Astrologian 5.0 Discussion

[TheBlackMind]

You literally boost peoples damage every 15 seconds. You have a party wide damage boost for 20 seconds every 3 min. You can switch between shields and go Regen at will. You even have some abilities that allow you to do both at the same time!!! And this is what you are gonna whine about???

[Edaniel]

@TheBlackMind - The boost is 3-6% for 15 seconds. That's negligible and unnecessary in 4mans. The party wide boost is 6% when you build 3 seals. Now in an 8 man this has some effect. However, the cooldown is irritating at 3 minutes when we can build the seals needed for a full Divination with over 1:40 left on the CD. This is not taking into account Sleeve Draw.

Secondly, we cannot switch between our two sects at will. We are locked into a Sect for the duration of a battle. Furthermore, Nocturnal Sect in its current iteration is the weakest healer in the game. Arguably worse than a Scholar without a fairy. Its potencies are lackluster, its MP cost overly high (I'm talking 1k MP per Aspected Benefic, and lets keep in mind MP is capped at 10k). AST's best bet right now is to stick to Diurnal, and get your shield from Neutral Sect and Celestial Intersection (I believe I have the name right). Intersection on Diurnal will give a shield, which should be used on CD.

So yes, we're going to whine. The flavor and lore of AST, was just gutted. AST uses time and space magic. Benefic is supposed to be turning time back on wounds. Time Dilation was extending the time left on buffs. Opposition was freezing time in a limited zone. The cards were AST's theme. Each card having a different meaning and so a different effect. They could have just thrown away all the cards and had a button that randomly changes to melee or ranged damage buff and the effect would be the same.

That being said, I would like to see the duration on our Divination extended to 30 seconds. The cooldown dropped to 2 minutes or less. I wouldn't mind the cards being damage buffs - FOR DPS. To me, it would be an interesting change to have the cards give buffs based on the class's role. DPS get Damage buffs, Tanks gets mitigation, and throwing a card at a Healer would increase their healing output. Also, I'd like to see the Benefic II crit proc off of Combustion tic's as opposed to me casting Benefic I. Honestly, if I'm casting a Benefic its because I'm running low on mana because I just rez'd a person or two. ...do I see any of these things happening? Probably not, but sadly, I also don't see them returning our old card effects.

[HyoMinPark]

You literally boost peoples damage every 15 seconds. You have a party wide damage boost for 20 seconds every 3 min. You can switch between shields and go Regen at will. You even have some abilities that allow you to do both at the same time!!! And this is what you are gonna whine about???

Correction: Divination is a 15s duration every 3 mins.

The card buffs are shadows of what they used to be. They’re weaker than old Balance by a mile. Divination is weaker than old AOE Balance. Sometimes it barely feels worth it to draw them because you don’t feel like they had the impact they used to have. The decision making is literally “oh, melee card” and “oh, ranged card”—followed by “oh, I have my seals now with Divination still 100+ seconds from being off CD so I guess Minor Arcana card”. It’s boring.

Neutral Sect allows you to utilize both sects for 20s every 2 minutes. At best, you’ll get in 2 A.Benefics and A.Helios without overwriting your HoTs. You cannot “swap them at will” while in combat, and Noct is still as MP inefficient as it was in HW and SB.

People are complaining about EVERYTHING when it comes to AST: weak heals, weak damage, weak cards, uninteresting/clunky gameplay (hello Horoscope), poor MP management (but hey, that was a thing in SB, too—at least we had Ewer to give ourselves MP...but that’s not a thing anymore). A lot of career ASTs mention the cards above all else simply because that was what attracted them beforehand, but now the mechanic has been dumbed down and is a shadow of its former self with zero variety to it. Someone phrased it perfectly in a thread I was reading: “Why do we have 6 skills [the cards] that do the same thing [+3%/6% damage]”.

But you clearly aren’t reading discussions if you think the cards are the only complaints ASTs have right now.

EDIT because posting limits:

It's not 6 skills though is it, it's only 2 or 3. Draw, Play and Minor Arcana.

It is 6 skills: Balance, Arrow, Spear, Bole, Ewer, and Spire all effectively do the same thing. The only difference is the original damage cards are melee, and original utility cards are ranged. But they all do the same. Hence, “why do we have 6 cards that all do the same thing”, i.e., give a 6% damage buff for 15s. Lord and Lady now do the same thing (with a +8% damage for 15s) with the same caveat—that a caveat of melee card versus ranged card exists doesn’t suddenly make this a revolutionary or thought-provoking mechanic. It’s boring.

Having played AST for 5 levels now, having come from an position of initial disappointment, it's growing on me again.

You’re welcome to your opinion, but my experience was the opposite. Each level gave more and more disappointment. Especially as I progressed and didn’t get any stronger as a result. The only skill I enjoyed getting was Celestial Intersection, but the shield is still fairly weak and gets broken in a matter of a couple autos on a tank. I think Divine Benison is actually better than it.

The cards... aren't so bad.
Balance needed a slight nerf, let's be honest, and once you factor in the fact that Balance was a 1-in-6 before (or a 16.6% chance, 36.6% chance when factoring in redraw) with Arrow and Spear not being as effective, the potencies averaged out aren't that much lower. Given that you've basically gone from a 36.6% chance tops to a 100% chance, the nerf seems proportional. From 10% to 6%, on a half duration, is 30% of the averaged potency, and 40% on a Minor Arcana. It's almost perfect. Given that over the course of 3mins you'll use 3 of the base cards (30%) and between as many as 6 Minor Arcana with Sleeve draw (40%) it's basically the same 36.6%.

The cards are a direct nerf from what they used to be. 6%/8% on one person for 15 seconds is already weaker than the 10% for 30 seconds a single-target Balance original gave, and you can no longer extend their effects with Celestial Opposition or Time Dilation, making them even weaker than before. 6% on 8 people for 15 seconds every 3 minutes is a joke compared to the old Balance, even when you try to factor in RNG. There’s no way the cards make up the rDPS gain they used to—Balance alone could net you ~1,000 rDPS, and Spear only got stronger as the gear progressed because players could stack more and more of it on their gear (and jobs with crit mechanics like 4.0 BRD and MNK loved the card almost as much as a Balance—especially during a burst window).

If Balance needed to be addressed, I don’t think the solution was to change all of the cards into weaker Balances.

You've basically lost the RNG aspect entirely when it comes to individual cards, and only need to worry about it for the seal mechanic. That is to say, your outgoing rDPS is no longer RNG dependant, the RNG is entirely contained within your personal mechanic management.

You’ve also lost the satisfactory element of applying the cards.

When it comes to Divination/Expanded-Balance, it's a similar situation, but it is a nerf.
Again factoring in redraws, you had a 26% chance to draw an Expanded-Balance over a minute*, you now have a virtually 100% chance to gain a full Divination over 3 minutes, so 33% efficiency in comparison to that 26%.
33% over 26% is... 126% as efficient, and at 6% instead of 5% damage up, it's another 16% more potent for a total of 142% of the averaged potency. Plug in the halved duration, and it's 71% as efficient as the old Expanded-Balance. If you want to give Divination a like-for-like potency, then it could be reduced to a 130s cooldown, therefore a neater 120s cooldown would actually be a slight buff.

As for the agency of choosing where the cards go, this is what I was most concerned about when we first got the tooltips, and initially, it bothered me. But it's really just a matter of adjusting. Choosing where to apply to ranged or melee, is fundamentally no different from the axiomatic application of crit to BRD/MNK, or speed to SAM/BLM. You just lose the grey area of "I don't have a BRD or a MNK, where does this Spear go?" which to me always made it feel more disappointing that I hadn't drawn a Balance instead...

*Expanded-Balance chance math:
Draw a Balance 1-in-6 = 16.6%
Redraw it for a 1-in-5 = 20%
Add them for 36.6%

Draw a Spire/Ewer for Expanded 2-in-6 = 33.3%
Redraw it for a 2-in-5 = 40%
Add them for 73.3%

To factor both outcomes together, multiply 36% by 73% for 26% overall.

I feel as if you are focusing too heavily on “there’s no more RNG now so it’s a straight gain” without actually looking at the potencies and considering that, even with the removal of RNG, the cards are straight up weaker than they were before without the RNG. The removal of RNG does not make up for the fact that they are weaker—especially with Draw having the same cooldown outside of Sleeve Draw windows. They certainly aren’t tipping the charts in favor of AST when you compare it to the other two healers.
As a side note, if you didn’t have a BRD or a MNK, Spear could either be Minor Arcana for an oGCD heal/damage card, or you could toss it on another job. Towards the end of 4.0, most jobs were stacking crit over any other substat, so it wouldn’t be a huge loss to put it on any player so long as they weren’t AFK or drooling on their keyboard. I feel like you’re really underselling Spear simply because it was +crit and not +damage. Was it weaker than Balance? Of course. But it wasn’t worthless.

WHMs are pulling 7,000 in just personal damage. ASTs are hovering around 4,000~4,500. Our cards are not making up 2,500~3,000 in rDPS to make us a viable alternative to WHM, and our healing is the weakest among the three (SCH is actually able to basically solo heal now with all their Aetherflow being relegated to healing resources only—even with its boring DPS rotation now). It seems more and more as if you’re purposely gimping your party bringing an AST.