Goodbye Astro

[ColdestHeaven]

If you do 10k DPS on your MCH then that 3% is an extra 300 DPS. That is lower impact then throwing the non-optimal card from the old system on you. It also only lasts 15 seconds so you wont even feel it because it effectively has no impact at all. They are useless. It is better to minor arcana it and throw it on a healer or tank of the appropriate range then throw it on the wrong DPS. Cause if your tank is only doing 8k DPS then that 8% Lord of Crowns card boosts their DPS by 640 compared to 400 if it was tossed on your MCH at 10k DPS. Even without Minor Arcana it is better to toss a melee card onto the tank when you have no melee to put it on. If you have a co-healer and only Melee DPS then any ranged card is better tossed on the co-healer.

The reason why a low power boost like the Dancer standard step buff and the old AoE Balance buff were worthwhile was because despite only minorly boosting damage they did so over a long duration. AST could boost the duration so the entire party had 40 seconds of +5% damage and boost the top DPS to have 55 seconds of +5% damage. Dancer buffs themselves and their partner throughout the entire fight as they need to use Standard step on cooldown as an attack as much as a buff. The sheer duration is what makes the buff worthwhile the lower the strength goes.

Now the reason why the old DPS buff cards could be so strong and impactful was because there were utility cards mixed in as well. Which also meant the utility cards could be strong. Sure in optimized 8 man savage raids Bole was seen as useless because they only wanted AoE Balance, though that was not the only content and in all other content Bole was useful for a wide range of reasons. Ewer in optimized 8 man savage raid was not very useful aside from being an AoE burn, but in all the rest of the content it was useful because in 24 man raids or 8 man normal raids deaths were common and in 4 man dungeons gravity spam ate you MP like hell. Spire had the most niche use and was indeed the one mostly useless card, it needed a rework.

Overall yes the new cards are "reliable" in that they are generally useless for the given amount of busy work that you need to do. Their durations are too short for the strength of buff they give. As they lack utility cards to be counterbalanced against they cannot be permitted to be strong, as such they remain feeling impactless. They also made it just as frustrating if not more so, because while there was minor disappointment in not getting the card you wanted previously you are getting handed literally useless cards that feel worse to use if you have the wrong class configuration in the party. It is not amusing when the only person I can buff is the tank because the cards are pointless on every other person in the party.

I wasn't talking as a DPS, I was talking in general: cards go to whichever benefits the most, regardless of the role, that much I think we can easily agree on, because a damage increase is good regardless of the source - again, it's a matter of being more or less useful. Assuming normal cards being used on "correct" candidates: 10000 MCH gets 600. 8000 GNB gets 480. I'm not entirely sure this is how math works because cards don't increase linearly DPS in such a way (also buffs multiply etc.), but even in this case, damage is damage.

I can't agree or disagree on the buff being less visible or feeling less impactful than the older versions for the sole reason that I have no math to check - but if I remember correctly, the aim of the devs was to not make a party too reliant on damage buffs from Astro - so that could be the reason for undertuning this aspect in exchange for the "stability" of a damage buff instead of being at the mercy of RNG. Was that a good decision? Not sure, probably not, but then again I wasn't defending this part. However I do get the impression that the problem lies in wrong cards being far too weak, rather than "variety" being taken out of the equation.

[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.

[Violet_Galaxy]

Slightly off topic, but did they ever address how they are going to rework the lore behind the cards? I just think that's rather lazy of them to change the way the cards work but not actually change the card images. Anyway, what drew me to AST was the RNG aspect of the class which made it unpredictable and fun to me and it looks like that is gone for good. Sad panda I am. Even with the buffs, it's just a really clunky and boring class to play.

[Almostward]

Slightly off topic, but did they ever address how they are going to rework the lore behind the cards? I just think that's rather lazy of them to change the way the cards work but not actually change the card images. Anyway, what drew me to AST was the RNG aspect of the class which made it unpredictable and fun to me and it looks like that is gone for good. Sad panda I am. Even with the buffs, it's just a really clunky and boring class to play.

They said no changes are coming to Astro. So I'm guessing they gave up with the lore also.

[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

[Brandedblade]

Healer DPS is going to be worthless when the tank is doing wall to wall pulls and you spend far more time trying to heal them through all the damage they are taking and cannot spend any of that time DPSing yourself.

Geez, it's almost like AST cant single weave most of its cooldowns on its AoE nuke, and that one of its main ogcd heals also doesn't do AoE splash damage, and doesn't have a cooldown that expressly allows it to instant cast both its healing and dps spells.


Oh wait.

If MP was a non-issue in all content then why was Refresh a requirement? Why was refresh needed in all raid content? Oh, because it was always an issue despite the better gear. Especially in content where death was common or content that was optimized with it in mind.

Because to be blunt, MP regeneration and stacking worked differently in 4.0. Ewer wasnt bad because its effect was bad, but because it was tied to RNG and therefore an unreliable source of mana regen. Refresh and Mana Shift (which btw where used more to extend Foe's on a brd then to actually restore the party's mp) where guaranteed effects and therefore could be planned around the use of. Now mp is a flat static value and piety helps increase the regen rate, alongside the fact that Lucid now has a higher uptime.

Which is why if they want to stick with this path I say remove the cards entirely. If they want us to have reliable buffs then actually make them reliable. Remove the melee/range split and seals which only exists for the purpose of even having the cards to begin with. Make it so we got 1 ST buff button on a 30 sec cooldown, give us "divination" on that 120 sec cooldown, give us "sleeve draw" for resetting the ST buff and granting it extra charges. With all the extra buttons removed they could fill in those gaps with potentially extra buffs or fill in our weak points such as lack of secondary MP source.

Because people would get salty that their cards are gone. As much as the forum hates the cards as they are now they're still a system that adds an extra layer of uniqueness and monitoring to the class. God forbid the dev team try to keep the core aesthetic of the job intact and try to keep some level of the rng feel without making half of the effects niche at best and worthless at worse.

[KanameYuuki]

God forbid the dev team would respect its lore and core identity, cards are gone, the devs should at least had the courage and go all the way instead of that half made job.

People keep bringing, X card was great but not reliable then its "useless", well yeah, AST was unpredictable that's whole the idea, a literal Job based on RNG, on a game full of rotations and scripted fights AST was the only one with some leeway for free form and improvisation, god forbid there is something like that for players who enjoy it, you get a defense boost and need it then you use it, otherwise redraw, spread for later if you know a pull is coming, burn for RR or minor it, same spire same ewer. Now it has been completely sanitized, you don't even have to take the effort of getting 3 different seals with the new 5.05 change.

Fights are so boring I even started to count bosses auto attacks and casting the needed heal just to keep my mind focused on anything.

For AST like us who had learned and took decisions in all kind of different situations about when or how to use X card feel nothing but boredom looking at Blue = melee , purple = range.

And that was just the cards, we also have the loss of Time Dilatation and CO that gave even more strategy to the class, it was such a complete package.

[TankHunter678]

Geez, it's almost like AST cant single weave most of its cooldowns on its AoE nuke, and that one of its main ogcd heals also doesn't do AoE splash damage, and doesn't have a cooldown that expressly allows it to instant cast both its healing and dps spells.

Oh wait.

Yeah, I've dropped tanks trying to do that. Wall to wall pulls are a nasty business when you do not have top DPS that can burn things down quickly enough that the tank blowing all their cooldowns and the healer trying to keep them up do not run out of cooldowns before the mobs take the tank down. Even the crazy tank players I know all say that when they get an AST they pull carefully because AST wont be able to handle the wall to wall pulls even with them popping invulnerability skills.

Because to be blunt, MP regeneration and stacking worked differently in 4.0. Ewer wasnt bad because its effect was bad, but because it was tied to RNG and therefore an unreliable source of mana regen. Refresh and Mana Shift (which btw where used more to extend Foe's on a brd then to actually restore the party's mp) where guaranteed effects and therefore could be planned around the use of. Now mp is a flat static value and piety helps increase the regen rate, alongside the fact that Lucid now has a higher uptime.

Lucid has a higher uptime and MP issues remain, such that RDM had to get its entire ST rotation slashed in terms of costs because it was literally unsustainable and SMNs still complain about MP issues of their own. SCHs had to beg to get energy drain back so they did not enter a feast or famine situation in terms of MP. Noct AST is pretty much not viable due to its high MP costs and need for a secondary MP source as Lucid cannot keep up. It was not as much a problem in the past... because we had a secondary MP source: Ewer.

Because people would get salty that their cards are gone. As much as the forum hates the cards as they are now they're still a system that adds an extra layer of uniqueness and monitoring to the class. God forbid the dev team try to keep the core aesthetic of the job intact and try to keep some level of the rng feel without making half of the effects niche at best and worthless at worse.

Not any more complaints then what we have now. What we have now is just as bad on the lore front and worse then that in usability or reliability. What uniqueness they had was stripped away for simplification. With less monitoring needed then other classes need for their gauges.

And guess what? The devs killed the core aesthetic of the job which is tied as much into the lore or the cards, effects of the cards, and feel as it is the pretty graphics. They seriously could make that one button ST buff ability use the same animation we have now using a randomized card appearance and nothing would change. You just would not have to deal with the clunky frustrating system that one single card being all the cards produced.

[KanameYuuki]

And for the people who think this is just a small group of us upset, I would love if you check the JP side, so many first time posters going there to either express their disappointment or outright say they will quit AST altogether, with a ton of likes on each post too.