Astrologian 5.0 Discussion

[Suishouhime]

Part of the issue is though, once you got to the point where people were farming the highest tier raids in the gaming, those situational cards became...useless. Which cards remain seen throughout all content? Balance, Spear, and Arrow, the DPS increasing cards, effectively making half of Astrologians previous kit unneeded. This is far less of an issue with what options Astrologian had, and more to do with how content is designed, but the new system already represents what any Astrologian was doing with familiar content.

But why does that matter? Situational cards indeed become useless in situations where they wouldn't be useful, but isn't that the definition of situational? They're not used in the situation of high-tier raiding, but a large majority of the content in this game isn't high-tier raiding. I do high-tier raiding on occasion, but I get most of my enjoyment from doing more social-oriented content like min-IL dungeons, daily roulettes, maps with my FC, hunts, PvP, boss FATEs and regular FATEs, 24-man raids, and all other sorts of things where those cards still saw active use.

That doesn't even address the fact that, while they might all increase DPS, it's a very different feeling to know that giving crit to a MNK or a BRD actually has an impact on their rotations themselves, giving them procs for their skills in a way that Balance wouldn't. I've known MNKs and BRDs who prefer Spear over Balance, purely because it's more fun to see their procs pop up more often. It also doesn't account for the fact that Arrow can be actively detrimental on some classes because of potential skill clipping, and can be frustrating to the point of clicking the buff off.

The cards might increase DPS numbers if you're simply looking at parses rather than how the class actually feels, but they all accomplish that in vastly different ways.

As I've been saying throughout this thread, high-tier raiding isn't the majority of the content in the game. It's not even a third of the content in the game. The vast majority of content still presented a variety of situations for cards other than the functional DPS increases, and I've already given you examples of times when cards other than Spear, Balance, and Arrow came in handy. The fact that AST can feel completely different in high-tier raids to regular pug content is proof of the fun in its versatility, not something that should be purged.