What are the AST changes that everyone wants, realistically speaking.

[Ceasaria]

SB AST with adjustements to fit the current gameplay and combat.

[HyoMinPark]

The news of the changes to be made to AST and DRG being postponed has been met with some mixed reviews. While DRG mains are thrilled, since DRG is in a good spot, AST players are a bit miffed.

While we can expect some minor changes here and there, I'm curious what AST players want in terms of changes. But on a realistic level. Its obvious that the seal system is a bit of a bust, but I think it's safe to say the card system might not change all that much from it's current iteration. So what else needs to change to make AST better?

Well, realistically speaking for me, I’d have them lessen the amount of finger gymnastics that happens during buff windows. This would have the added benefit of allowing Lightspeed to function as a movement tool, which was one of its previous uses before it was locked into all the card-slinging required during the opener and any buff windows. I’d also have them consolidate Draw/Play and Minor Arcana/Crown Play into a single button (this frees up two buttons on a very bloated job); and I would ask for Redraw to be given back its three charges again. To ease on more button bloat, Synastry could probably be removed and AST be no worse for wear without it. Also, Undraw is useless. I cannot think of a single instance where you’d want to Undraw a card, since the Seals + Astrodyne buff is so miniscule, it doesn’t matter if you get all 3 or not.

I don’t think it would be realistic, but I would also ask for Astrodyne to be deleted, and to return Divination to its original design if the desire is to keep the Seal system relevant in some way. I guess this would be a hopeful/slightly unrealistic change. I’d also ask for Minor Arcana to just be deleted entirely. It made more sense to me back in SB where it served as a “useless card dump” back when you didn’t want to upset your current Spread or Royal Road. Even ShB Minor Arcana made more sense, since you wouldn’t want to mess up your Seals for Divination. Now, it is just a “Get Lord or cry” button. AST has too many healing tools for Lady to be considered useful now (especially since healing requirements in most content is extremely low).

Pipe dream changes would be to just bring back varied card effects, Spread, and Royal Road while attempting to fix the issue with Balance being king, Spire being useless, and overall power creep. Adding in a system that allows you to hold a utility card and a damage card might help. Old Arrow might not work, since so many jobs dislike skill speed, but I miss the old system terribly still. Bringing back Time Dilation and COpp extending buffs/HoTs would also be nice. But I am very much aware that this is a pipe dream.
Even just bringing back Royal Road and keeping all the cards as 3%/6% buffs would be fine… I miss doing AOE Royal Roads, or Extending or Enhancing a card for a party member during a buff window.

[Gemina]

Still getting it to 90, but so far the changes I would like haven't changed at all for the longest time. I've had these requests since SB into ShB:

Remove Redraw
Remove Undraw
Remove Minor Arcana
Place Draw and Play on the GCD (damage returned with Divination)
Divination does damage based on seals (this came with ShB) Primary target damage soak w/ AoE fall off. *worse case on single target is base damage + .02%

*EW changes crossed a lot off of this list that I did not mention such as the removal of Sleeve Draw.

After EW
Remove Astrodyne or make THIS skill a buff, and return Divination to my suggestion above.
If seals are to remain, they need to be fixed to reflect the true odds. Three of the same seal is much harder to get than one of each, and should return the highest damage from Divination. Without redraw and undraw, the AST has no power over the RNG, which is a boon, not a bane. No matter what, you get base damage + .02%. And considering this is 6 GCDs worth of damage, that attack is going to hit hard. RNG will determine if it is higher.

All of these changes reduce ASTs current APM significantly.

[GoatOfWar]

More damage buttons, but that goes for all healers.

[Valmaxian]

Since the card system is so integral to ASTs job identity, I think its important for the Devs to take notes from the jobs that have effective mini games built into their kits. For example, Ninja and Dancer - both the mudra system and Tech/Standard steps reward the player for completing the mini game, and are impactful enough to make the execution time worthwhile. My issue with Draw is that the time we take to Draw and play a card, even quickly, feels...ok, but not as impactful as when we had Royal Road. That system rewarded us for effective card management, and allowed flexibility. I doubt they will go back to that system, but I, for one don't want frequent 1-card minimal impact Draws. Make the mini game MATTER. Perhaps using Draw could not only provide a card to play (preferably AoE in all cases), but would also grant an Astrodyne-like effect to the AST. Increase the CD on Draw. I'm somewhat ambivalent to the seal system they introduced, but it could still be useful - perhaps we still generate seals, but can't control them - remove shuffle. What we get is what Fate gives us. But accruing seals will simply increase our personal DPS by perhaps 4, 8, or 12% depending on seals accrued. Our DPS is low enough. Its not going to break the job.

[Ylendale]

- Bring back more variety on cards effect
- Bring back Time Magic spells (after all AST is suppose to be a Time Mage), it will be cool if we can extend buff for example
- Remove the seal system, if it's going to stay make it matter for example if we get three different seal it's unlock a spell, two different an another spell and all the same an other spell (the spell could be damage, buff or heal)
I am both excited and worried about AST rework it could turn out to be awesome or a complete disaster if the dev simplified too much the job i don't want a WHM 2.0
Let's see what minor change they will do for 6.2 maybe it could give us a hint for what they want to do for AST in 7.0

[Aelin_Ashryver]

I'm just pissed they are delaying the rework to 7.0 because samurai's cried. I hate astro atm and it was my main for years. You play the piano and play internal dps calculator with each card for the lowest dps of every healer and only in the top .1% of cases does that really change. It's a whole lot of effort for no reward it feels like. Now I need to wait to 7.0 for my favourite job to have some HOPE of being playable again. I finally dropped healing entirely, I am playing dps this next coming savage tier.

I was looking forward to the revamp, at least I would know sooner than later if the job is to be permanently in the grave for me or not.

I like astro being busy compared to other healers, I liked the old sleeve draw and I liked having 3 redraws. Yet somehow this expansion it feels turbo speed but I am not feeling the reward at all. Astrodyne feels awful cause I can almost never get three seals, I don't care how little of a dmg boost it is. It feels like garbage to me.
I would like the lost time dilation effects back, I want the stun back on celestial op.
Draw and play can be one button, same for drawing and playing the minor arcana. Personally preferred changing unwanted cards to arcana than the 50/50 of lord and lady we have now. I enjoyed buffing up cards too back in SB.

SB was my fave astro, shb left me furious as we lost what I felt made astro unique, the card variety and manipulation of buffs/hots. EW just killed the job for me entirely.

The irony of they made so many changes to make the job 'slower' because people could not deal with the speed of throwing out cards etc and now in EW it's back to being too busy for the people they changed things for to begin with.

[Valmaxian]

I'm just pissed they are delaying the rework to 7.0 because samurai's cried. I hate astro atm and it was my main for years. You play the piano and play internal dps calculator with each card for the lowest dps of every healer and only in the top .1% of cases does that really change. It's a whole lot of effort for no reward it feels like. Now I need to wait to 7.0 for my favourite job to have some HOPE of being playable again. I finally dropped healing entirely, I am playing dps this next coming savage tier.

I was looking forward to the revamp, at least I would know sooner than later if the job is to be permanently in the grave for me or not.

I like astro being busy compared to other healers, I liked the old sleeve draw and I liked having 3 redraws. Yet somehow this expansion it feels turbo speed but I am not feeling the reward at all. Astrodyne feels awful cause I can almost never get three seals, I don't care how little of a dmg boost it is. It feels like garbage to me.
I would like the lost time dilation effects back, I want the stun back on celestial op.
Draw and play can be one button, same for drawing and playing the minor arcana. Personally preferred changing unwanted cards to arcana than the 50/50 of lord and lady we have now. I enjoyed buffing up cards too back in SB.

SB was my fave astro, shb left me furious as we lost what I felt made astro unique, the card variety and manipulation of buffs/hots. EW just killed the job for me entirely.

The irony of they made so many changes to make the job 'slower' because people could not deal with the speed of throwing out cards etc and now in EW it's back to being too busy for the people they changed things for to begin with.

I totally feel this. AST has been my main since HW. Now I play SGE. My big fear is that the devs are going to severely water down the job the way they did SMN. I also like that Astro is a busy job, I just want to see some actual payoff for it.

[Liam_Harper]

I'm just pissed they are delaying the rework to 7.0 because samurai's cried.

If they did delay the rework because Samurai's rightfully complained about their rubbish job changes, then it's a good thing. Unless you wanted the big AST rework to make the job even worse still.

The core of the issue is nothing to do with Samurai players anyway, it's the fact they have a ridiculously small, inexperienced job design team in one of the biggest MMO's on the market with 20+ jobs. They simply can't design good jobs with their current resources, but they've been stubbornly trying to push it along for years while they fall further and further behind. They need to wake up. Job design is in a dire state.

[ThorneDynasty]

Ultimately it's most likely not even the developers' fault, SE as a producer is ridiculously stingy with servicing one of their most reliable source of income, but clownshoe timeghost nonsense projects get infinite production values. One can only hope the upscaling of the infrastructure after the uptick in the game's popularity will eventually show in-game too. But the pessimist in me says that Square is just complacent they can find the sweetspot where they can squeeze the maximal amount of subscriptions while putting the minimal investment in. It's not until people literally can't register into the games because it's technically impossible to handle the logins with the amount of servers they have when they wake up.

And yeah, you can make the valid point that simply throwing more designers and programmers at the project isn't an immediate panacea. But some of the prominent points of criticism go back several years already, and some all the way back to 2.0 launch. At this point I have zero patience for deflecting any reasonable improvements to say, the glamour system, because "spaghetti code". It's been almost a decade, the rookie programmers would be vets by now. The number of players who've put over a thousand dollars into this game is going to grow less trivial by the month. At some point you have to stop saing "we've been sitting on this problem but it takes so much manhours to fix", or "well you just have to accept jobs are going to be more shit since there's so many and balancing is hard and there's only so many designers". The honeymoon period with your playerbase is going to end when the players start feeling like they put more into the game than the production company does.