Reason i wont be playing Astro anymore after ShadowBringers launches.

[Rahspdoy]

If you needed bole, ewer, or spire, someone messed up. Plain and simple.

What this means is that nothing is a necessity, and when nothing is a necessity, the cards with the most amount of useful "use cases" wins.

Want to guess which card that was?

Have you ever played bard?

You know how Bloodletter gets to 'skip' its cooldown right? Its based off your Dots 'critting'. Your dots critting are based off your crit chance. How much 'more' damage are you going to do using Bloodletter 4 times vs only 2? How about Repertoire? Same thing, its based of your dot critting, which is based off Crit chane. Does Balance help that? No.. Spear does. A Balance cycled for the 150% boost effect to use on a Spear helps even more.

But Wait! only Astro has RNG right?... So... i guess im just imagining how a Spear can actually help a Bard do more DPS than just a generic Balance can?

How about when your doing that last wall-to-wall pull in a dungeon and you want to make sure you dont have to wait for Mana before the boss fight? AOE Bole once the tank has all the mobs in a pile and relax a bit as you dont need to have your finger hovering over insta-cast heal for when that Samuri or Ninja gets hit by 5 overlapping AOE attacks they didnt see because there's 20 mobs all piled up in one spot.

And Ewer. Saying its only useful if someone messed up? I guess your saying its only useful if a Healer isnt in that 0.01% of meta-players that know 'exactly' when to move and the 'exact' spot to stand in 100% of the time and 'never' makes a single mistake? Isnt that basically calling 99% of the playerbase idiots that dont know how to play without dying?

Let's put it this way: I rather do a coin flip than quickly learn the definition of insanity by pulling Bole, then redraw as Spire, then draw a Bole again... then redraw as Ewer. Yay more minor arcana uses I guess. So yes, I do find it more interesting then internally screaming on why a Spear or a Balance won't come out due to my crappy rng. It's less of 'RNG BAD' it's more of 'I don't need most of these cards with the content and raid set up I am running with'. That's the main flaw with AST, most of the time the cards are worthless. Though I do agree that changing everything to balance isn't the best, and they should've reworked the system in a different way. What way? I dunno. Maybe make each card contribute to the party a bit better but still keeping some core effects to make things more interesting.

The other cards 'were' useful, IF you understood more of the other classes in your party than "oh its dps, so he does damage, the only card he's wanting is one that makes his damage higher and Balance is the 'obvious' choice for that".

The Bard example is a perfect one. Sure.. Balance makes 'all' their attacks hit just slightly harder than they otherwise would. But a Boosted Spear helps one of their skills be 'able' to be used more than it otherwise would have, so instead of just hitting for 20 extra damage, you get a full 200+ extra damage you otherwise wouldnt have had. Then you have the Repertoire effect, which gets absolutly 0 help from Balance, but gets a direct boost from Spear.

[Kabooa]

How about when your doing that last wall-to-wall pull in a dungeon and you want to make sure you dont have to wait for Mana before the boss fight? AOE Bole once the tank has all the mobs in a pile and relax a bit as you dont need to have your finger hovering over insta-cast heal for when that Samuri or Ninja gets hit by 5 overlapping AOE attacks they didnt see because there's 20 mobs all piled up in one spot.

AoE bole isn't saving anyone MP and only serves as the best example to why the current iteration of cards is mostly meaningless outside balance.

[Rahspdoy]

AoE bole isn't saving anyone MP and only serves as the best example to why the current iteration of cards is mostly meaningless outside balance.

And your just ignoring the entire fact that Spear 'was' useful to directly work off another class' mechanics? Because Bole does not 'seem' useful to you, then 'all' other cards are just as useless?

[Kabooa]

And your just ignoring the entire fact that Spear 'was' useful to directly work off another class' mechanics? Because Bole does not 'seem' useful to you, then 'all' other cards are just as useless?

Yes, because if you don't have a monk or Bard, Spear's value immediately diminishes, but Balance doesn't.

So Spear is only ever arguably equal to Balance when you have specific jobs partied with you, and in every other case is inferior.

Same with Arrow.

Spire is only for RR or Minor Arcana food, both options (lord/Lady) are inferior to just boosting up a party member.
Ewer has some use, but every other buff to Astrologian has made Ewer less and less significant.

[eiozza]

The other cards 'were' useful, IF you understood more of the other classes in your party than "oh its dps, so he does damage, the only card he's wanting is one that makes his damage higher and Balance is the 'obvious' choice for that".

The Bard example is a perfect one. Sure.. Balance makes 'all' their attacks hit just slightly harder than they otherwise would. But a Boosted Spear helps one of their skills be 'able' to be used more than it otherwise would have, so instead of just hitting for 20 extra damage, you get a full 200+ extra damage you otherwise wouldnt have had. Then you have the Repertoire effect, which gets absolutly 0 help from Balance, but gets a direct boost from Spear.

You are claiming that the other cards are useful but the only example you are giving is about a card that I said you want to pull in my second post? Balance and Spear are fine. Everything else either sucks or is very situational depending on your build. And even your BRD example is kinda trash because in ShB the procs aren't based on crit anymore. And I brought up Arrow as an example of a situational card. You only want to draw Arrow if you have a BLM or a SS SAM in your party, nothing else. Most, if not all jobs, want there SS to a specific point so their rotation can be consistent. So, unless you have those two jobs, the Arrow goes to the trash. Same with Bole, Spire and Ewer. They are only ever situational.

[Rahspdoy]

You are claiming that the other cards are useful but the only example you are giving is about a card that I said you want to pull in my second post? Balance and Spear are fine. Everything else either sucks or is very situational depending on your build. And even your BRD example is kinda trash because in ShB the procs aren't based on crit anymore. And I brought up Arrow as an example of a situational card. You only want to draw Arrow if you have a BLM or a SS SAM in your party, nothing else. Most, if not all jobs, want there SS to a specific point so their rotation can be consistent. So, unless you have those two jobs, the Arrow goes to the trash. Same with Bole, Spire and Ewer. They are only ever situational.

The entire thing all the meta players are missing is that what made Astro 'fun' for those of us playing it, is that it had a neat mechanic to it.

Most people playing Astro play it likely because they DONT want to just stand there in one spot, throwing out heals, and doing absolutely nothing else. The card system gave us 'something else' to do, to keep us entertained, and having 'fun'.

With ShB, the entire mechanic is 100% gone. Essentially replaced with 2 skills we use every so often while we stand in one spot doing nothing but throwing around heals.

We may as well just roll WHM's and make sure everyone in our group had 99-stacks of the Braised Pipira, or Tree Toad Leggs foods (depending on if their mele or magic) in their inventory so they can give themselves a 30-minut, last through deaths, buff that is equal to the 1 button Astro's get to press now between healing once every 3 minutes.

That isn't my wish. At no point did I say it was.

Went back and re-worded it

[Kabooa]

Went back and re-worded it

I feel like you're ribbing me a bit but I appreciate it.

It's not the path I would have taken. They had the opportunity to go one way, potentially even just dropping the damage buffs and make the cards more meaningful to the Astrologian specifically, but they went to the other extreme.

[Rahspdoy]

I feel like you're ribbing me a bit but I appreciate it.

Was not a rib, i honestly messed up and wanted to fix it.