Reason i wont be playing Astro anymore after ShadowBringers launches.

[Rahspdoy]

They needed to keep the 6 cards for lore reasons, since the 6 arcana are a mayor point in the original job quest. would have been weird to have entire quests dedicated to learning the arcanas and then not actually having their cards anymore. However, that makes me curious how they are going to rework that lore part of the questline. "Ah the spear, it stands for halone and her increasing dmg." "and here we have the spire, representing dmg aswell. And this is Ewer, which contrary to the other arcanas, does represent dmg."

I was speaking more from a actual 'coding' perspective. they quite literally do not 'need' 6 cards when you only have 2 options.

+8 Melee and +4 Ranged, 'or' +8 Ranged and +4 Melee.

Then you have the 3 'signs', which are a separate entity from the cards themselves.

in terms of possibilities, we went from having a deck of 6 cards, to having a single gil and 3 pieces of string each a different length to use.

We are Oracles now, not Astrologians.

[Rahspdoy]

Noot to bump my own thread, but wanted to re-post this here as it was a reply i made in another thread.

Seals are used with this cool new skill called Divination. It increases damage of all party members by 6% for 15 seconds if you have all three types of seals.
And it has a 3 minute cooldown. In three minutes, you can play up to NINE cards if you use Sleeve Draw. And every three minutes, you only need THREE seals. This means the seals are literally useless 66% of the time. Remember Lilies? I remember.

Everyone is putting so much stock in this new 'sign' system being such a great thing because it *gasps* lets you give the whole party your 1 single buff now, rather than having to spam-cast it on everyone.. that their ignoring how many cards you can draw in-between uses of the new Divination skill. And given how many cards you can pull in those 3 minutes, vs the 33% chance of getting a 'different' seal each draw... the 'requirement' for having 3 'different' seals is almost moot. And as such, that requirement may as well not exist as your almost guaranteed to 'always' have 3 different seals.

As for what all of us who LIKED the old system would rather have in place of this single coin-flip and a 3-sided dice (which when all said and done makes no difference 'what' you get as its all the exact same thing.. only with 'slightly' better % of the same buff if done 'well'), I personally like this persons idea.

If we don't get back the ancient system, here my changes :
Royal Road and Spread removed, no changes.

Cards
Balance : 5% damage, grants 1 solar seal
Bole : 10% damage reduction, grants 1 solar seal
Arrow : 5% attack speed, grants 1 lunar seal
Ewer : 30 potency mana regen, grants 1 lunar seal
Spear : 5% critical rate, grants 1 celestial seal
Spire : 10% to all healing actions used, grants 1 celestial seal
Lord of Crown and Lady of Crown keep the same effect granted in Stormblood.

Divination
Activable at least with one seal.
You can cumulate 3 seals max of each type.
1 solar seal : 3% damage
2 solar seals : 6% damage
3 solar seals : 9% damage
----
1 lunar seal : 3% attack speed
2 lunar seals : 6% attack speed
3 lunar seals : 9% attack speed
----
1 celestial seal : 3% critical hit
2 celestial seals : 6% critical hit
3 celestial seals : 9% critical hit
----

When you activate Divination :
- If you have 1 solar + 2 lunar, the team will get 3% damage + 6% attack speed.
- If you have 2 solar + 2 celestial, the team will get 6% damage + 6% critical hit.
- If you have 3 solar + 1 celestial + 1 lunar, the team will get 9% damage + 3% critical hit + 3% attack speed.
- Etc.

So, the best case would be within 10 draws in 180 sec, to have 9 seals = 3 solar seals + 3 lunar seals + 3 celestial seals which would give 9% damage + 9% attack speed + 9% critical hit to all the team.

It would be far more interesting and rewarding playing this and dealing with the rng again than what they are trying to give us for ShB.

[Darkpaw]

Let’s try to understand a few things, you make your decision. Posting it here is nothing but a cry for attention. There will be other astros to fill your shoes. For the most part though astro cards were balance or bust. Each card had a very niche use, and you knew once u saw the color of the card whether you were going to burn it, road it, or arcana it.

It really wasnt as in depth a mechanic as most people are on this forum clamoring, i guess hindsight is better with rose tinted glasses. They could never balance the cards well, ever. And it encouraged selective gameplay. Bole you’d realistically only use on a bad tank, spear bard or monk, arrow black mage, balance highest dps, ewer u or other healer rarely, spire burn.

Tada astro, now is the new system perfect? Hardly. The seals are an interesting mechanic the single target card play makes sense. Building up to an aoe utility. I like this. Should they all be made mini balances? No, and yes.

By making every card mini balance you are right it is tedious and kind of mind numbing like old astro cards. So yea maybe we could look at that.. does this mean bring back the old system? God no that was horrible. But also by making every card mini balance theyve finally achieved card balance wooo hoooo first time in four years.

Tldr: no one on the forums cares about your decision to not play astro and old card system wasnt as great as people say.

[Vorlonshadow]

Well I will enjoy astro and the instent duty. Thank you all.

[reyre]

Tldr: no one on the forums cares about your decision to not play astro and old card system wasnt as great as people say.

If no one cares why do you comment in this tread? It seems you care enough to make a response making your argument very clear, or that is to say you took time and wrote a reply, meaning you cared not just a little but a lot. Seems contradictory, making your whole "no one cares" argument invalid.

[Kabooa]

If no one cares why do you comment in this tread? It seems you care enough to make a response making your argument very clear, or that is to say you took time and wrote a reply, meaning you cared not just a little but a lot. Seems contradictory, making your whole "no one cares" argument invalid.

Some people revel in salt. -They- don't care about -the op's- pining about cards that made not a wick of difference outside anecdotal "But this one time Spire saved us!" examples, but that doesn't mean they don't get some sort of catharsis by saying it.

[Haxaan]

While I am not 100% impressed with the implementation of the new cards, I do think the new mechanic is interesting. The abilities all look fantastic sure, but we will have to wait and see how it plays. The fact that you can pull cards more often, even if they are only single target, means you have many more chances to buff the party. It feels like the buff up-time will be greater. Again, depends on how it actually plays. I will miss the royal road mechanic, but I want to see how this one works out. If it doesn't work they will change it.

*pours one out for Time Dilation* You will be missed.

[Vivian_Vex]

If no one cares why do you comment in this tread? It seems you care enough to make a response making your argument very clear, or that is to say you took time and wrote a reply, meaning you cared not just a little but a lot. Seems contradictory, making your whole "no one cares" argument invalid.

Is that really the best you can come up with? Just because someone makes a post telling them no one cares doesn't actually mean that that person cares.

People do stuff they don't care about that all the time.

[Rahspdoy]

Got linked to a Reddit post by a friend, and one of the posters named Al-Quti (i think?) stated this, and i think it sums up pretty much what i feel as well (and what a lot of Astro players feel).

The fun in the system was thinking about how to use each unique card in any given situation. Even the DPS cards were far from interchangeable. Arrow and spear both benefited certain jobs more than others, but had universal utility (except arrow on MCH or lazy monks). You had to judge if redraw was worth the risk of pulling a Spire, if it was worth spreading an Arrow even if you might pull a Balance later between pulls. In 8-mans you actually wanted Ewer or Spire if you were sitting on a DPS card.

Having diverse cards with unique effects was what made the system fun. If you're going to give us 6 cards with DPS buffs, give us unique DPS buffs, that all have different base and situational utility, so that spread and RR still make sense. Balance is always the best; Arrow is just as good for SAM and BLM but still a good buff for all but 1 other job; Spear is alright for everyone but much better for bards. Add in a +direct hit, a +magic damage and +physical damage buff, and you have cards that are always of some use in group content, despite having vastly different situational utility (+magic and +physical are gimped without a magical or physical DPS in the group, but you will always have a healer that does magic damage and a tank that does physical).

Was Arrow, Balance and Spear all the same at their 'core', in that they increased DPS? Yes.

Did they do it in the same 'way'? No.

And that is what made it more 'fun'. That is what made it more 'unique'. That is what broke the monotony of just standing there healing and every so often stopping to toss 1 single buff out to any random person because it doesn't matter who gets it as its the same buff.

Is a Balance a more obvious 'bonus' to give a Bard than a Spear? Probably.. but a Spear actually works to the 'advantage' of the Bard's mechanic that works off when their dots 'crit' (Repertoire and Bloodletter), while a Balance has no effect on that.

Things of that nature are what made the Card system so engaging, so 'fun' to use.

This new 1 card, 3 shells, mechanic we have removes all of that, removes all 'engagement' from the system. We simply have 1 choice, 1 option, and to be frank, you can spout out percentages and whatnot, and how much 'better' using the correct 'face' of the card on Melee rather than just chunking it on the Ranged will help. In the end, its still the same card. It doesnt matter 'who' gets it as it does the same thing. It affects them in the same way. It simply tacks on another % to their base damage.

That's not engaging play. Its not 'fun' play.

As the OP said, its this 'lack of fun', that the new system puts in place of the old system, is why i gave up on leveling up Astro for the 2nd time. As i see no 'fun' in the class once 5.0 drops.

[RayThrust]

I will probably still be enjoying AST. I might have preferred the Arrow card, but most of the time I was fishing for Balance. The cards gave me an "illusion" of choice. I never think hard about what card to use for Spread or whatever. Sure I'll loose some damage mitigation, but I mostly used Bole because thats what I ended up with at the time, we (and tanks) still have mitigation somewhere else.
I liked Ewer when my gear wasn't good enough for said content and that's about it. BRD won't even be as dependent for Spear anymore.
If anything they could be more creative with the minor arcana. Anyone have any good ideas for those, instead of this "me accept change poorly-rampage"?