Goodbye Astro

[whiskeybravo]

I just wonder which group would be louder if they hadn't changed the cards at all.

[Sylve]

I just wonder which group would be louder if they hadn't changed the cards at all.

There would not have been another group to speak of f they hadn't changed them. People like me who only took up AST because of the card changes would have continued to ignore AST in ShB were it not for the change.

I abandoned AST back in Heavensward after I got it to 60 because cards were absolute garbage. Either I drew really well and got lots of Arrows/Balances or more commonly, drew nothing but Boles, Ewers and Spires.

Drawing luckily did indeed feel great. It was satisfying to drop a super long Balance on someone. But the sheer odds of drawing well was overshadowed by the odds of drawing badly.
Sleeve Draw, while fun to watch occur was also garbage 90% of the time I used it while playing AST in prep for ShB. I sure did love getting AoE Bole with a held Spire. Such fun.

New cards aren't perfect. But they're a damn sight better than they were in terms of sheer usability. They don't last as long, but that's because the uptime on any given card effect of the old variety was even worse. Or better, As it was pure RNG as to what you got.
We also no longer need to be concerned with cards becoming obsolete as we get further in the expansion.
MNK and NIN generally didn't enjoy Arrows because they already had the SkS breakpoint they needed and more would just throw off their rotation. Bole was worthless in farm content. Spire was worthless everywhere except mass pull AoEs and then only if your party had melee dps.
Ewer was also practically worthless unless you just so happened to draw at the exact moment a fellow healer just so happened to be raised. Which happened less and less often as content went from new to farm status.
The only card that remained powerful and useful in all content, all the time was Balance.

New cards will always be useful in every content every time they are drawn from now until 6.0. That alone makes them a world above the old cards.

[TankHunter678]

New cards will always be useful in every content every time they are drawn from now until 6.0. That alone makes them a world above the old cards.

Except for all the times where matchmaker gives you a configuration where you are getting none of the cards you actually need (which renders half your cards worthless and pointless) and refuses to give you the seals you actually need (which renders divination mostly worthless). Not to mention the fact that the effects are so weak and so short lived that the Old cards stomp on them in terms of gains.

Which is why AST is in such a terrible position that no one wants it except the people who only care about how high their personal numbers can get padded damn the rest.

I am going to be honest, I get far more worthless useless cards with the new AST then I ever got with the old AST. I also get frustrated far more often thanks to the seal system and the melee/range split. At this point if they want to stick with this simplified mess they may as well remove the card system entirely and just give us 3 buttons: A button that buffs a single target on a 30 sec cooldown, the 120 sec cooldown button that buffs the party, and a button that resets the single target buff button and grants 2 charges. Doing that makes the system achieve what the current card system was supposed to achieve while eliminating all of the current systems negatives. The lore of the class will still be destroyed, but at least we wont work harder then other classes who achieve similar results in far fewer button presses for their raid buffs.

In the old system Bole was useful in all content that was not optimized content, which is 95% of the content in the game. Ewer always had a use. In truth thanks to minor arcana all cards were never useless, never worthless. Spire simply needed a rework because it was too niche out of all the cards. I never heard of any card becoming obsolete.

[whiskeybravo]

There would not have been another group to speak of f they hadn't changed them. People like me who only took up AST because of the card changes would have continued to ignore AST in ShB were it not for the change.

Kinda seems like people who like the new card changes might've felt shafted, you know, with the whole "this is a healer rework expansion" aspect of things - if they left the crummy old card system in place there certainly would be people questioning it. My comment was meant to provide that bit of perspective.

I don't really have a dog in this race one way or the other, my main experience with AST is only raiding along side them, but from an outsiders perspective the changes make more sense than not. I feel a little bit with both sides, but the reality is most people only wanted DPS cards. To say the weaker cards were useful to use for fodder is just a rationalization to feel better about a bad design.

That being said, there seem to be core playability issues with AST moreso than what the cards do or don't do anymore. So the focus should be more on making the class enjoyable to play in action rather than the relatively unimportant aspect of the cards themselves.

[TankHunter678]

That being said, there seem to be core playability issues with AST moreso than what the cards do or don't do anymore. So the focus should be more on making the class enjoyable to play in action rather than the relatively unimportant aspect of the cards themselves.

If you ignored the card system entirely then ever since its first implementation in HW AST has always been a discount WHM with the option of being a heavily discounted SCH in terms of play. It was really simple, really straightforward, and really consistent on its output. It was also, if one still ignores the cards, boring to play because of this simplicity. What made the class stand out and what made the class enjoyable was the card system itself. The entire lore of the class being built around the cards and their effects. It was all about working with what you got and the possibilities presented. This produced high highs, with low lows you could mitigate. Every card in the majority of content was useful and provoked thought in an otherwise very simplistic boring kit, so one tried to plan around the cards. With the new card system all the thinking was removed from the class. You either push for optimal, or you begrudgingly settle for sub-optimal not worth your time.

Now it is just the basic simplistic base it always had with nothing to spice it up. The entire class would need a rework to make the class enjoyable to play outside of the card system.

Oh and the card effects were not unimportant, the entire lore of the class and selling point of the class was the card effects. Detaching the card effects from the lore is like detaching BLMs from their explosions.

[tikiwiki]

Kinda seems like people who like the new card changes might've felt shafted, you know, with the whole "this is a healer rework expansion" aspect of things - if they left the crummy old card system in place there certainly would be people questioning it. My comment was meant to provide that bit of perspective.

I don't really have a dog in this race one way or the other, my main experience with AST is only raiding along side them, but from an outsiders perspective the changes make more sense than not. I feel a little bit with both sides, but the reality is most people only wanted DPS cards. To say the weaker cards were useful to use for fodder is just a rationalization to feel better about a bad design.

in an rng class you kinda need a bad outcome though rn none of the outcomes feel good but bad ones are annoying, and before the rework there were dissapointing out comes but they werent frustrating to me but the good ones like several aoe balances felt great