Thank you for the Astro changes coming in dawntrail!

[Supersnow845]

I didn’t like AST’s overfull burst because of how clunky it was to execute but I don’t know how trading it out for “utility” cards we don’t need is a meaningful improvement

This seems to be a trend, square just doesn’t know what to do with regen healers. SCH (despite how ugly it is) and SGE are both getting more skills that play into the shield healers strengths. AST is getting……..more single target healing and WHM is getting………nothing

Why do we even have regen healers in the game anymore

[Zolvolt]

I didn’t like AST’s overfull burst because of how clunky it was to execute but I don’t know how trading it out for “utility” cards we don’t need is a meaningful improvement

This seems to be a trend, square just doesn’t know what to do with regen healers. SCH (despite how ugly it is) and SGE are both getting more skills that play into the shield healers strengths. AST is getting……..more single target healing and WHM is getting………nothing

Why do we even have regen healers in the game anymore

Yeah the fight design of healing has kind of put itself into a really tough spot. The harder they try to give ast/whm more to heal, the stronger it ends up making shield healers. Game is so mapped out for everything that it really hurts throughput healers who would really benefit from more sporadic/unpredictable damage.

[ty_taurus]

Since this topic has been drawing in a lot of debate, I created a survey to try and collect information about what everyone feels is important about Astro's card system over on the general discussion. You can find it in this thread.

My goal is to try and help add clarity to what's most important to people and get a better picture on how people feel about the system.

[StriderShinryu]

As someone who doesn't play healers that often but does play AST when I do heal, I don't necessarily mind the changes though I'm not sure they are the changes I myself might have made. I think it's also a good idea to hold back at least a little of the doom and gloom until we actually get all of the information about the rework instead of just what people have been guessing based on the little we've seen so far.

Given how the new system appears to work, the one change I would make is to bring back Redraw (or keep it, I guess, since we don't know for a fact it's gone). Allow Redraw to only work on the card types still in your hand so if you've already spent your Damage Buff Card you can't just Redraw your Def Buff Card into another Damage Buff Card. This means that, assuming you still have all 3 card types in hand, you can essentially gamble throwing away a good Curative Buff card and a good Defensive Buff card in hopes of getting a better Damage Buff card but getting worse varieties of the other two types. Also put Redraw on a 90 second cooldown (separate from Draw of course) so that you can't just Redraw every single Draw and sometimes have to be okay with the hand Draw gives you in the first place. Doing this would, in my mind at least, preserve some of the RNG chasing and min maxing effect that some AST players really enjoy but without making the entire job about flipping cards every single time if it's not the one you want. Redrawing would be more of a tactical decision.

Just my 2 Cents.

[Kamishawe]

This seems to be a trend, square just doesn’t know what to do with regen healers. SCH (despite how ugly it is) and SGE are both getting more skills that play into the shield healers strengths. AST is getting……..more single target healing and WHM is getting………nothing

Yeah the fight design of healing has kind of put itself into a really tough spot. The harder they try to give ast/whm more to heal, the stronger it ends up making shield healers. Game is so mapped out for everything that it really hurts throughput healers who would really benefit from more sporadic/unpredictable damage.

It's not really that much of a surprise to be honest. A good SCH could out preform AST and WHM even back in Stormblood and make PURE healers redundant even then. It's just become more apparent with the addition of SGE easing the way into shield healer logic and shining a spotlight on the gapping hole that is a Pure's need to waste resources to gain dps. Shield healers literally have a Pure's recovery capability, + regens, + Shields (when they decide to actually use them :V ).

So yes... Square has no idea what to do with Pure Healers.

WHM looks like it got less gcd Dps with a ability skill and a new Misery system (maybe, hopefully). My main hope for Pures is they either scale back shield healers, and some of their utility; or they rethink Pures and making them more Utility and party buffs than current to offset the Shield Healers...

Hopes are not High though with Sage being their poster child healer, community darling, and spoiled as fuck brat.

The only other solution to the healer problem is making everything hurt as all hell and forcing the use of both co-healers kits, which...

"BRING IT ON, SQUARE!! I want it to HURT!! !!!"

[Kissune]

You're falling into the same trap. Assuming that people who are happy about the new direction (which arguably is back to the old direction) of the job only didn't like astro "because it's too hard" is wildly offbase. I've done savage as every iteration of ast in the game, I've done ultimate, criterion, and yet I'm told 6 or 7 times now that I can't possibly agree with the changes unless I haven't done any hard content. There's plenty of people who are both for and against the changes on both sides who have all played the exact same job in the same content all this time and the fact is nobody here knows if anyone has or hasn't done any particular content. Pretending that people haven't so that they can shut down other's opinions is, well, how children argue with eachother. If someone can't argue another's opinions or just agree that you both prefer different versions of the job, then they result to playing these worthless terms just to be rude and make themselves feel superior. It's just not okay, and I think you know that by your initial statement in your post.


I just don't agree that they gutted astrologian's identity or made it an easy job. I understand if you feel differently but it seems to me like even the devs are saying "the cards are the identity" here by giving us more cards to play

I pretty much agree with you. I'm not here saying I want stormblood/hws astro back because the fact is being a balance-bot was the worst part about old astro, particularly stormblood ast. I was simply outlining that there are many playstyles that astro has had that have been removed permanently now and no amount of being upset is going to bring it back, nor is trying to convince everyone that "this way is better". At least on the bright side for people who liked old astro, the new astro is bringing us back utility cards instead of only dps cards. This is obviously to the dismay of players that only want dps cards or who don't care that the cards are identical in shb/ew, but I agree with the devs in that moving back to utility is closer to the original job identity than what we have now and they solved the problem with the old card system anyhow, which was that dps and utility cards competed against each other.

Alright dude, I told myself I wouldn't reply to you bc you're either a troll or the most logically inconsistent person I've ever met, but here goes.

The idea that you somehow think that AST's card identity is tied to 'how many you play a minute' and 'looks like a card' tells me that you've either never held a deck of cards in your life or you are a purely visual-dazzled person who cannot actually process anything outside of a purely aesthetic medium. Am I being rude? Sure. Call me childish if you want, I don't care, bc you are intentionally lying about what the new card system actually represents. Do you think anyone here actually gives a shit about 'cards played per minute' if what they're actually playing have nothing in common with cards apart from a visual aesthetic, and more in common with just any generic healing cooldown in the game? Do you think SCH players would be overjoyed to have aetherflow go up to 4 if instead of just having 4 stacks that can be divided any way they were told 'instead of charges that can be used on any aetherflow spending button, you got one energy drain, one lustrate, one sacred soil, and one indom' and that was it? Do you seriously, 100% think that scholar players would be happy about that change? Bc they would be using, THEORETICALLY (in most cases, yes, even in savage and ultimate, a good chunk of your stacks are going to energy drain. Not all, but having that option to decide how the stacks are used is what makes aetherflow, well, aetherflow. Do you think sage mains would be happy about a fourth addersgall stack if they were dictated on what to use it on? Maybe you would, and maybe the people who hate having to think for themselves and like every facet of their job being explained for them, but I very much believe that would be an unpopular change.

So why are people expected to like it when it happens to AST? I wouldn't care if the cards were mixed DPS/utility, honestly. I'd think it's a poorly designed mechanic, and it would lead to frustration as I draw a card that's useless in the situation I'm in, but I'd still be grateful that the playstyle is still there. I don't mind friction. The idea of having to react to not only the fight, but to your own kit. Now reaction is only done to what happens in a fight. The only thing new that'll ever happen is someone fucking up, and guess what. EVERY healer has to deal with that. Every single healer has to heal, every single healer has to mit, and every single healer has completely static, unchanging tools that are 100% reliable and predictable.

'Arguably moving back in the old direction' is only true if you think the only thing that made cards cards was having their vfx and different abilities from eachother. That's it. EW cards have more in common with stormblood cards and if you can't see that you need to stop lying to yourself and think a little harder. And yes, I'm sorry, but AST is going to be a much easier job. Y'know why? Because think about it, what did they give us? More healing tools, more mitigation tools, zero reaction to draws, zero busyness, and a turbo-tanked APM. The only possible way that AST gets 'harder' is if fights are harder, and that's not... making AST harder. That's making healers harder. We get more tools, though, and we have to think about them, right? Well, no. Did getting an extra charge of ED make the job harder? Did removing nocturnal sect and just giving intersection, neutral, and CU the effects of diurnal make the job harder? No, and... I don't know how you could possibly argue it did. If anything, that particular aspect made the job easier. With more cooldowns at your disposal, which ones you use become exponentially less impactful. Either a fight is designed to make use of all of them, in which case, it's the same case for every healer because damage isn't scaled differently depending on your choice of class... or it isn't designed to make use of all of them, which means you are constantly sitting on a wealth of resources that serve no purpose. Y'know. Just like Endwalker? Where I provided actual log proof that the literal hardest fights to heal, by your own words, didn't even need to utilize your full kit at all times? And if they somehow needed to give us extra tools... exaltation, intersection, and ED were right there. Just give us more charges of them, instead of completely gutting an interesting and skill-rewarding system in place of a bootleg aetherflow that'll do the exact. same. thing.

I don't care man, if you cleared every single savage week 1, or are a pentalegend world first degen-hour raider or not. I don't care that you are super in love with new AST, and think it's the greatest step forward for the job since its inception, or whatever. You're entitled to that opinion. But what you're doing is outright lying to yourself, and to us, about what would make the job so good in DT. You are outright ignoring any kind of statement to the contrary, you are declaring that the barest essence of AST's cards is 'what they look like and what effects on target they have' and refusing to acknowledge any more facets of the cards that existed behind all iterations since its inception, bc to do that would contradict your very own points. You have insisted numerous times that 'playing more cards per minute' is more important than how the cards interact with the rest of your kit and themselves, and you have also repeatedly implied that this is a 'step forwards, towards stormblood design' which at its most generous, and I mean GENEROUS interpretation would be no more than a step to the side. If you take every aspect of what stormblood cards were, how they worked, how they interacted... You would be gaining, yes, utility effects. At the cost of? RNG, thoughtfulness about how best to use what you're given and not what you always have, whether or not to burn or use a card, having every pull be different, reacting and quickly assessing your draw, having to juggle healing and mitigating when you don't have the card you want and making sacrifices in exchange for a later boon. But hey. It's okay. The exact same set of four cards you draw every single time are distinct from eachother, and that means that we're more like stormblood! Maybe I didn't play stormblood AST, but at this point it's hard to believe you did, and even if I'm wrong you seem to have the shallowest view of what those cards actually were if you only look at them and see 'different effect go brr' with a flashy tarot image. You also, apparently just like square enix, don't know how a tarot reading works, so your claims that 'the job identity isn't being gutted' are clearly tainted by that as well. I do IRL tarot readings, and if I drew the same alternating set of 4 cards every single time, I'd think something was wrong with my deck. Nor would I have fun doing the readings if I had exactly two to pick from.

[Zolvolt]

Alright dude, I told myself I wouldn't reply to you bc you're either a troll or the most logically inconsistent person I've ever met, but here goes.

You were so upset after the first day posting in this thread that you did everything in your power to find me. You couldn't find my logs so you went out of your way not only to find me on discord somehow but also to message me about this. I don't really want to hear from someone who feels that doing that is okay over a difference of opinion on a job. Please never talk to me again, I don't want a stalker situation on my hands.

[KanataNanaya]

I don't care man, if you cleared every single savage week 1, or are a pentalegend world first degen-hour raider or not. I don't care that you are super in love with new AST, and think it's the greatest step forward for the job since its inception, or whatever. You're entitled to that opinion. But what you're doing is outright lying to yourself, and to us, about what would make the job so good in DT. You are outright ignoring any kind of statement to the contrary, you are declaring that the barest essence of AST's cards is 'what they look like and what effects on target they have' and refusing to acknowledge any more facets of the cards that existed behind all iterations since its inception

right after that dude promptly quoted the first sentence of your thing then ignore the rest xD

[Heilstos]

Well, after the last Youtuber didn't become so interesting. I'll take one of the experienced ones and that's Rinon. This also says that as long as there are no tool tips there is no point in talking about it. And yes, he sees it exactly that way, that the seals and Astrodyne (RNG WHM Power) are gone

https://youtu.be/guuM0M61Ep4?si=5JDun9cGufe0hUNy&t=294

[Kissune]

Well, after the last Youtuber didn't become so interesting. I'll take one of the experienced ones and that's Rinon. This also says that as long as there are no tool tips there is no point in talking about it. And yes, he sees it exactly that way, that the seals and Astrodyne (RNG WHM Power) are gone

https://youtu.be/guuM0M61Ep4?si=5JDun9cGufe0hUNy&t=294

Why would I care about the opinion of someone who doesn't play AST more than my own? Rinon and I have cleared the exact same fights, but he rarely if ever plays AST, I do. So if he's excited about the changes that just tells me that, yet again, this job is being changed for the people who don't play AST, not the mains. He's a WHM main ffs