Patch 5.05 Astrologian is still frustrating, stressful, and disappointing

[Wawachume]

RE: Divination prep -
I believe this was intentional to prevent the "pre-loading" of cards prior to starting a fight. Sure, maybe you got lucky with a Balance + Ewer/Spire and were good to go within 60s, or maybe you sat there cursing RNG for 5 minutes as the game refused to give you anything but Boles. But either way, you would wait, because having that expanded Balance in your pocket at the beginning was just too good. They did the same thing with SCH aetherflow by making it useless out of combat (see also: WAR Infuriate). SE doesn't want us "prepping" like that anymore, and I can see where they're coming from. It sucked knowing that with a SCH in the group you had a full minute wait time before you could restart a fight, and likewise with AST you could sit there for several minutes before you would actual start a fight, only to do it again later if there was a wipe. But even doing it just once was still boring and unfun, on top of giving AST a major advantage over the other healers.
Now, everyone's on the same equal footing when they start. Everyone needs to wait for combat to start before generating their respective resources.

My problem with the decision is that it seems to have been made exclusively with raids in mind, without considering other content. Outside of savage raids, I'm not sure anyone even knows what an "opener" is, let alone makes the group wait while they prepare the perfect one. Meanwhile it's annoying in dungeons, to have to deliberately do something to "get yourself in combat", on every single trash pack, before you can start doing your job.

On the other hand, I'm definitely not saying the problem should have been ignored just because most people weren't running into it---it certainly sounds really irritating to me. I'd have just preferred an alternative solution, like "all secondary resources set to zero when pulling a raid boss" or something.

[Quor]

My problem with the decision is that it seems to have been made exclusively with raids in mind, without considering other content. Outside of savage raids, I'm not sure anyone even knows what an "opener" is, let alone makes the group wait while they prepare the perfect one. Meanwhile it's annoying in dungeons, to have to deliberately do something to "get yourself in combat", on every single trash pack, before you can start doing your job.

On the other hand, I'm definitely not saying the problem should have been ignored just because most people weren't running into it---it certainly sounds really irritating to me. I'd have just preferred an alternative solution, like "all secondary resources set to zero when pulling a raid boss" or something.

On the one hand, I sympathize with you, but on the other, I don't. I don't say this to be cheeky, it's just that over the long view, all SE did was take SMN/SCH/AST and bring them in line with every other job. No one else can generate non-MP resources outside of combat, and now SMN/SCH/AST are on equal footing with everyone else. Because let's be honest here; being able to prep cards (and aetherflow stacks) was an outright advantage.
As for your suggestion, I get where you're coming from, but practically it's just going to create a lot of confusion. While it'd be nice not to worry about it in a non-8-man environment, truth be told no one is losing sleep over non-optimal 4-mans. If anything, disabling the "Play" button until the AST is in combat will solve the issue just as well; can't waste a card if you can't use it.