Thank you for the Astro changes coming in dawntrail!

[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.

[Zolvolt]

Theres so many dramatic posts in here now. Seriously listen to yourselves. 'Astro was the last bastion for those of us who like complicated jobs'. I don't know how to tell you guys this besides just telling you, but Astrologian isn't complicated, it just has a busy burst window. If you want a busy burst window, there are plenty of dps jobs that have that. Also please stop mixing up APM with a busy burst window. They are similiar things but different. You can have high APM and a burst window that is not as busy as EW astro, which is obviously the direction they are going. You'll still hold your offensive card for double offensive back-to-back cards for 2minutes. It's also exhausting that people think seals/astrodyne are what define the class when those have only existed for 2 expansions. I understand that you may have enjoyed the experiment that astro has gone on the last 2 expansions but most of us, SEnix included, realized that Astro was poorly designed when Endwalker launched. They even came out and said they were going to redesign it during endwalker and the amount of work needed to do so it was pushed it to now. For all intents and purposes the way astro works currently was supposed to have been scrapped a year and a half ago. I'm not sure why anyone is pikachu-face shocked over it, when it was flat out said a long time ago. Then therse people supporting astrologian being an unpopular job. I don't think y'all realize just how much astro's popularity has dropped. It's staggeringly low compared to every other job and it has been dropping since shadowbringers even with the influx of players we've had this expansion. In terms of health of a job, astro has been on life-support and if the current design of astro had existed for another expansion then the class would be abandoned even by many of those who love it.

Just for comparison's sake, Astro in EW is in the exact same posistion that MCH was in stormblood. The design is in such a horrible spot that the class is only being kept alive by a small amount of dedicated players. Thats not good enough to keep a job healthy for expansions to come.
"but couldn't they have done X Y Z instead?"
they could take any job any number of directions. They have to consider and prioritize getting the job to a healthy state again and simultaneously putting it in a spot where we can build onto it instead of revamping it drastically every expansion. Just like they did with MCH, which has been a resounding success.

[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.

[Aravell]

I don't know how to tell you guys this besides just telling you, but Astrologian isn't complicated, it just has a busy burst window. If you want a busy burst window, there are plenty of dps jobs that have that. Also please stop mixing up APM with a busy burst window. They are similiar things but different. You can have high APM and a burst window that is not as busy as EW astro, which is obviously the direction they are going.

Who even said AST was complicated? I said "middling complexity", which is miles better than the no complexity of DT AST cards wherr everything is just handed to you for free.

Also, you and everyone else says that they're not reducing the APM, yet they've confirmed deletion of several skills that you'd weave. I don't see how they'd manage to keep APM the same with less weaves, but I know I won't be convincing you of that, so have fun with your new AST.

[Zolvolt]

Also, you and everyone else says that they're not reducing the APM, yet they've confirmed deletion of several skills that you'd weave. I don't see how they'd manage to keep APM the same with less weaves, but I know I won't be convincing you of that, so have fun with your new AST.

The difference in APM between current ast and new ast is about 1 skill. Current ast gives you 3 draws and 3 cards per minute. The new ast is 1 draw and 4 cards per minute. We lose astrodyne too, but we get another stack of ED (ED is higher APM than astrodyne too). Thats -1/+1. Other than that we have yet to see. but with the information we have currently, astro's APM has barely changed.

[Supersnow845]

The difference in APM between current ast and new ast is about 1 skill. Current ast gives you 3 draws and 3 cards per minute. The new ast is 1 draw and 4 cards per minute. We lose astrodyne too, but we get another stack of ED (ED is higher APM than astrodyne too). Thats -1/+1. Other than that we have yet to see. but with the information we have currently, astro's APM has barely changed.

Every potential draw has also lost clarifying redraw which is 2 redraws potentially as you never press clarifying redraw on the first card. As for ED and the tank/heal card there is every chance you won’t even spend it on CD (hell I could see not even using the healing card at all and just drawing over it) so the APM has gone down and especially the APM in the burst window has collapsed

[Zolvolt]

Every potential draw has also lost clarifying redraw which is 2 redraws potentially as you never press clarifying redraw on the first card. As for ED and the tank/heal card there is every chance you won’t even spend it on CD (hell I could see not even using the healing card at all and just drawing over it) so the APM has gone down and especially the APM in the burst window has collapsed

You still use all your OGCD's in savage when healing. Your charge-type OGCD's rarely sit off cd and fights generally don't have zero-damage going out for entire minutes even when we have mechanics where the boss just isn't targetable, like p8s p2. The idea that you just hold on to some healing OGCD's for extended periods of time only really occurs in some ultimate fights. In this expansion, especially so for Astro, nearly every boss has double tank busters that happen regularly. It's been the theme of this epxansion to use all your ED's, CI, and Exaltation.

[Supersnow845]

You still use all your OGCD's in savage when healing. Your charge-type OGCD's rarely sit off cd and fights generally don't have zero-damage going out for entire minutes even when we have mechanics where the boss just isn't targetable, like p8s p2. The idea that you just hold on to some healing OGCD's for extended periods of time only really occurs in some ultimate fights. In this expansion, especially so for Astro, nearly every boss has double tank busters that happen regularly. It's been the theme of this epxansion to use all your ED's, CI, and Exaltation.

Between the double amount of free healing between the healers, the fact that often you are using AOE skills and the tank has self healing even on savage I rarely find use for the ungodly amount of single target heals AST has

Honestly double TB’s in savage at this point can basically be handled by soil/kerechole + the fairy/kardia on the tank with weaker self healing + the tanks self healing leaving the regen healer with functionally nothing to do. Sure in that time you can spend ED if you want but it really isn’t adding anything to the necessary healing besides getting the tank back up faster which they really don’t need

ED, CI and exaltation’s niche is basically triage and we don’t have triage anymore, it’s the same niche that taurochole, lustrate, and bension occupy which is why they get used so infrequently

[Zolvolt]

Honestly double TB’s in savage at this point

This is where your emphasis should be because this wasn't the case when the current raid tier started. But now everyone is maximum geared, and you can solo heal the fights (with enough support from dps jobs). Unless we're doing prog fully geared it's just not the case.

[KanataNanaya]

What does APM gotta do with healer, a role that's supposed to be "support, strategic"

Royal Road enjoyer we didn't have to press a tons of buttons at once, good card? bad card? RR/hold. wait for the right time, use. It was strategic. I hated the ShB card system onward but accepted it because "some people also liked this", but it was just some extra buttons you have to do every 30 sec for some eh dmg buff, because astrodyne barely mattered.

Hell, i play on Pad, that means every card that need to go out, it's 3-4 extra buttons to select the team member. does it make me busier? yes. does it make the job any better or fun? no. It was also one of the point why i liked raiding in SB because AoE Royal Road was more viable in there than dungeon.