Question for those who didn't pick up AST til 5.0 or after.

[Seraphor]

I played AST in Stormblood, and honestly think it's better now.
Yes there's some variety missing from the card effects, but the system is way better tuned and streamlined now, especially with a regular full party damage buff and the recent sleeve draw changes.
If there was a way to bring back some variety without going completely back to the old system and undoing the progress made this expansion that'd be great, but frankly, having Ewer and Bole's old effects just didn't work, and the less said about Spire the better.

Also, in light in the WHM and SCH changes with 5.0, taking all healers at their current form and disregarding what any of them might have been in the past, AST is by far the most fun healer to play and the only healer with a more indepth dps rotation, given that the cards are a dps contribution.

[Valkyrie_]

I started healing savage in Shadowbringers, and i have a love/hate relationship with the class.

On one hand, compared to WHM and SCH, AST is waaaaay more fun, enjoyable and complex. Both dps wise and healing.

On the other hand, the cards are super boring in their own way, it is fun that you have to sort through different party members and give them cards(especially on controller), but the cards themselves all doing the same thing sucks, and is boring and bland.

I never played old AST in savage stuff because i was scared of the healer stress, but i played the class casually, and my god back then it was so great. Royal road and having cards not all be the Balance was super fun. Along with funky unique stuff like time dilation.

But of course it had to be changed because the top 0.00001% of L33T ASTmeta mains wanted min/maxing and didn't like fishing for balance.
So to cater to them, now every card AST has is balance...and we have to fish for seals instead.

Boy it sure is fun getting the same seal 4 times in a row, especially in a group with all the same type of dps and a have to settle for 3% buff instead of 6%, i can't imagine why some old AST mains would be angry.

But yeah, ultimately i do adore the class, i tried leaving it, but i can't stay away. I think it's just healing in general is so much more fun to me than tank/dps, mostly due to the randomness of people making mistakes and taking damage.

[Kabooa]

I have played it minimally in all expansions. I gave it more of a shot in Shadowbringers primarily because of the ill review it had, and it helps to play something before you can have some feedback on ways to improve it.

I didn't really care about losing the card variety. There was a clear hierarchy and once your mental flowchart was established, it killed the illusion of choice for them, as well as knowing that nothing will ever require the cards because you'll never be guaranteed to have them. There were some places where having the 90s or 30% bole was good clean meme fun, but it all devolved into balance, or not-as-good-as-balance.

At the start of Shadowbringers it was weak, or rather while leveling it felt weak. This was prior to the potency buffs it received, but during the leveling process I either had the squishiest tanks alive, or I was doing something severely wrong. This was alleviated as more abilities were gained, but Holminster after leveling White Mage was rough.

The loss of time extenders was kind of meh, but without the fundamental differences in the cards, I didn't miss them that much. Sleeve Draw was annoying, and divination was weak.

Horoscope is the kind of ability we need more of, but in a more flexible and expanded way. More spell interactions will be the way forward for healers. If you only get between two and five abilities within one part of the kit, then they need to have interactions with each other and other parts of the kit.

Example: Earthly Star already creates an entity. Make it targetable, and let it be loaded with single target spells. This is a basic concept and can be expanded in a number of ways.

The dual sect set up was minimized in importance as more cross-sect abilities were added. This is a good change, but also a half measure. It would not surprise me if sects were gone next expansion and their effects baked into the healing kit - and I'd prefer this. No one wants to be the third wheel.

C+.

[Corbeau]

Do you enjoy it?

No. I do not.

[Tlamila]

I love it.
I actually first tried it in SB, but the cards mess discouraged me from actually even levelling it, so it ended up being one of my last classes to be levelled.
I mained WHM for a long time but dropped it in ShB as I didn't like it anymore, I thought it was a problem with the new state of healers in general but AST changed everything and got me back to healing after a hiatus from it. SCH almost got me as well, but I found at some point it gets clunky and disconnected.
Current AST is really fun. You never get bored with cards and all, buffing people in general feels great as this game doesn't have actual support classes it has great mobility, and in general the way it works requires some planning which is satisfying when you get it right (ex. star timing). And the current state of cards make it so that you don't have to focus too hard on them too much and get distracted from actual healing. Plus come on, we're all made of stars.

[SWB]

My issue with astro isnt with the cards at all, the old cards were fun, but they were changed for understandable reasons.

My issue with astro is the same as all healers in the game. There's not enough required healing in the game unless you're doing end game raiding(even then not really since theres two healers), so playing a healer always ends up just pressing your one dps button, And healing with off globals when needed, which I find really boring as I can do it, and the required healing with one hand, and not really feel engaged or required.

Hopefully healing gets reworked next expansion, or healers get interesting dps rotations to make the role better.

[Absurdity]

The loss of time extenders was kind of meh, but without the fundamental differences in the cards, I didn't miss them that much. Sleeve Draw was annoying, and divination was weak.

I didn't care one bit about the loss of extending spread balance.

What I did care about was the other things you could do with Time Dilation and old Celestial Opposition, like extending Aspected Benefit on the tank to turn it into the most powerful heal in the entire game (~2400 potency), extending Collective Unconscious to turn it into a 1200 potency raid-wide heal, extending your Lucid Dreaming and Lightspeed by 10 seconds or extending the timer of Earthly Star by 10 seconds if you misjudged the timing of the next raid-wide damage. You know, fun and useful interactions between abilities in your healing kit...


I think in casual play even Bole was quite useful. Ever had one of those duty finder tanks that couldn't use a defensive cooldown even if their life depended on it and instead expects you to just heal through their binary health bar? Well no worries, with Bole you can just do their job for them!

[Marxam]

"It functions in ShB", is probably the best thing I can say about it. There's nothing wrong or right about the job currently and it performs its job well and removes most of the randomness of drawing a desired card. It is also much more easier to understand for newer players which ultimately is a good thing, given FFXIV's shift towards casual and RP. However I'm sure some jobs like BLM are probably raging at what AST used to be able to do with royal road and the arrow card and how BLM are aiming to break 4k sps, and that's one example.

[Absurdity]

"It functions in ShB", is probably the best thing I can say about it. There's nothing wrong or right about the job currently and it performs its job well and removes most of the randomness of drawing a desired card. It is also much more easier to understand for newer players which ultimately is a good thing, given FFXIV's shift towards casual and RP. However I'm sure some jobs like BLM are probably raging at what AST used to be able to do with royal road and the arrow card and how BLM are aiming to break 4k sps, and that's one example.

The thing I don't really get is why mmo devs always think that casual = braindead easy. Sorry but I would find that insulting. A casual player in my definition just means that they do not have the time or simply don't want to invest 6+ hours every day into a game, they want to play it "casually". This doesn't mean that they're the absolute lowest common denominator, someone so inept that they can't press more than 2 buttons.

No, casual players could just as easily be some of the best players, arguably even more so since they can potentially reach the same level of skill with less time invested.

And no, spending 12 hours in Limsa and "totally not having time to learn your job" does not make you a casual player, you're basically living in the game at that point, just too lazy to improve.

[Lastelli]

"It functions in ShB", is probably the best thing I can say about it. There's nothing wrong or right about the job currently and it performs its job well and removes most of the randomness of drawing a desired card. It is also much more easier to understand for newer players which ultimately is a good thing, given FFXIV's shift towards casual and RP. However I'm sure some jobs like BLM are probably raging at what AST used to be able to do with royal road and the arrow card and how BLM are aiming to break 4k sps, and that's one example.

BLM don't give a damn about the loss of the old arrow effect. They know that balance was overall a superior card and that no decent astro would try to fish an arrow just for them.
Also the previous card system was just as easy as the current one. You had a very well defined priority system and if rng didn't favor you, you simply settled for the second best or third best alternative.