Your thoughts on Astrolgian so far?

[Kaerline]

Level 60 astro who used to be whm/sch here! I was reading through this post and decided to contribute my experience since I'm really enjoying this class at the moment.

I think some of you might be a bit too picky about the cards system, or are looking at it in a way it's not supposed to be considered. I healed through all dungeons and trials and while I know this doesn't count much - need to test the class in proper raids - I still think it helped me get the hang of the class. Cards buffs are not supposed to be game breaking, and honestly I wouldn't want them to be. They're there so you can give the party that little more oomph, and in turn they need to be reactive to make good use of it.
When I first started I was getting pretty pissed whenever I was drawing what I considered useless cards (dem spears), then I simply started realising that every little bit helps. I don't consider myself to be OMG BEST PLAYER EVAH or even a good theorycrafter, but I'm pretty sure that rather than going *draw* "naah" *shuffle* "meh" *have card sit there and go to waste*, it's best to balance the amount of royal roads and play them. If I draw a balance towards the end of any fight, I just spread it and use it later. If I draw bole towards the beginning of the fight, I might use it on the tank to add something more to his cds and use that time to dps, or maybe I can decide to RR it because I have a balance waiting to be used in my spread.
What I'm trying to say is, sure, you hardly ever get the cards you really want, but that doesn't make whatever you get useless. Try experimenting, try being more loose with them in short fights and use the downtime as the fight is about to finish or as you're running to the next enemies to try and prepare a nice RR. You'll have more fun and the others will spend more time with some buff up and less wondering what the hell this new class is doing, sitting there spinning the cards wheel.

As for Sects, I tend to use Nocturnal on trash and Diurnal on bosses, though that might change for different boss fights. I do admit that as a fresh 60 a couple of days ago I was almost traumatised trying to clear the new dungeons, but as I got more gear and as the people started learning how to avoid unnecessary damage, even with only a very few blue pieces, I can now safely speed run all of them while dancing in and out of CS to throw in dots and gravity and help with boss adds. I think the biggest issue at the moment is that everyone needs to learn how to play with both brand new classes and old classes who got major revamps. Instead, people who haven't rerolled, hit 60 and expect to faceroll new dungeons while still being in toilet paper armor, just because that's what everyone used to do until a week ago, when highly overgearing the content.

This said, I only have one issue with cards. When you read that Draw has 30s cd you think "wow, amazing, that means A LOT OF CARDS". Well, nope. 30s in a normal boss fight is actually a very long time, not to mention you will want to RR some cards as well. I'd love some kind of tweak to RR, something like reduced cd on Draw when used within x seconds after drawing a card.