Goodbye Astro

[Almostward]

No, you turned into balance fishers because every other card was worse than it.

This isn't a hard concept.

Never fished for balance. I made what I draw work. That was the magic of Astro. You either decided to accept your fate or fight it, but you couldn't deny it......sad that those lines are nothing now.

To think I was hyped to see the new astro moves. To think I once mained it, and enjoyed it. Wish i knew so i could have accepted my role as Whm....cause that's what I'm stuck as.

[Billythepancake]

It is not gimped at all and you do not pay for it in healing options. AST's healing is very strong following the changes in patch 5.05. As I've said before, the healers are pretty well balanced right now and AST is just as strong as SCH/WHM. It will take a while for people to realize this, but it will happen.

"Strong and balanced" will not make people want to play a class. SB MCH was "strong and balanced" but it was the least played class of the expansion because it felt like trash to play, sounds familiar doesnt it?

[Mesarthim]

It is not gimped at all and you do not pay for it in healing options. AST's healing is very strong following the changes in patch 5.05. As I've said before, the healers are pretty well balanced right now and AST is just as strong as SCH/WHM. It will take a while for people to realize this, but it will happen.

We're overflowing with threads saying "Goodbye Astro", "AST is dead", etc... that discourage people for playing it. But soon enough some encouraging posts will surface. Such as the E4S noct AST solo heal.

As for doing more for the same effect ... Well ... Haven't people been complaining incessantly that there's nothing to do? You'd expect AST to be the darling of the community right now.

What was your favorite phrase? Get over it? You really seem to be banking on this "it will happen. It will take time. My opinion is already true and everyone is wrong and slow to realize." Here's the thing, the old system wasn't as busted as you seem to be claiming it was. At worst spire needed an adjustment and heaven forbid maybe balance into something else. Now we effectively have one of the clunkiest openers and a lot of busywork for what seems to be little payoff. Patch 5.05 fixed sleeve draw feeling god awful as well as "most" healing potencies (Square seems to have missed CU) but the complaints aren't about how well the class heals.

[LariaKirin]

"Strong and balanced" will not make people want to play a class. SB MCH was "strong and balanced" but it was the least played class of the expansion because it felt like trash to play, sounds familiar doesnt it?

Two friends have switched to playing AST. I am now way more inclined to play AST. Yes, these are anecdotes, but none of us would have even considered it in 5.0. Are you willing to claim that the proportion of AST players will not increase at all in the following weeks?

What was your favorite phrase? Get over it? You really seem to be banking on this "it will happen. It will take time. My opinion is already true and everyone is wrong and slow to realize." Here's the thing, the old system wasn't as busted as you seem to be claiming it was. At worst spire needed an adjustment and heaven forbid maybe balance into something else. Now we effectively have one of the clunkiest openers and a lot of busywork for what seems to be little payoff. Patch 5.05 fixed sleeve draw feeling god awful as well as "most" healing potencies (Square seems to have missed CU) but the complaints aren't about how well the class heals.

AST being stronger now in both healing and DPS is not a matter of opinion. All you need to do is look at 5.0, then look at 5.05 and then be able to understand some numbers.

Do you think that AST being extremely weak in terms of healing and DPS had nothing to do with the low proportion of AST players?
Do you think that the cards and the opener are the only reason AST was not being played in 5.0?

If the answer to these is no, then you should be able to understand why I think the AST population will increase and why I'm optimistic about AST's future.

[Billythepancake]

Two friends have switched to playing AST. I am now way more inclined to play AST. Yes, these are anecdotes, but none of us would have even considered it in 5.0. Are you willing to claim that the proportion of AST players will not increase at all in the following weeks?



AST being stronger now in both healing and DPS is not a matter of opinion. All you need to do is look at 5.0, then look at 5.05 and then be able to understand some numbers.

Do you think that AST being extremely weak in terms of healing and DPS had nothing to do with the low proportion of AST players?
Do you think that the cards and the opener are the only reason AST was not being played in 5.0?

If the answer to these is no, then you should be able to understand why I think the AST population will increase and why I'm optimistic about AST's future.

It will increase, sure, but I dont believe for 1 second that it'll be nearly as popular as it was in SB. I have no doubt if AST stays the way it is, it'll be the MCH of this expac.

[Almostward]

Funny. You say you have 2 freinds who will now play astro and like it, but all over in the game I've seen a lot who hate it or think refuse to play it cause of how it feels. Guess what. It means nothing that some of your freinds will play it, nor when I find those many who dont because we dont know the statistics.

Astro still has a lot of issues, and I only hope SE will address these for us all.

[Nimloth]

I do wonder if a lot of what we liked about the old card system was the fact that the RNG meant you couldn't optimize it. You had to improvise, and surf it, and lots of folks couldn't deal with that and turned into Balance fishers.

RNG bad, RNG horrible! How come so many people took up Dancer, then? It got MCH's proc RNG, and with nothing to help buffer the chances. Is it because they're able to go with the flow?

When I mentioned optimization it was in the sense of clipping GCDs, the goal in a raid environment is to get out as many GCDs out as possible. You mention that you couldn't optimize the old system due to RNG and that you had to learn how to deal with the cards you were given, that is a skill ceiling; It's similar to how a DPS who do not properly learn their rotation will deal less damage. So yes, you had to deal with what you were given to be a good AST, that was part of learning the class. There was always the option to play other healers if the card system was too difficult for someone.

As for your argument about why people took up Dancer, I don't know the answer and you don't either. This is a bad faith argument because people can take-up classes for a multitude of various reasons and discussing Dancer isn't really part of this thread. Also, its RNG elements are entirely different from AST and it's not a healer.

That being said, the old system had flaws, I'm not going to deny that. However, the development team made the decision to throw the baby out with the bathwater and now we have a worse system in place. The current system requires you to still fish for cards, albeit you are fishing for a seal. SE saw that fishing was going to be a problem and gave us three re-draws to deal with it, but in doing so made it where we spend more oGCDs fishing for a seal in an expansion where they gave us even more oGCD heals. In addition, manually targeting people every single time for every single card is exhausting in a raid environment. Next, the re-design of Sleeve Draw is terrible since you still have to resolve three oGCDs at a minimum before draw comes off cooldown. This is compounded by the fact that you are single targeting every person for each card that is produced by Sleeve Draw. AST is no longer a difficult class to play because of its skill ceiling, it's a difficult class to play because it's mechanically difficult to work with due to poor design.

[nalol]

No, you turned into balance fishers because every other card was worse than it.

This isn't a hard concept.

u could still make use of others. Crit onks or bards, arrow to blm .. ewer could be usefull on yourself or RR .. same for spear ... bole had it use ... but was it really a bad thing that some cards were better than others ? when u could still RR or change it to lady/lord ?

plus the satisfaction when u had a balance on the group. now u don't get the satisfation .. even getting 3 different seals for divination doesn't feel as satisfying.

I don't say the card system didn't need some changes ... but I prefered old system to new one.


also the AST feels way to busy compared to H and ASt .. so maybe would have been a better idea to add a tiny bit more complexity to those classes also while toning a bit down (compared to now) the AST complexity ... or busyness ... of the class

[CelestialHealer]

I like current Astro more than I thought I would.. I'm glad I gave it a chance past 71. Once I adapted how I was playing it and managing my MP more responsibly, I started to really enjoy it again and now I prefer it to my WHM because the AST aesthetic has always been close to my heart.

I just wish that it weren't so painfully slow to solo content as an AST compared to WHM.. Even with a lady of crowns on myself, it feels overly-slow to sand a single mob down. AST deserves some sort of assize-adjacent ability.

[TankHunter678]

I like current Astro more than I thought I would.. I'm glad I gave it a chance past 71. Once I adapted how I was playing it and managing my MP more responsibly, I started to really enjoy it again and now I prefer it to my WHM because the AST aesthetic has always been close to my heart.

I just wish that it weren't so painfully slow to solo content as an AST compared to WHM.. Even with a lady of crowns on myself, it feels overly-slow to sand a single mob down. AST deserves some sort of assize-adjacent ability.

The problem AST has is that in terms of pDPS potency you are only slightly better then a level 54 SCH, by 50 total potency on the dot. Also our version of an oGCD with added damage like Assize... is Earthly Star. Which saw its damage potency nerfed.