Thank you for the Astro changes coming in dawntrail!

[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.