Astrologian changes 6.0

[AnotherPerson]

I have no problem with rng but why the hell can I only redraw once per card and then they remove sleeve draw also.

Because people wanted to "draw and deal with what you have, and then adjust if you don't have the thing you need," like old Stormblood AST while others wanted guaranteed DPS buffs and more controlled RNG. The randomness of the RNG was a very popular reason to why people played AST.

This is taken very literally. DPS card buffs stay, divination gets changed, so this is always good for guaranteeing rDPS increase.

The AST 'flavor' with the cards is basically this RNG buff with Astrodyne. The additional DPS buffs from Astrodyne would be great, but not mandatory. It's a lot better than say, for example, having the effects of damage mitigation tied to the effect that you can't guarantee drawing.

While there are certainly better ways to implement the RNG flavor, this is still pretty good to have. Astrodyne will also always guarantee MP regeneration, so there's no problems with MP even if your RNG is terrible. Just think of Astrodyne as RNG DPS procs like other jobs, except on a longer duration.

[Gemina]

They basically gave me everything I asked for, and now the world is mine. Mine!



seriously though, I am so effin stoked for AST!

[Absurdity]

Because people wanted to "draw and deal with what you have, and then adjust if you don't have the thing you need," like old Stormblood AST while others wanted guaranteed DPS buffs and more controlled RNG. The randomness of the RNG was a very popular reason to why people played AST.

This is taken very literally. DPS card buffs stay, divination gets changed, so this is always good for guaranteeing rDPS increase.

The AST 'flavor' with the cards is basically this RNG buff with Astrodyne. The additional DPS buffs from Astrodyne would be great, but not mandatory. It's a lot better than say, for example, having the effects of damage mitigation tied to the effect that you can't guarantee drawing.

While there are certainly better ways to implement the RNG flavor, this is still pretty good to have. Astrodyne will also always guarantee MP regeneration, so there's no problems with MP even if your RNG is terrible. Just think of Astrodyne as RNG DPS procs like other jobs, except on a longer duration.

It would've been so easy to avoid this nonsense by simply not attaching dps to the rng factor, I really don't know why SE doesn't get it.

[Mortex]

Because people wanted to "draw and deal with what you have, and then adjust if you don't have the thing you need," like old Stormblood AST while others wanted guaranteed DPS buffs and more controlled RNG. The randomness of the RNG was a very popular reason to why people played AST.

This is taken very literally. DPS card buffs stay, divination gets changed, so this is always good for guaranteeing rDPS increase.

The AST 'flavor' with the cards is basically this RNG buff with Astrodyne. The additional DPS buffs from Astrodyne would be great, but not mandatory. It's a lot better than say, for example, having the effects of damage mitigation tied to the effect that you can't guarantee drawing.

While there are certainly better ways to implement the RNG flavor, this is still pretty good to have. Astrodyne will also always guarantee MP regeneration, so there's no problems with MP even if your RNG is terrible. Just think of Astrodyne as RNG DPS procs like other jobs, except on a longer duration.

Yes but even stormblood astro had more options what to do with the cards. Now it’s single redraw atleast in stormblood I could royal road the card if it was decent or had king or queen. Now it’s draw get a bad seal then redraw once and still a bad seal. Also astro has no mana problem expect if the entire party dies 5 times or so. Having so many ogcd heals on a minute cd make him still the most mana efficient heal in the game.

[Sylvain]

But that was my point. It really doesn't. You will almost invariably always want Lord of Crowns as it is always useful. While Lady of Crowns is only useful when there is some significant healing to do. Especially since Lord of Crowns IS a dps gain. It adds to Astrologian's dps, its an oGCD you can weave into your casts for a 250 potency gain.

Indeed, I agree it is not much. And the RNG definitely offsets the value for both. Maybe it's not valuable enough to make a dent, but it is still more useful than healing. Healing doesn't make the fight finish faster. Healing can be completely wasted and add nothing to a team if it doesn't save anyone and for that AST has a lot of much more consistent tools.

It's a choice between always free useful damage (which can be augmented in Divination or Astrodyne windows, increasing its value.) and free very situational healing. This isn't really choice.

Well it all depends on the encounter and your gear regarding that encounter.
If you can heal through everything solely with ogcd then yes the Lord is better but that's usually only true when you overgear the fight or have it already down and had time to figure out the best ogcd rotation with your coheal. Especially during prog a 400potency aoe heal can be quite nice.
On day1 even E9S was hardly healable without gcd heal and by the time you figured it she was usually already dead.

200 damage potency on an average of 120s is like so weak I don't even see why people care about that.
Over the course of an entire fight this will result in 2-4 malefic depending on the RNG something that shouldn't be needed for a dps check. And again, if it is then it would probably only be on 4th floor week one and usually when you do the 4th floor on week one you generally do use a few gcd heal there a there and if you have to then the lady is better than the lord because it heals more than a helios so if 3 lady can replace 3 helios then that's 3 malefic cast instead which is a net benefit.
(and yeah ofc once you overpower the fight well... at this point it only matter if you do speed run or want that 99+% perf)

[Liam_Harper]

I think RNG is fine if the dice roll happens frequently enough to somewhat balance itself out. RNG in WoW for example worked back when I played because there was so much of it going on at the same time, you would roll the dice with almost every cast/ability. And this is also why I think Direct Hit and Crit are fine the way they are, it's a dice roll with every ability.

What is not okay is a single coin flip every 30 seconds, especially in a game like XIV where dps reigns supreme.

Absolutely. DNC rng works for example because your procs are frequent enough that it averages out. Even so, they're smoothing out Espirit because it was a little much.

It's worse than 30 seconds, Minor Arcana is a 60 second cooldown now. With that small a number of "procs" it's quite possible that in an 8 minute fight you'll get 1500 potency one pull, then 500 on the next.

Because people wanted to "draw and deal with what you have, and then adjust if you don't have the thing you need,"

"Adjust" to what? This is what I mean by players deluding themselves there's a choice here. You just press it on cooldown and it either does damage or overheals, then you pretend you made a choice and adapted and you're a great player. Lady isn't a bad heal, it's practically an Indom, but no good player will plan around a heal that rng might choose not to give you for 4-5 minutes. And AST is all about heal planning and mapping your cd's.

[AnotherPerson]

It would've been so easy to avoid this nonsense by simply not attaching dps to the rng factor, I really don't know why SE doesn't get it.

So what do you attach to the RNG factor? Healing? Defensive buffs? That brings back to the first point - you still get people still complaining "we can't rely on random utility in high-end content!" and "Extra DPS buffs are always preferred!" which ran rampant in the previous AST threads.

Yes but even stormblood astro had more options what to do with the cards. Now it’s single redraw atleast in stormblood I could royal road the card if it was decent or had king or queen. Now it’s draw get a bad seal then redraw once and still a bad seal. Also astro has no mana problem expect if the entire party dies 5 times or so. Having so many ogcd heals on a minute cd make him still the most mana efficient heal in the game.

Yeah, I agree it's kind of plain because there's not a lot of flexibility in options. Currently, Astro has no MP problem because 5.3 patch overtuned our MP by reducing MP cost of all skills and gave us a lot more MP regen on Draw (8% per 30 secs, sleeve draw giving another 8%).

If anything, MP economy of AST is still roughly the same as it is in 5.5, but the MP gain just moved around a bit. Draw is now 5% MP per 30 secs, and Minor Arcana no longer gives MP in exchange for Astrodyne guaranteeing MP regen every 90 secs, with generally higher odds to get 2 signs and a faster recast speed on Malefic.

"Adjust" to what? This is what I mean by players deluding themselves there's a choice here. You just press it on cooldown and it either does damage or overheals, then you pretend you made a choice and adapted and you're a great player. Lady isn't a bad heal, it's practically an Indom, but no good player will plan around a heal that rng might choose not to give you for 4-5 minutes. And AST is all about heal planning and mapping your cd's.

Referring to Draw's 'adjust' with redraw only having one charge per draw for Astrodyne sign, so you gotta deal with what signs you get. Even then, it's not much of an adjustment since Astrodyne is basically a DPS buff beyond 1 sign, compared to AST Stormblood iteration's draw - where cards have a lot more flavor.

As for Minor Arcana, Yeah, players won't rely on RNG heals in a controlled environment. I agree that it's currently an issue where you can't control whether you get Lord or Lady unless there's a guarantee to get the other in the next Minor Arcana use. Even if there's a guarantee, there's no charge system for Minor Arcana, so you would want to use it on cooldown to get more Lord of Crowns due to sharing a DPS resource. As it stands, Lady of Crowns's usage is more likely used in DF for casual content in case everything goes radically wrong and the healer needs to adjust their healing strategy on the fly after dying due to the stat penalty.

[IceBlueNinja]

Am confused for the people who do not sound happy about endwalker card system, are you guys saying you would prefer stormblood system back(which I love the best and would not mind) or this current boring shadow bringers system be kept and dont want end walker card system?

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Am confused for the people who do not sound happy about endwalker card system, are you guys saying you would prefer stormblood system back(which I love the best and would not mind) or this current boring shadow bringers system be kept and dont want end walker card system?

Personally I'm quite happy because the RNG is tied to only their personal buff, & their personal DPS is already the lowest amongst all jobs in game. At that point anything else is just a bonus to my taste. Full powered Divination having small chance to not be at their full potential irks me because AST has that dedicated party buffer image in my fantasy; having RNG simply say "No" to my face from doing the very thing I'm supposed to doesn't leave a good taste to me. If I'm screwed, I want to know at least that it's my own error so I can look up and see where had it gone wrong instead of a coin flip. At least in EW I can do that more consistently than ever. If there's any change I'd like to see, I wish the arcana storage system operates in LIFO instead of FIFO rule: First two seal stays until Astrodyne is fired and cannot be deleted.

Lord & Lady.. is a bit meh, but I don't dislike it either. It's basically extra 250p gain or additional heal that I will always prioritize to heal any damage in the next 60s, if any. It does looks fun to use in AoE situation in conjunction with Macrocosmos too, it excites me to give it a try in upcoming dungeon big pulls.

Otherwise, everything else is up in the air and/or until EW official release. Time will tell I guess.

[rewd]

Let me clarify since you seem to fail to understand how this game is designed. Your ability to do your job properly as an AST with this design is entirely RNG dependent. Using your basic dps abilities is the bare minimum. AST has tools that give it large boosts of damage which will always be beneficial for your team, but those tools have more or less a 50% chance to fail.

Being a buff class does not automatically make it an inconsistent class. The current design of minor arcana and draw/astrodyne do make it inconsistent. If you like inconsistencies for the sake of it, then good for you. I’m not trying to change your opinion. Just reiterating that the class design is objectively flawed and hope they fix it for the sake of players who want their hard work to be paid off consistently.

Instead of practicing and improving on a class like AST where I’m destined to fail 50% of the time, I could just play sage whose damage is guaranteed every pull. I will always be benefiting my team to my jobs fullest extent, not barred by pointless coin flips.

This is the second time in a row that you treat your interlocutor as an idiot that has no idea how healing and the game work, while you act like you are aware of the secrets of the universe. I know it's an alluring option when you have weak arguments, but it's also very obnoxious.

That being said, no. AST needs to do three things: damage, healing and party buffs. None of this is - and I'm quoting you - entirely RNG dependent. Not even close. Now that we - hopefully - made this clear and got rid of hyperboles, we can move on.

To address your question from your previous comment: why would anyone play AST over WHM? Because they like AST more. And because, unless balance is very off (and in this case, they will fix it), AST's basic damage spells, card and divination will, more or less, match WHM's personal damage. Astrodyne and Lord would very likely make AST deal more damage than a WHM if you have perfect RNG, but guess what: it's RNG. It's inconsistent. You can't replicate it realiably. It doesn't matter.


No, the job is not objectively flawed. Your lack of awareness is also so astonishing.
Let me get this straight: some people enjoy the AST changes, some don't. These AST changes make the job more different compared to the rest of the healers. You don't like the job and call it objectively flawed.
Your solution: scrap what makes AST different and make it similar to the rest, so one portion of the playerbase (=me) can be happy. So everyone that wants AST to change can play AST or - like you said - SGE and WHM. Everyone that wants to play EW's AST in its current form can instead play... Ehm... What can they play?
Sounds very healthy and not egoistic at all to me.