Thank you for the Astro changes coming in dawntrail!

[Supersnow845]

The thing is that nobody disliked ShB AST, hell it was significantly ahead of SCH who was the floundering one

It was the EW changes and the EW changes alone that made everyone hate the job

Outside of divination being powered by seals which forced overuse of redraw when it still had 3 charges there was basically nothing wrong with ShB AST besides a bit of flavour that could have been added later (like adding certain effects to the existing cards

Whether you are a proponent of SB AST or later versions we all agree that EW AST is the worst version, but that doesn’t justify basically making it not Astro anymore

[Aelin_Ashryver]

The thing is that nobody disliked ShB AST, hell it was significantly ahead of SCH who was the floundering one

It was the EW changes and the EW changes alone that made everyone hate the job

Outside of divination being powered by seals which forced overuse of redraw when it still had 3 charges there was basically nothing wrong with ShB AST besides a bit of flavour that could have been added later (like adding certain effects to the existing cards

Whether you are a proponent of SB AST or later versions we all agree that EW AST is the worst version, but that doesn’t justify basically making it not Astro anymore

I think every SB ast enjoyer will disagree with you there. I hated the change to the cards going into SHB, I still managed to find enjoyment in SHB AST thanks to sleeve draw but it still felt far worse and more boring outside of that to play. Hardly takes a genius to recognise who should get what card when you drew it in SHB or EW for that matter. Having a reasonable understanding of the other jobs and you're good to go.

But I do agree EW AST was the worst by far and after giving it a solid try to stick with it I swapped to heal a tier as SCH and then moved out of healing entirely due to missing my AST for years. I have very much enjoyed delving more into DPS roles and hope to give PLD a go in the coming tier on an alt. Got my first ultimate done even, hoping to carry on with progging UCOB over summer.

I'm so happy with the job changes coming I am glad I have so many housing alts I can actually raid on most of them this summer since I will have more free time \o/ woooo

I will give this new AST a go and advocate we get back some of our card manipulation and a touch of rng, but that will be hard so long as parsers cry over it. I feel that the manipulation return is more likely if we all agree and advocate it.

[Kissune]

I think every SB ast enjoyer will disagree with you there. I hated the change to the cards going into SHB, I still managed to find enjoyment in SHB AST thanks to sleeve draw but it still felt far worse and more boring outside of that to play. Hardly takes a genius to recognise who should get what card when you drew it in SHB or EW for that matter. Having a reasonable understanding of the other jobs and you're good to go.

But I do agree EW AST was the worst by far and after giving it a solid try to stick with it I swapped to heal a tier as SCH and then moved out of healing entirely due to missing my AST for years. I have very much enjoyed delving more into DPS roles and hope to give PLD a go in the coming tier on an alt. Got my first ultimate done even, hoping to carry on with progging UCOB over summer.

I'm so happy with the job changes coming I am glad I have so many housing alts I can actually raid on most of them this summer since I will have more free time \o/ woooo

I will give this new AST a go and advocate we get back some of our card manipulation and a touch of rng, but that will be hard so long as parsers cry over it. I feel that the manipulation return is more likely if we all agree and advocate it.

Well I hope you enjoy your white mage with card vfx, and I hope you realize fast that it's nothing like stormblood cards.

Also as a 'parser', jobs with RNG are way more fun than jobs that aren't. If AST has no RNG, the only thing that'll determine my parse is crit RNG and keeping my gcd rolling, along with killtime. With EW AST, it was my own skill and reactions on top of those things, meaning I wasn't just spamming pulls hoping I had a sufficient amount of critical hits and lord draws, it could also offset the RNG with good dps card placement and proper tracking of burst timings and effective DPS under a card. AST was complicated in EW, and anyone who says otherwise just didn't even give optimizing it a try. They just saw the surface level 'card do same thing' and gave zero shits about anything else. It wasn't a fuckin non-standard BLM level puzzle box rotation that needed a spreadsheet to figure out how to squeeze out a 20 potency gain, sure, but it required you to think, and think fast. The difference between a good AST and a bad AST was night and day, and the amount of damage that good card placement actually accounted for wasn't nothing. And fuck, y'know what, even if the damage increase cards gave wasn't that big... at least it would be something. At least there would be something to work towards. Bc right now I see AST being mildly amusing in week 1 prog and completely lifeless and dull for the rest of the tier, whereas before I at least still had card RNG to keep me on my toes and make pulls feel different. Now I'd just be begging for someone to fuck up so I can briefly feel something again. And that's a general healer sentiment.

Every time I think of 'oh but the parsers wanted the job to be boring' I think of this video, and specifically this timestamp. Anyone struggling to understand my view should watch it. I don't want AST to be "meta". I don't want it to be "consistent DPS". I want it to be engaging, and fast, and fun. Let white mage exist for the one button rotation fans, I liked having something, ANYTHING to do beyond occasionally throw out my ogcd heals/mit and press malefic.

[Aelin_Ashryver]

Well I hope you enjoy your white mage with card vfx, and I hope you realize fast that it's nothing like stormblood cards.

Also as a 'parser', jobs with RNG are way more fun than jobs that aren't. If AST has no RNG, the only thing that'll determine my parse is crit RNG and keeping my gcd rolling, along with killtime. With EW AST, it was my own skill and reactions on top of those things, meaning I wasn't just spamming pulls hoping I had a sufficient amount of critical hits and lord draws, it could also offset the RNG with good dps card placement and proper tracking of burst timings and effective DPS under a card. AST was complicated in EW, and anyone who says otherwise just didn't even give optimizing it a try. They just saw the surface level 'card do same thing' and gave zero shits about anything else. It wasn't a fuckin non-standard BLM level puzzle box rotation that needed a spreadsheet to figure out how to squeeze out a 20 potency gain, sure, but it required you to think, and think fast. The difference between a good AST and a bad AST was night and day, and the amount of damage that good card placement actually accounted for wasn't nothing. And fuck, y'know what, even if the damage increase cards gave wasn't that big... at least it would be something. At least there would be something to work towards. Bc right now I see AST being mildly amusing in week 1 prog and completely lifeless and dull for the rest of the tier, whereas before I at least still had card RNG to keep me on my toes and make pulls feel different. Now I'd just be begging for someone to fuck up so I can briefly feel something again. And that's a general healer sentiment.

For the card themselves EW ast has little rng vs what it did in SB given again it's all dmg, just ranged vs melee. It wasn't complicated, another poster put it nicely... something like middling difficulty I feel is more appropriate. A little thought was there but it was not complicated. EW ast is so poorly thought out and it was so painfully obvious they told us mid expac they will rework it. It wouldn't shock me if they saw AST's already small player base plummet even further.

Maybe you as a parser don't cry as much from rng (so you say but I'll take it at face value!), but you weren't here when others were in the forums crying about fishing for balance and their 'cursed' runs with few balance pulls during SB. And you can go peek at reddit the amount of people who are happy and upvoting changes, there are hundreds of them. For many it's specifically for them NOT liking RNG. So yes getting the rng back in will likely not happen. But I do like the idea someone said of making lord and lady our manipulatiuon tools for the cards, that could be fun. I look forward to finding out the best places to put our new cards in encounters and finding those moments again like in SB I can throw a utility card at someone in a crucial moment.

So yes I'll be having fun with AST in DT, it's still not like the WHM in how it heals no matter how much you like to compare the two. You still think about timings for placements of your heals more vs a WHM. If we get more time related mechanics for AST as well I'll be thrilled. You carry on being spiteful to every person that is happy with the changes though, I'm sure it'll help!

You can do what I did if you end up disliking AST, play other jobs. If you want difficulty and thought you can try some BLM like I did, it was good fun and I look forward to playing it more!

[Kissune]

For the card themselves EW ast has little rng vs what it did in SB given again it's all dmg, just ranged vs melee. It wasn't complicated, another poster put it nicely... something like middling difficulty I feel is more appropriate. A little thought was there but it was not complicated. EW ast is so poorly thought out and it was so painfully obvious they told us mid expac they will rework it. It wouldn't shock me if they saw AST's already small player base plummet even further.

Maybe you as a parser don't cry as much from rng (so you say but I'll take it at face value!), but you weren't here when others were in the forums crying about fishing for balance and their 'cursed' runs with few balance pulls during SB. And you can go peek at reddit the amount of people who are happy and upvoting changes, there are hundreds of them. For many it's specifically for them NOT liking RNG. So yes getting the rng back in will likely not happen. But I do like the idea someone said of making lord and lady our manipulatiuon tools for the cards, that could be fun. I look forward to finding out the best places to put our new cards in encounters and finding those moments again like in SB I can throw a utility card at someone in a crucial moment.

So yes I'll be having fun with AST in DT, it's still not like the WHM in how it heals no matter how much you like to compare the two. You still think about timings for placements of your heals more vs a WHM. If we get more time related mechanics for AST as well I'll be thrilled. You carry on being spiteful to every person that is happy with the changes though, I'm sure it'll help!

You can do what I did if you end up disliking AST, play other jobs. If you want difficulty and thought you can try some BLM like I did, it was good fun and I look forward to playing it more!

The playstyle of AST that I had was gone, and it's not gonna be found in other jobs. And why would I want to jump to another job (like BLM, which btw is ALSO losing it's high skill expression optimizations due to the literal death of non-standard BLM) either when they've already shown they're willing to cut all difficulty for the sake of people's aesthetics?

EW AST had stuff to do outside of healing. Now it's healing is even more predictable, even more standard, and it's all the people who couldn't hack the job who needed it to be super easy and streamlined who kept begging for that. If people really didn't like RNG, they could go play any of the other 20 fucking jobs that don't have it! So yes, I will continue to be spiteful, because I'm pissed off that I am losing my favourite class in favour of some streamlined homogenized mess that barely, and I mean BARELY thinks about its heals more than white mage. The healing gameplay I liked is still there, maybe, assuming earthly star, horoscope, and neutral sect are even still around at all lmao. But it's there in the absence of the other entire half of the job, which has been replaced with a shitty handful of single target utility that we already had an overload of.

And you know what? Yeah, AST RNG in EW/ShB wasn't as much as it was in StB/HW. But it was still. There. It was something to think about, something to do that made EVERY PULL DIFFERENT. Do you see that part? Do you see those three lines when you continue complain that there was no substance to EW cards? Did you go through AST and just close your eyes when you pressed draw and put it on the same people every single time, not even caring about seals or the melee/ranged modifiers? Because then yeah, it had no RNG for players like that. And for the people out there, who liked having that kind of optimization, who liked having to think about the cards they were playing, who liked optimizing through quick thinking and mechanical skill, AST was all we had.

Like fuck, hearing you even say 'I look forward to finding out the best places to put our new cards in encounters and finding those moments again like in SB I can throw a utility card at someone in a crucial moment.' just makes me roll my eyes BECAUSE YOU COULD ALREADY DO THAT! You had that gameplay already! That was never taken away, it was just called fucking exaltation! Or intersection! Or aspected benefic, or essential dignity, or fucking synastry for gods sakes. That's not unique and interesting gameplay, that's just the exact same mechanics that every other healer has to deal with. EVERY healer has to 'find the best places to put their abilities' whether or not they're called a card or not. They do the same fucking thing, the differences are microscopic. You are starry eyed and overjoyed for a rework that gives us nothing new, just waves their hands and say wow look, we turned an ED stack and exaltation stack into a caaaaarrd! It can be used the same amount of times, in the same places, isn't that so interesting and I just cannot fathom how you can be so smugly indifferent to what is being lost to make that happen. The people who didn't like RNG should have just played a different fucking class. Because they HAD options. We don't, I don't. And that's not fair. I paid my sub, I put thousands of hours into this game and I found most jobs unfun. Didn't like playing white mage, sage, or scholar because they were too boring. AST was fun as hell, and it was the card gameplay that made it interesting. Maybe, just maybe, square enix should stop listening to people who just keep wanting to have their classes mechanics handed to them, and are thankful for the one dps button rotation slop we've had for three entire fucking expansions.

I am not mad that you are happy with the changes, I'm mad that you are happy about changes you clearly don't understand the actual like, picture of. You see card vfx with some new text and you go wild. You claim to love stormblood cards but you will happily drink up this slop that has nothing in common save for a superficial attempt at presenting cards as 'unique effects' when they cease to be unique cards once you get the exact same ones every time. All while mocking me for having enough of my main being transformed all for the sake of people who would have found the exact same gameplay they demand in some other healer, but just want their preferred aesthetic.

If you're happy with the only thing standing out about AST being earthly star and macrocosmos, sure. Do that. But I'm not going to sit here and pretend like that's healthy for the game, and that making all the healers have minor differences is going to truly make AST a glorious job again, and I'm not going to entertain the opinions of someone who keeps worshipping stormblood card design while simultaneously saying 'looking forwards to dawntrail AST!!' because at that point the only thing I can think about is how logically inconsistent that is. You can play the job, and convince yourself you're having the most unique, interesting gameplay with the highest of decisions to make while you hum and haw about when to use your brand new mitigation card you're guaranteed to get every time on a tankbuster and autos and nod, telling yourself how that's so very different than the decision making process for exaltation or intersection, and how AST is so very different than white mage, because white mage doesn't have to think about intersection or exaltation, the have to think about aquaveil and benison, which are very different abilities and definitely 100% have different use cases.

[Heilstos]

Leona, I notice your pain and yes, as I said, I did when the SHB ASt came and I thought I wouldn't play the branch anymore... And no, I have to disappoint you, I still like playing the branch =D We should wait until the tooltips come. I think that we do more dmg than AST or that the DPS card has a strong push.

I'll think about it, we can become the "Endsinger" later.

In the meantime I have looked at YouTube and have now heard positive comments about the AST:

https://youtu.be/4n_d0v4QOyI?si=89SVUUAOXi-bLymo&t=417

[Kissune]

Leona, I notice your pain and yes, as I said, I did when the SHB ASt came and I thought I wouldn't play the branch anymore... And no, I have to disappoint you, I still like playing the branch =D We should wait until the tooltips come. I think that we do more dmg than AST or that the DPS card has a strong push.

I'll think about it, we can become the "Endsinger" later.

In the meantime I have looked at YouTube and have now heard positive comments about the AST:

https://youtu.be/4n_d0v4QOyI?si=89SVUUAOXi-bLymo&t=417

You clearly didn't read anything I said if you think the reason I played AST was anything to do with 'how much DPS I put out'. Read my signature.

As for the rest of your comment, you're incomprehensible, and that video you linked me is one person saying basically 'it's not my main but i will pick it up bc it is as easy as the rest of the healers'. I'm sorry but... why the fuck would i care about the opinion on if AST is good or bad now from someone who doesn't play the class? Part of the problem is that the class is being changed away from what mains like myself want to cater to people that didn't actually play it because it was too hawd ;c

And a lot of the comments on this video are saying 'I disagree, the busyness or RNG and card manipulation were what made AST fun'. You're gonna find people who like this new reworked AST, but you're gonna find a lot more AST mains unhappy with the changes. And hot take, I think job design should cater to the people who like the class and not the people who want to like it but hate the gameplay? Especially when the difficult parts of AST only mattered in savage+ content?

[Zolvolt]

The playstyle of AST that I had was gone, and it's not gonna be found in other jobs.

I need you hear me on this. The playstyle you have on every job today will be gone some day. Jobs/classes in an mmo are always changing. If you can't accept that then you will always be really upset and angry over something that you already should be aware is going to happen. For example:
Long time astrologian players lost our old playstyle of manipulating 6 different types of cards. We lost our playstyle of being a shield healer. We lost our ability to have multiple DoT spells from cross-class skills. We lost our playstyle of using more GCD healers during encounters. We also lost the playstyle where you couldn't OGCD with malefic, so you had to make more decisions in terms of DPS casts.

All that is to say that you're going to lose your current playstyle on every job at some point and then you'll lose that new playstyle at some point too. No amount of being upset changes that, I mean look at Kaiten samurai. They have cried from the heavens but it doesn't change the fact that kaiten samurai was deemed as worse for the game than non-kaiten samurai. The same is true here. You can love EW astrologian all you want, but it doesn't change that it is worse for the game to keep in. So you'll have to make peace with that and accept the new astro and look forward to how that can be improved, or you'll have to accept that you no longer like astro and might have to look elsewhere. What other choices do you really have?

I'm sorry but... why the fuck would i care about the opinion on if AST is good or bad now from someone who doesn't play the class? Part of the problem is that the class is being changed away from what mains like myself want to cater to people that didn't actually play it because it was too hawd ;c

Do you believe that Avvy hasn't played and enjoyed the previous iterations of Astro? She has. EW Astro is unpopular so many people moved away from it. It doesn't give you more say over them. Your opinion is not more important than people who left astro because of endwalker. Listening to other people's opinions gives you a better picture of the class. You can debate mechanics like I have seen you done, but once you moved into mocking people, assuming people don't play astro "because it's too hard" it just you being salty about it. Lets grow up a little shall we? If we can't discuss what we like/dislike about our classes without attacking other people, simply because they have a different opinion, then it makes your own opinion worthless. Nobody cares what a jerk who diminishes other people's thoughts and ideas has to say.

"they want astro to be whm with sparkles"
"you never play a b c content"
"they think astro is too hard"
"they're not a REAL astro player"

any of these statements and statements like them are childish. Please do better.

[ForsakenRoe]

I need you hear me on this. The playstyle you have on every job today will be gone some day. Jobs/classes in an mmo are always changing. If you can't accept that then you will always be really upset and angry over something that you already should be aware is going to happen. For example:
Long time astrologian players lost our old playstyle of manipulating 6 different types of cards. We lost our playstyle of being a shield healer. We lost our ability to have multiple DoT spells from cross-class skills. We lost our playstyle of using more GCD healers during encounters. We also lost the playstyle where you couldn't OGCD with malefic, so you had to make more decisions in terms of DPS casts.

...You can love EW astrologian all you want, but it doesn't change that it is worse for the game to keep in. So you'll have to make peace with that and accept the new astro and look forward to how that can be improved, or you'll have to accept that you no longer like astro and might have to look elsewhere. What other choices do you really have?

'X fate is inevitable and you might as well just accept it' is the BS that the Endsinger tried to force on us, and we kicked seven shades of shite out of her for it. If the devs want to give us an inferior job design because they think it's 'what's best for us', then they have the right to. But we also have the right to express our opinion that 'it sucks, and misses the point of the originally established identity of the job'

Drawing cards from a deck is not something that should be 'predictable'. Once a deck is shuffled, drawing a card from it is a guess every time. Taking a regular deck of playing cards, once shuffled, I'd have a 1/52 chance of guessing what card I'd draw. Being able to know 'I'll draw the Ace of Hearts, then the 4 of Clubs, 6 of Diamonds, 10 of Spades, 5 of Diamonds, 7 of Clubs, King of Hearts, 10 of Diamonds, Jack of Hearts...' etc. would be incredibly useful at the Poker tables, yes, but it's also not something that we humans can do. We can count which cards have been removed from the deck (if the cards aren't shuffled back in after each round played), but that's all. For Tarot readings, neither the customer nor the teller knows what card will be drawn to each position, nor whether it will be regular or inverted. It'd be very odd if you and three friends went to a fortune teller, and the first to go got Magician, The Star, Empress, the second person up got Hierophant, The World, Emperor, the third up somehow also got Magician, The Star, Empress, and the fourth unbelievably got Hierophant, The World, Emperor. It'd mean, effectively, there's only two fates in store for any customer, fate A or fate B. And which fate you get read isn't random, it's dependent on the fate the previous person got. If they got A, you get B. If they get B, you get A.

I once loved DRK for the MP management, of trying to balance spending MP for more damage versus the constant drain of Darkside, and that got removed, I loved HW SCH for its multiple DOTs, and that got removed. Eventually, the 'removal' of these playstyles, in a desperate attempt to appeal to people that don't main the job (by alienating players who do main the job) is going to cause the 'swap to another job' path to run out of road. Say I like AST, and its the only Healer I like in the game. I don't play other roles, because I like to play Healers. If AST is changed such that I don't like it, then I have nowhere to go. I can't play Tank or DPS, as I don't enjoy those roles. I can't play Healer, as the one Healer I liked is gone, none of the other 3 Healers have anything similar to the aspects of AST that made me enjoy AST. And so with no job to enjoy in this scenario, I'd have to either play a job I don't enjoy, or just quit the game entirely. Now imagine that happening with a lot more than just me, one person. Imagine that process happens with, say, 10% of AST players. Now let's imagine it happens again, this time with a rework to GNB that is very divisive, and 10-15% of GNB players stop playing the game because of it. Over time, these 'revamps' haemorrhage player count.

Look at Jagex, and RuneScape. They overhauled the combat of the game, to try to appeal to the MMO players who like hotbar gameplay (like you'd find here, or WOW). Instead of appealing to those players, it instead just drove away the players who liked the more simple 'click enemy, wait until it is die' gameplay. And the game cratered in playercount so hard, they not only brought back Old School RuneScape (11 years ago), OSRS often has triple the playercount of the 'new and revamped' version. Overhauling things is risky business, and it has to be very carefully considered. And IMO, SE hasn't fully considered the lore and identity of the Job when creating this revamp.

[ForteNightshade]

I need you hear me on this. The playstyle you have on every job today will be gone some day. Jobs/classes in an mmo are always changing.

Change is one thing. Wholesale gutting job identity because some players find it too hard yet refuse to play anything else is a very poor approach that has actually bitten them in the backside more than once. Dark Knight's popularity tanked (no pun intended) when they continuously changed it from HW to ShB. Although, the most notorious example would be Bard, the most popular DPS in Stormblood that well all the way down to nearly the least played all because they listened to a handful of people who simply didn't want to learn how Foe's Requiem worked.

To answer your example. The original card system was simply an illusion of choice, one that would not function with later iterations of the game. You manipulated six different cards but only ever wanted one. Nowadays, Spire and Ewer would be useless, the last thing tanks need is more mitigation and most DPS would punch you in the mouth if you put Arrow on them. In short, HW/SB Astro simply couldn't exist. Hence the changes made going into Shadowbringers. They were a necessity. Now you could argue the system they landed on wasn't perfect but it needed refinement now yet another overall.

Ironically, the system you're advocating for... is almost exactly what I described. Tanks are already damn near invincible and MP management is non-existent unless you're running zero piety parse builds. So the return to "unique" cards is once again, just an illusion. I can all but guarantee you will either be frequently overhealing or simply overwriting those utility cards repeatedly because they serve little more than bloat on a job that already has enough ways to heal. And before you argue they'll up the outgoing damage to compensate. Need I remind you, people thought the same going into Endwalker yet not only did they do precisely the opposite but tank sustain became so oppressing that it's more efficient to remove healers entirely from dungeon runs and just run WAR/PLD and three DPS. Even GNB can make it work.