The positive Astrologian thread!

[TatoRazzino]

And please, SCH players need to stop talking about Selene as if that fairy did anything amazing and OP to the group; she adds like 30 dps to some jobs, while she does almost nothing nothing to jobs like SMN and can drain the TP of other jobs. People are talking about WHM and SCH as if they didn't have any downsides, which it's not true. They act like there are no cooldowns, no losses and no restrictive mechanics to anything. Like, SCHs only get 3 Aetherflow stacks per minute, which means they get to choose which skills to use; you can't just blast 3 Lustrates and then pretend you don't lose almost ALL your AoE healing potency. Emergency Tactics is nice, but it only makes your Succor equivalent to Helios/Medica, which AST/WHM have all the time; and on Adlo, it makes the potency reach 600, which is lower than Benefic II/Cure II; it can go up, but it depends on RNG – and if RNG is bad for AST, it's bad for SCH, so you can't depend on it to make your case against AST.

[Aurum]

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Yes, it's true that aetherflow has a cost, but that being said, SCH gets 3 more aetherflows a minute than AST does, so saying it's not that great is like telling a person without a car that "yes, I have a car, but it just gets me from point A to point B. It's nothing special". Yes, maybe you're not riding around in a ferrari, but that's not what the person who has to walk to work every day cares about.

And as far as the RNG element goes, if you wanted to level the RNG playing field between SCH and AST, you'd have to do this: take all of your aetherflow skills, roll them into a ball, and put them on one button. You can only press that button every 20 seconds, and when you do, it randomly activates a skill that consumes aetherflow. Oh, you wanted to lustrate that tank? Too bad, you get Sacred Soil.

[TatoRazzino]

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I don't want to level the RNG playing field, I'm saying that RNG is not a bad thing. SCHs use it too, and a lot. And it works out for them. The point of the cards was never to make a party pass a DPS check they couldn't pass without them or save a tank from a blow he wouldn't survive without them. That's not the core concept of the job. It would be like saying that SCH was crap for not being able to land critical Adlos at specific moments to shield tanks from busters they wouldn't survive with a normal Adlo. ASTs have very nice healing tools and are reliable at the healing end when played properly; the cards are a bonus and add utility to long runs. You have a 4/6 chance to draw cards that are useful all the time to almost all groups and you get tools to manage the ones you don't want. You're not gonna see DPS numbers go sky high, but that was NEVER the point. Stop saying that RNG to cards is a problem, because it isn't.

[Aurum]

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SCHs use RNG in an entirely different way than Astro does. SCH RNG can only ever work in a SCHs favor since a crit adlo is always nice. It's not necessary, and isn't something people rely upon for specific things. AST RNG on the other hand often makes your cards come up at irrelevant times. A crit adlo is never irrelevant; AST's cards often are.

And if the cards aren't the core aspect of the class(even though many of our abilities are related to manipulating them), then what is? WHM has AoE heals and general healing output covered. SCH has single target shielding and DPS covered. Where does AST fit?

[TatoRazzino]

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If you're only getting bad cards, you're using them wrong. Drawing a Bole can save a cooldown from your tank rotation (and yes, tanks rotate cooldowns during raids) and the Spear can make a NIN do more DPS with Ninjutsus. If you don't have a NIN and your tank is doing fine, then you use your tools. By using RR, you can make up for the Draw you "lost". The other cards are always useful in raid situations. Arrows can be used for healers and almost all DPS jobs, the Balance is a direct DPS increase which can be Spread in case you can't use it at the moment. MP and TP add a lot of utility and make your BRD/MCH dps more steady since it takes some of their Refresh job. There's no possible scenario in which your cards won't help the party; the chance of that happening (like, drawing all Spears) is so low that it only makes this whole argument ridiculous: people are overreacting about something that is not gonna happen in a raid encounter.

[Aurum]

I would agree with you on the DPS cards if the cards made up the difference between our personal dps and the dps lost from replacing a WHM or SCH with an AST, but the cards fail to do that by a wide margin. If AST is given the ability to buff dps, then what is the point if they can't even account for the loss of dps from having us in the party in the first place? As for spear, I would agree that it's a good card to draw, but the way it works is currently so awkward that I find it night useless. As far as spear/ewer go, I'm okay with ewer, but none of the current endgame content sees people TP starved, so why would I care about spire?

[TatoRazzino]

There have been people saying that TP is a problem in A2 Savage. Also, when my group cleared t13 (pre-echo), TP was an issue. Tonight in A1, there was BARELY room for healer DPS. Anytime me or the WHM went into Cleric, someone died; the healing check is intense. Cards would have helped a lot. Other than that, I can pull similar DPS on my AST and on my SCH in short bursts, and I can pull over 400 on Faust. AST has 2 DoTs that can't miss and a 200 potency burst; one of the DoTs is stronger than Bio II by 100 potency, which can make up for the lack of Miasma (which can miss); the difference between the burst from Broil and Malefic II can make up for the lack of Shadow Flare. Of course, you won't be able to do that for a long time, but WHM got some new nasty tools too. You just need to work out a strategy. Healing checks won't allow a SCH to DPS for a long time even with a WHM on the party, so an AST will be more than fine solo healing for short periods while the SCH does it.