Healers, then and now:

[Faidid]

Astrologians getting their cards simplified, losing spread and royal road. Ugh. Might as well rename the job to gambler for how much a coinflip their cards have been turned into. And its not like they don't know, especially with how the pvp version of astro has something resembling the old bole, arrow, and balance cards.

I'm shocked they destroyed Astrologians so completely. That mechanic was very cool and SE just deleted it!

[Supersnow845]

I'm shocked they destroyed Astrologians so completely. That mechanic was very cool and SE just deleted it!

I don’t like new AST but in practice the old AST was a lot of effects for not much benefits, balance or bust was a real thing, balance was just objectively the best card by a country mile and every other card was “balance but worse” (spear) “an active hinderance on most classes (arrow) or really just useless (bole, spire and ewer), this just made the class a pain in raids and mildly inoffensive in casual content

Royal road and the time dilation effect of CU I 100% miss though

[Osmond]

It’s not that they destroyed AST. The community pointing the finger at them because all they use is dmg buffs in SB. The devs give ppl what they actually wanted and now ppl don’t like it. Don’t freaking deny it lol.

[Semirhage]

I categorically deny it. Squeenix are the ones who made damage the only metric that matters. Of course the players fished for it more than anything else. They'd be stupid not to.

[Connor]

It’s not that they destroyed AST. The community pointing the finger at them because all they use is dmg buffs in SB. The devs give ppl what they actually wanted and now ppl don’t like it. Don’t freaking deny it lol.

Unfortunately this. All SE heard was ‘I don’t want to do these other support effects I just want to dps you can’t make me do those others things!!!!’. So they just made every card a dps card. Then there was the ‘oh but those pesky cards are getting in the way of my Malefics!’ so they removed all card interaction abilities and the standardised card effects meant you can throw those pointless buffs away wherever you want and focus solely on what you play Astrologian for…dps…?

I can’t wait for them to ‘rework’ the job in 7.X, because if the PvP version of card effects is anything to go by we’re going to get an absolutely hilarious situation where the forums are flooded with tears over Bole. ‘I went into a raid and all I got was damage reduction’. ‘why is this filthy effect in my game’ ‘plz delete and just give Balance’, ‘Bole doesn’t give DPS why have you done this Yoshi-P?!?!?!?!’

[Chasingstars]

I don’t like new AST but in practice the old AST was a lot of effects for not much benefits, balance or bust was a real thing, balance was just objectively the best card by a country mile and every other card was “balance but worse” (spear) “an active hinderance on most classes (arrow) or really just useless (bole, spire and ewer), this just made the class a pain in raids and mildly inoffensive in casual content

Royal road and the time dilation effect of CU I 100% miss though

Since the most likely thing is to force The Balance, Heres a wild idea for Astrologian: Why not incorporate Eureka's elemental wheel and repurpose it to 'alignment' for one of six different cards?

Since Astrologian was originally a mix of Chemist, Time Mage, and Gambler.. why not lean into the gambler element more? Eventually having the equivalent of weighted dice? Like here is my idea for traits:

Elemental Wheel (Lv20): Your understanding of the celestial bodies is murky at best. When the wheel is aligned to an element, the corresponding celestial alignment has a 20% likelihood chance to occur. Other cards have a 16% chance.
Elemental Wheel II (Lv40): Your understanding of the celestial bodies is slowly becoming clearer. When the wheel is aligned to an element, the corresponding celestial alignment has a 40% likelihood chance to occur. Other cards have a 12% chance.
Elemental Wheel III (Lv60): Your understanding of the celestial bodies is greater. When the wheel is aligned to an element, the corresponding celestial alignment has a 60% likelihood chance to occur. Other cards have a 8% chance.
Elemental Wheel IV (Lv80): Your understanding of the celestial bodies is getting closer to its zenith. When the wheel is aligned to an element, the corresponding celestial alignment has a 80% likelihood chance to occur. Other cards have a 4% chance.
Elemental Wheel V (Lv100): Your understanding of the celestial bodies is with perfect clarity. When the wheel is aligned to an element, the corresponding celestial alignment has a 100% likelihood chance to occur. Other cards have a 0% chance.

For example The Balance is a celestial alignment and is naturally fire-aspected, so keeping the wheel aligned to fire means you have increased probability of getting a fire-aspected card. And The Balance is just a damage buff of 6% for the target.

Then you mix back in the old Royal Road and Spread abilities to allow for the astrologian to stack the deck in their favor more to compensate at lower levels. Obviously the durations and benefits of the old cards need to be tweaked, after all we are not working with TP anymore for example.

[ForsakenRoe]

Again, Ewer and Spire were not 'useless'. Their own effects may have been middling at best, but they were one half of the 'aoe balance' combo that dominated SB, you can't 'AOE Balance' without burning a Ewer/Spire first. The one card that was 'not good' in all situations was Bole. It's also telling that people (including SE) think the only way to make the cards 'equally desireable' is to make them all identical, rather than actually balancing potencies between them. Or, since we have Crit Variance issues, DHit Variance on Misery, etc STILL causing rampant swings in damage, maybe people just need to open their damn eyes and realise that you cannot attain perfect balance, save one instance: Every class is completely identical. Which we're getting dangerously close to with healers.

A friend of mine showed me a log, his WHM wanted to optimize P1 of TOP, and was looking at one of the best WHMs in that phase. Both had 42 casts of Glare, 4 Dias, 3 Assizes, one Misery. 'Friend WHM' did 5434dps, 'Top WHM' did 6422dps. One thousand damage per second more, and it's entirely because their crit rate on Glare was double 'Friend WHM', and DHIT rate on Glare was FOUR TIMES AS HIGH. So with that ridiculous damage swing in mind, I would have to ask: Do we make Misery guaranteed Crit DHit because people bitched enough about 'feels bad when it doesnt crit'? Do we remove Chain Strat because of it's contribution to Crit Variance? Do we remove cards entirely, because AST always ends up ahead of WHM due to how raidbuff stacking works?

Or do we (and the devs) say 'enough is enough' and tell people to sit down, shut up, accept that some imbalance is a necessity for the game to actually feel alive rather than being as sterile as lab equipment? I for one am completely fine with WHM forever being 'a little bit worse than AST' if it means that WHM and AST are more fun to play. I can clear stuff as WHM, that's enough for me, I don't care about some dipshit who's hopelessly subservient to 'the funny colored number' on FFLogs, or their backwards priorities on class design. Its like they're tempered by the website, it's their 'primal'. And at this point, SE shouldn't pay attention to them either. SE's had four years of 'healers have really hollow design' to balance them, to satisfy these 'balance > fun' players and guess what: They haven't balanced them. They CANNOT balance them. As long as some of them have raidbuffs and others do not, it's going to be the same story.

We had an expansion about 'the encroaching sterility of blank perfection' and fighting back against it's advance. Can we do the same 'fight back', with the sterility of the class design please

[Semirhage]

I will never be okay with the healer role balance that states WHM must always, always, always be worse than AST because buff stacking necessitates it. It paints job design into a box that gets just as stale as the one we're in now, and I'm -very- tired of "healer design will be great once we decide to make WHM's being weaker an explicit design consideration rather than just a natural consequence of overlapping secondary considerations"

"Just make WHM weaker" is not a design I will ever agree with. Why not make AST weaker? Oh that would be unfair? Wonder why that is. Oh right, it's only unfair if anyone other than WHM gets thrown under the bus.

[Garten]

The devs give ppl what they actually wanted and now ppl don’t like it. Don’t freaking deny it lol.

This Is what i HATE the most. I am a player (and former main AST) and i DID NOT wanted It ti change. You cant generalize all ppls.

Dont care if i am a filthy casual or what.. they, as usual, could have done something to make the class work without destroing it's divining identity (with time mage aspects), and instead decidere to take the lazy route

[Connor]

This Is what i HATE the most. I am a player (and former main AST) and i DID NOT wanted It ti change. You cant generalize all ppls.

Dont care if i am a filthy casual or what.. they, as usual, could have done something to make the class work without destroing it's divining identity (with time mage aspects), and instead decidere to take the lazy route

I feel like the ‘time aspect’ removal from Astrologian’s identity is another symptom of the devs desperate attempt to maintain absolute balance (which cannot be maintained without standardising literally everything lol). Extra 15s on a party member’s buff? Unbalanced.
Extra 5 sec on all nearby party member buffs? Unbalanced.
Astrologians having fun? You guessed it, Unbalanced lol.
So instead of balancing, or just accepting that disparity is sometimes inevitable (and in my opinion acceptable as long as it’s minimal because it’s practically impossible for there not to be slight disparity), they just…straight deleted it. Which frankly has been the developer’s MO for quite a few expansions now, so it shouldn’t even surprise me at this point lol