Thank you for the Astro changes coming in dawntrail!

[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.