Astro's redraw defying logic

[Amiaze]

The change is both good and bad. Good because SE is listening to the players and actually catered to them by changing an ability for sake of (slightly) improved reliability.

Agreed, and I won't argue that the ability being changed to Redraw fits the lore exactly, but to be fair, many class/job mechanics and logic don't fit the lore. The game has to make concessions for playability at times.

But I will argue that the improvement is more than slight. AST's main benefit is that it can use buffs on the party, but as it stood, literally more than half my draws would be Ewer/Spire before 3.2 launched. I would literally spend entire boss fights doing nothing but redrawing the same cards over and over again, eventually settling for using Spear or Arrow simply because I wanted to use something during the run.

And I no longer find myself saving a held Balance with Expanded Royal Road simply because I know I likely won't get it again before the next boss.

Now, I find myself getting a good mix of all the cards and being able to do things such as cast Balance on all my party members and then cast a held Bole on my tank. This is especially effective during large mob pulls when we only have ranged DPS that likely won't get hit by anything. Before 3.2, I wouldn't have dared try such a thing.

And, of course, there's always the argument that Shuffle invalidated both a cooldown (or two, if you're unfortunate) and somewhat invalidated the point of AST. I don't mind that AST uses RNG - I actually like it - but I did not appreciate how poorly implemented it was.

I now actually feel as if I'm strategizing and working with RNG rather than being a slave to it.

[RocheKat]

I now actually feel as if I'm strategizing and working with RNG rather than being a slave to it.

This. Now you can play the cards to your advantage. It also makes Royal road and spread far more powerful than they where. Going entire runs with nothing but spire/ewer was not all that fun imo.