feed the concept beyond damage. Healing and mitigation is already covered by AST's toolkit (like all healers). What's left? MP? Nobody cares about MP anymore. Mobility? Sure maybe, but again, very niche especially if it's not AoE.

---

I think this is the problem. AST itself is fine, possibly the best it has ever been. But the game only cares about damage buffs because we have 180% of the healing and support we need for any given encounter and everything is so heavily scripted that after a couple of runs you memorize the steps and stop thinking about what to do.

If we had more dynamic content with higher healing demands the current cards, or something similar, would shine. I don't want to revert to EW's system as I found nothing interesting about it. The same card over and over, but with a forced melee/ranged divide to prevent putting one card on the same player, though even that may have been unnecessary since cards don't stack.

I ran my first alliance raid in DT. The tank in my party was never the main.
I did not know what to do with my 4 "tank" cards so I just threw them on random party members. It's just meh in light party and 8-man. I prefer the dps buff cards.

I would like the ‘defensive’/‘healing’ cards if they were actually good personally. I love the supporting the party in any way. But the effects on them currently are so uninspired and useless that even I can’t enjoy them lol.

Bole doesn’t really do anything because tanks have billions of mitigations already and Exaltation does the same thing but better.

Ewer is literally just Aspected Benefic wearing a wig, and is by far the least useful card of them all lol. The one thing Astrologian has on basically all its spells / skills (regen) and devs thought we needed a card for it? I still cannot find a reason to ever use it besides yeeting it at the tank and out of my sight lol.

Arrow just feels like a joke…who has ever needed a 10% healing bonus? Like ever? lol

Spire is just extremely weak lol. Feels like I can barely hit Intersection fact enough to get them both on tank to double up on shields lol.


My fanfic fixes:
Bole - 10% HP increase and restores the difference. Can’t be devalued by tank mitigations, strength scales with tank’s max HP, extra HP can save potentially save dps with vulns.
Ewer - MP Regen. Yes it’s problematic, gamebreaking, etc. But it would be useless in the current game design as MP management no longer exists. So I mean, why not lol? Can’t break the balance of something when it’s too simplistic to unbalance lol.
Arrow - Haste. But: It only works on healers! I mean, a mini-PoM effect perfectly fits the ‘healer support’ card but also gives them the opportunity to leverage it for faster dps or whatever.
Spire - Keep the shield strength but make it like Haima where it reapplies itself once or twice before dissipating. Or maybe something like, stores target HP when shield breaks. Idk just something more interesting than literal Intersection lol

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Connor

Bole doesn’t really do anything because tanks have billions of mitigations already and Exaltation does the same thing but better.

...

Bole - 10% HP increase and restores the difference. Can’t be devalued by tank mitigations, strength scales with tank’s max HP, extra HP can save potentially save dps with vulns.

---

Isn't that the same? The problem with tanks is too much mitigation/healing. Extra HP doesn't change anything and it doesn't make it more or less useful than damage reduction when it comes to vuln. In fact that's a good use for the current bole, players with vuln stacks.