Thank you for the Astro changes coming in dawntrail!

[Supersnow845]

Your description is not a problem of the job.
Yours is a problem with the game.
If the game doesn't provide you with reasons to use your kit, that's not the kit's fault.
If the game proves to you a greater challenge, then your grievances vanish in a flash.

Call it a kit problem or call it a game problem, either way these healing “cards” are going to wind up useless bloat bloat because we simply do not need more healing and this problem extends all the way up to ultimate

The game not doing enough damage may be a game problem but continuing to add bloated heals over alternatives when the damage isn’t being up is a kit problem

[glamazon]

Call it a kit problem or call it a game problem, either way these healing “cards” are going to wind up useless bloat bloat because we simply do not need more healing and this problem extends all the way up to ultimate

The game not doing enough damage may be a game problem but continuing to add bloated heals over alternatives when the damage isn’t being up is a kit problem

Now that I think about it this is true. So Why not have cards:
Dmg increase buff
dm decreasee debuff
Mitigation increase buff
Mitigation decrease debuff
incombat runspeed boost
stun
skill/spell haste card (for blm maybe healers too)
skill/spell slow debuff

This provides enough variety that works. also instead of four cards just make lord a dmg aoe and lady an aoe heal over time

[Kissune]

Now that I think about it this is true. So Why not have cards:
Dmg increase buff
dm decreasee debuff
Mitigation increase buff
Mitigation decrease debuff
incombat runspeed boost
stun
skill/spell haste card (for blm maybe healers too)
skill/spell slow debuff

This provides enough variety that works. also instead of four cards just make lord a dmg aoe and lady an aoe heal over time

Variety cards in a vacuum doesn't mean anything. You need cards that do something, and you need cards that aren't dead if you don't need them or a chance to not show up if you do. If AST is designed around some of its mitigation and healing toolkit being locked away behind RNG, then it presents a paradox issue where either the cards end up being useless bc you can either survive the hit without a mit/heal card thus rendering the cards unneeded, or you can't survive it which means that AST becomes the only healer in the game that has to sacrifice a solid percentage of their pulls due to bad luck. Neither of which is fun and engaging. People who want an RNG system with dps cards and mit/healing cards in the draw pool seriously don't seem to understand what that inevitably leads to, and what it means for the rest of the toolkit by design. The only way to solve it is to provide enough RNG mitigation that it becomes basically impossible to not have the card that you want, and at that point why have RNG? I still maintain that all the people demanding varied cards led to this bc they couldn't recognize that fights being designed the way they were would invalidate the entire system, and square enix did, and now nobody wins. DPS only cards might have been 'boring' for some but fuck at least they always did something. A weak dps gain is still a gain, but a mitcheck is a yes or no.

[glamazon]

Variety cards in a vacuum doesn't mean anything. You need cards that do something, and you need cards that aren't dead if you don't need them or a chance to not show up if you do. If AST is designed around some of its mitigation and healing toolkit being locked away behind RNG, then it presents a paradox issue where either the cards end up being useless bc you can either survive the hit without a mit/heal card thus rendering the cards unneeded, or you can't survive it which means that AST becomes the only healer in the game that has to sacrifice a solid percentage of their pulls due to bad luck. Neither of which is fun and engaging. People who want an RNG system with dps cards and mit/healing cards in the draw pool seriously don't seem to understand what that inevitably leads to, and what it means for the rest of the toolkit by design. The only way to solve it is to provide enough RNG mitigation that it becomes basically impossible to not have the card that you want, and at that point why have RNG? I still maintain that all the people demanding varied cards led to this bc they couldn't recognize that fights being designed the way they were would invalidate the entire system, and square enix did, and now nobody wins. DPS only cards might have been 'boring' for some but fuck at least they always did something. A weak dps gain is still a gain, but a mitcheck is a yes or no.

But how are any of those cards useless? runspd in combat? that's always useful. a debuff to the enemy damge? how is that not usefull? yes i will say tanks already have so much mitigation but not all tanks use their mitigation and even when they do dark knight its barely enough. mit decrease to enemy? That's good! a stun to interrupt casting? how is that bad? ok yes maybe you wont have the stun when u need it but this is part of the rng maybe you wont get exactly what you need maybe you will but it wwill always be useful somehow. Except for heals beacuse we already have the tools for that.

[Kissune]

runspd in combat? that's always useful.

only if you're moving, and if you could make it there without a speed buff, you didn't need it, so it's not useful. And if you couldn't, then what happens when you don't draw it?

a debuff to the enemy damge? how is that not usefull?

'enemy deals 10% less damage' is identical to 'allies take 10% less damage'. If you could live without it, you didn't need it, so it's not useful. If you couldn't, what happens when you don't draw it?

yes i will say tanks already have so much mitigation but not all tanks use their mitigation

No kit should be designed around the possibility of people not using theirs.

mit decrease to enemy? That's good! a stun to interrupt casting?

...Stun? I feel like I'm talking to someone who has been in a coma since heavensward... If a stun is ever needed in current content, it would be done by one of the melees or the tank. You want a card to be... like, holy? So literally only usable in dungeon trash packs and nowhere else?

you wont get exactly what you need maybe you will but it wwill always be useful somehow.

If I am presented with a raidwide in current EW design, lady of crowns is not even considered in my plans. Bc I need to ensure the party can survive a healcheck if I drew lord. If you extend this to cards like a party wide mitigation, party wide movement speed buff, party wide any kind of utility... I can't factor any of it into how I respond to that particular obstacle bc I need to sure I am using enough for us to survive if I didn't draw said utility. And since I'm doing this, if I do draw the utility, it means exactly nothing to me because it's just a 'bonus' on the already decided mitigation and healing. The difference between surviving a raidwide on 10% HP and surviving it on 20% HP is negligible. The difference between 'healing us to full' and 'healing us to full + 400 potency aoe heal' is... lmao.

I see your point. WHy not have the increased number of cards none of which are dmg increased then and have the ast able to select which cards he or she wants depending on the situation. So you get a draw of five cards out of ten and you can select which of the five you want to use. the others go back in teh deck. If you shuffle because you don't like any of the cards. All go back and you get a new hand of five. I wish they brought back card time extension like if you sacrifice a draw you can extend the last card you played to double the length.

...Because I'd still have to assume that I don't draw the card that I need in a situation and act accordingly? And if you design it in such a way that I can always just choose to have X card at X time... Congrats, you've invented dawntrail AST with extra, needless steps. It would just be no real RNG but you'd have to do a bunch of redraws to get there. Also you're thinking of royal road, not time dilation. And I dunno if this is a hot take but having a bunch of generic healing and utility abilities already covered in my kit that just say 'do X' isn't more interesting than having cards that just increase dps. At least with DPS cards the order I got them in and the actual split mattered. With utility cards I either have the card I need or I don't. And if I don't have it, and we die bc I lacked utility in my kit you've created a healer that has the unique property of 'randomly has a chance to wipe due to bad RNG'. And you might say like 'oh but DPS cards are kinda like that with enrages' except DPS checks have way, way more variables in play about determining if you pass them. If I ever heard an AST say 'we wiped bc I didn't draw enough melee cards :c' I'd ask them what the fuck their dps were doing. 8 people doing 8 rotations with crit variance and random procs on jobs like dnc/rdm/etc along with micro mechanical mistakes over several minutes of a fight are what lead to enrages. Or deaths. Usually deaths. With mit checks... you either meet X% mitigation, or you die. There's no variance. It's just a flat number of 'you must mitigate at least this much damage to live'. Crit autos don't exist anymore, so highly variant boss damage just does not exist.

[glamazon]

crit autos don't exist anymore, so highly variant boss damage just does not exist.

Utility should be a bonus for healers. Our primary job is to heal and our kit covers that all of the cards should be bonus not necessary but nice to make things a little easier so you could scrap all healing with cards and just have the cards do the bonus buffs and debuffs that help but are not live or die.

After going through some of your points i just don't get it. What's wrong with a bonus? A mana regen? scholar speed buff has helped you act like it doesn't matter but it does. If its on cooldown and you can't use it does that mean it wasn't useful when it was up? If all the cards are just nice bonuses that help but are not required to win a fight then that should be fine right? They help. They don't win the fight for you. You make a lot of great points primarily leading me to think that ff14 fight design is one dimensional, flat, and stale. it limits so much when it comes to jobs and what they could do.

[Kissune]

APM on AST is going heavily down, and let me explain why. In burst now, in EW, we have 9-14 weaves. Between 3xplay, 2xdraw, 1xdivi, 1xlightspeed, 1xdyne, 1xminor arcana, the absolute minimum is 9. Then, after that, you have up to 2xredraw, 2xlord, and an extra dyne every 6th minute burst window, leading to 14. That's a lot, I'll give them that. That's 7 straight GCDs of double weaves, likely with a haste buff, and I genuinely can't think of another class that weaves that much. I will agree, something needed to change there. As much as I loved it, and thrived in it, by the end of TOP I was starting to feel the wrist pain, and I'm kbm. But one of the big things I loved about it was the burst never felt the same. If I had a ranged card first over melee it changed the order I needed to target people, or possibly my priority in some cases. (Summoners bursted harder in the first few seconds of a 2min and didn't do nearly as much over the rest, meaning a card was most effective on them early and fell off hard later, whereas a bard would be more consistent over the course of the burst window and might even snapshot their DoT which was a very valuable thing to catch.) I might have had to redraw, even twice, if I was presented of the same type of card, or possibly greeding for a seal just for my own enjoyment. The last part wasn't optimal, but by god it was enjoyable. Dyne itself, loathed as it was, I had to use at a different point each burst, finally looping at 8 minutes. The burst window was the most exciting part of AST to me bc it was different every time.

Now... We get exactly, and I mean exactly, bc there's not even a variation on WHEN you play the cards, every button in this burst window is used at the exact same time, on the exact same people, every time. 5-6 weaves. That's it. I only say 5-6 bc I don't know if the new divination follow-up is a gcd or ogcd, I wasn't paying attention for the flash in the trailer. Play, divination, lord, draw, play, possible divi follow-up. That's it. That's the burst. That will always be your burst. Doesn't matter the fight, the comp, the timing, the duration of the fight, nothing. Your burst is as static as a white mages. It is about as busy as a scholar, who presses chain, aetherflow, EDx3, chain-follow up (which we know is an ogcd). Technically scholar is more busy but I'd be surprised if dissipation survives given how much people bitch about it. Honestly I'd be surprised if energy drain survives, given how dedicated they are to making healing as easy and unappealing as possible. Healers will only be asked to heal and press their one dps button, and that's it. Bc that's definitely not the major cause of the healer drought given that it is so. Fucking. Boring. To play if you're not actively healing, which you rarely are.


To the guy I have muted who says stuff like 'oh the APM won't change bc you will be playing more single target cards than ever'... That's just wrong. I did TOP on release. I did DSR on release. During the entire length of a 19 minute fight, I cast, on my very first TOP clear where I was still shaky and overhealing.... 6 Exaltations. 9 Intersections. And 5 Essential Dignities. This is a 19 minute fight. For 13 minutes Exalt was sitting there, unused. For 14.5, I had charges of intersection sitting there, unused. For 16.5 minutes I had charges of ED sitting there, unused. But that's ultimate, right? Healing isn't really needed there, nor is single target mit. What about savage?

Well... During P8S p1 my very first AST clear was... 2 exaltations. 7 intersections. 4 EDs. In a 7 minute fight. During P8S p2 it was 2 exaltation, 11 intersection (wow!), and 4 ED. 8 minute fight. You say that 'there was never a time where they were just sitting on cooldown' but during the alleged hardest tier to heal mine just were. I was undergeared, too, bc my static insisted that gear go to dps and tanks first. And even with that, I just did not need to use them all. Even on a mechanic that requires as much ST healing as natural alignment, I barely used anything. Maybe you just love to overheal, but if that's the case just play white mage or sage that gets actual benefits for doing just that. So considering I was literally never ever 'out' of ST healing resources that I needed... why do we get more? Why do we need more? Abyssos was apparently the hardest tier to heal, and yet these two clears I refer to were a blue and green in regards to healing. I wasn't chadding my cohealer, we just straight up didn't heal very much together bc we didn't need to. He got a 27 to my 28 in p8sp2, and a whopping 8 to my 52 in p8sp1. Like I'm sorry, but we just do not need more single target healing in this game. And even if we did, they could have just given us more charges of what we already have rather than completely removing cards as a system and handing us an aetherflow with pre-assigned lustrate and aquaveil built in. Cards could have been made less busy, sure. The ShB system was many things, but it wasn't 'busy'. DPS cards could have been made more interesting, flat% isn't the only damage buff in this game. But instead, we get nothing. No dps cards, no utility cards, bc the appeal and playstyle of drawing from a deck and using what you get with each pull forcing adaptation you get the same useless tools every single time you press the button. I'm never going to run out of ED charges and be thankful I had that 'healing card' from what is essentially a permanent uptime aetherflow... I'm just gonna think 'why is this not a 4th ED charge if I am just going to use it like one'. Same with a mit card and exaltation/intersection. We just simply do not need this utility, and even if they do bump up the damage and healing requirements of Dawntrail, which after an expansion of watching warriors solo heal every dungeon in the game I doubt... Why the hell did they not just give us more charges of abilities we already have instead of taking the only thing that seperated AST from the other 3 healers away? I'm so sick and tired of having to argue with people that these new skills are actually useful bc it feels like I'm the only one that actually played AST in anything other than dungeons with apparently the worst players knowing to mankind, who can't possibly make the connection of 'heal you unlock by pressing a button called draw' and 'heal you unlock by pressing a button called aetherflow' aren't the same fucking thing? Like I seriously don't understand how people can look at the upcoming system and feel like it's in any way new or exciting unless they're coming from the perspective of a non-AST player who is just happy to have a brand new basic ass healer with a starry aesthetic bc everything that made astro interesting is gone. The slight differences in stuff like earthly star, macro, and horoscope are all that's left but if that's the only thing that distinguishes them then it's a failure of game design. These new cards suck. They're boring, they're slow, and just bc they look like cards doesn't mean they feel or act like them. Giving me a bunch of extra mit and healing options isn't what I cared about. I had those. What I wanted from the AST rework was engagement, and this is anything but. It might not look like white mage, it might not be exactly like it, but it's going to play so similarly in 99.9% of situations that it won't matter. You heal the damage, mitigate the hits, press the one dps button otherwise. I won't even need a job gauge on my screen to play the class to 100% efficiency.

And having all these people screaming about how 'well we wanted cards that had a bunch of wacky effects that can't be relied on or a bunch of stupidly situational and niche ways to do the exact same fucking thing as a flat% damage buff anyways' just makes me sad for this games future. Square enix at least recognized that you can't have mixed dps and utility effects in the same deck with RNG bc that makes them either unplayable or broken, and that's horrible for static fight design. So rather than say 'no' to the people demanding fancy and unique cards, they did this. And now no one is happy, except people who apparently think the identity of AST is pressing an ability called draw, and not thinking about what it does.

Utility should be a bonus for healers. Our primary job is to heal and our kit covers that all of the cards should be bonus not necessary but nice to make things a little easier so you could scrap all healing with cards and just have the cards do the bonus buffs and debuffs that help but are not live or die.

After going through some of your points i just don't get it. What's wrong with a bonus? A mana regen? scholar speed buff has helped you act like it doesn't matter but it does. If its on cooldown and you can't use it does that mean it wasn't useful when it was up? If all the cards are just nice bonuses that help but are not required to win a fight then that should be fine right? They help. They don't win the fight for you. You make a lot of great points primarily leading me to think that ff14 fight design is one dimensional, flat, and stale. it limits so much when it comes to jobs and what they could do.

Bc scholar expedient is predictable. Most people in the raiding scene don't use it for its speed boost anyways. They use it bc it's a 20s mit. I think the last time I remember it being relevant was wroth of flames... and like... wroth of flames was clearly doable without it. There's a big difference between getting a mana regen 'sometimes' and a speed boost 'sometimes' vs being able to reliably and comfortably know when it's happening every time. I'll be real, if the dawntrail tools we were getting were just tools on top of our kit and nothing else, I wouldn't have cared. I would have questioned what we actually needed them for, but I wouldn't have minded. We got a bunch of tools in EW from ShB that made me ask 'why do we need this' like exaltation and the more charges on our healing CDs... but bc cards were still fun, active, and rewarding, I didn't care. Now we're getting even more tools that are making me ask 'why do we need this' bc we didn't need them in EW either, but this time it's at the cost of that card system I found active, fun, and engaging. Pressing a button every 60s to gain access to buttons I basically already had in the rest of my kit but now they have card vfx is not fun to me. It's not interesting. I don't think about them like cards, I just think about them the same way I do essential dignity or celestial intersection. It's there if I need it in a fight, and once I've decided on where I put it in a pull, it stays there. Even if you can make the argument of 'well what if there are mistakes' like... I'd just use ED? Like I always have? And if I run out of ED and the only thing that saves me is the healing card I got a minute ago... it's not gonna make me think 'phew, thank god i drew that' it's gonna make me feel like 'this could have just been a 4th ED charge bc I use it the exact same way.'

[glamazon]

Variety cards in a vacuum doesn't mean anything. You need cards that do something, and you need cards that aren't dead if you don't need them or a chance to not show up if you do. If AST is designed around some of its mitigation and healing toolkit being locked away behind RNG, then it presents a paradox issue where either the cards end up being useless bc you can either survive the hit without a mit/heal card thus rendering the cards unneeded, or you can't survive it which means that AST becomes the only healer in the game that has to sacrifice a solid percentage of their pulls due to bad luck. Neither of which is fun and engaging. People who want an RNG system with dps cards and mit/healing cards in the draw pool seriously don't seem to understand what that inevitably leads to, and what it means for the rest of the toolkit by design. The only way to solve it is to provide enough RNG mitigation that it becomes basically impossible to not have the card that you want, and at that point why have RNG? I still maintain that all the people demanding varied cards led to this bc they couldn't recognize that fights being designed the way they were would invalidate the entire system, and square enix did, and now nobody wins. DPS only cards might have been 'boring' for some but fuck at least they always did something. A weak dps gain is still a gain, but a mitcheck is a yes or no.

I see your point. WHy not have the increased number of cards none of which are dmg increased then and have the ast able to select which cards he or she wants depending on the situation. So you get a draw of five cards out of ten and you can select which of the five you want to use. the others go back in teh deck. If you shuffle because you don't like any of the cards. All go back and you get a new hand of five. I wish they brought back card time extension like if you sacrifice a draw you can extend the last card you played to double the length.

[glamazon]

And A CARD TO GIVE BACK MANA WHEN A HEALER OR MAGICAL DPS IS BACK FROM REZ AND HAS NO MANA TO EVEN HEAL TO SAVE THEMSELVES.