Thank you for the Astro changes coming in dawntrail!

[Aelin_Ashryver]

Issue is, at no point have they said that DT AST will have card manipulation. Rather, it appears to be very much a case of 'draw card, play card' as it was in EW. Just now, the amount of cards to consider in the damage slot goes from 6 (thanks to Seals and the ranged/melee split) to just 2, and from 4 damage cards to play per 2 minutes, to 2 per 2min, with the hazy 'assurance' that 'oh but you'll have defensive/healing cards too', completely glossing over the part where most content will not hit hard enough for those cards to actually feel like they're making a difference. In fact, the content that most benefitted from AST having 'more going on' compared to other healers, the low-end no-failstate stuff like EX roulettes, is the same content that least 'demanded' the correct use of the cards. You could play the cards on anyone, at any time, including not playing them at all, and still clear the roulette.

Without the full picture provided by seeing the whole range of tooltips from the media tour, we have to go off of what we see in the Job Action trailer, and the small amount of talk about the job they gave during the slides. That is, they're removing the RNG because some people said they don't like the RNG (on a job who's identity is predicated on something that inherently is made up of RNG, Tarot), that there will be three kinds of cards drawn, Offensive, Defensive and Restorative, and that you'll draw cards once per minute. Being able to manipulate the cards was never mentioned, and is just wishcasting until we see tooltips that show it's a thing again. It's fine to want card manipulation back, but we haven't been given it back, and what we are given may well turn out to be 'EW cards, but you can only draw Balance and Bole, and the cooldown is doubled'.

I understand your points, I've said before if we are lacking the card manipulation it's gonna be the first thing I ask for! I hope it's there in some form, I don't think that it is already there. I have some hope that with drawing four cards at once we keep some feeling of higher tempo the AST has also. I'm not gonna repeat myself again and again, but in the end for me I feel this is a nice base to start from and I expect to enjoy AST in DT and I am hopeful for 8.0 where they want to add the individuality back to jobs also. Overall positive outlook for me.

[ForsakenRoe]

I understand your points, I've said before if we are lacking the card manipulation it's gonna be the first thing I ask for! I hope it's there in some form, I don't think that it is already there. I have some hope that with drawing four cards at once we keep some feeling of higher tempo the AST has also. I'm not gonna repeat myself again and again, but in the end for me I feel this is a nice base to start from and I expect to enjoy AST in DT and I am hopeful for 8.0 where they want to add the individuality back to jobs also. Overall positive outlook for me.

See, the problem with that is that we can see what happens when SE reworks a job, makes it 'more simple', and we think 'oh there's room for them to add complexity to it going forward': they don't add complexity to it going forward. Look at MCH, which was considered quite technical in HW, 'so overly technical that a single GCD out of place screws your burst entirely' in SB, 'simple' in SHB, and 'just as simple again' in EW. SMN's rework has been widely criticized for how little depth it has, and with the Job Action Trailer details, we can see that it's functionally not changing, just that instead of Baha, Phoenix, Baha, Phoenix, we'll have Baha, SolBaha, Phoenix, SolBaha. So when I see that AST is losing a lot of the complexity it currently has, and that 'oh it's a good baseline to build off of', I know that the last thing that will happen is that 'they'll build off of the baseline'. What we see is what we'll get, and it's exceptionally unlikely we'll get more in 8.0, I'd sooner expect another rework before they add anything to the system they showed.

I can't stop you from being optimistic, but I'm going to be a realist on this one

At the start of EW we got a bunch of extra healer bullshit that made everyone think 'oh man the fights are gonna be so hard now' and then we ended up having no uses for them. What makes anyone think dawntrail is gonna be different?

You just know some goobs are going to insist 'wow Seraphism so cool, clearly this means we're going to take so much more damage that we won't even have time to spell the word Broil, let alone cast it!' and then the content hits as hard as currently (that is, not enough to require a healer in dungeon runs), it's like a broken record

[Kissune]

See, the problem with that is that we can see what happens when SE reworks a job, makes it 'more simple', and we think 'oh there's room for them to add complexity to it going forward': they don't add complexity to it going forward. Look at MCH, which was considered quite technical in HW, 'so overly technical that a single GCD out of place screws your burst entirely' in SB, 'simple' in SHB, and 'just as simple again' in EW. SMN's rework has been widely criticized for how little depth it has, and with the Job Action Trailer details, we can see that it's functionally not changing, just that instead of Baha, Phoenix, Baha, Phoenix, we'll have Baha, SolBaha, Phoenix, SolBaha. So when I see that AST is losing a lot of the complexity it currently has, and that 'oh it's a good baseline to build off of', I know that the last thing that will happen is that 'they'll build off of the baseline'. What we see is what we'll get, and it's exceptionally unlikely we'll get more in 8.0, I'd sooner expect another rework before they add anything to the system they showed.

I can't stop you from being optimistic, but I'm going to be a realist on this one



You just know some goobs are going to insist 'wow Seraphism so cool, clearly this means we're going to take so much more damage that we won't even have time to spell the word Broil, let alone cast it!' and then the content hits as hard as currently (that is, not enough to require a healer in dungeon runs), it's like a broken record

Thank you for finally putting into simpler terms what I've been trying to get across so, so badly. Square Enix does not 'build on a base'. They do not simplify jobs to give them more to work with. Complex jobs get simpler, simple jobs get simpler, and the simplest jobs just get bloat. There is no upwards scale anymore. It's just a downwards slope of easier with each successive expansion. ShB AST was easier than StB, EW AST easier than ShB, and all signs point to DT AST being easier than EW. Is it so unreasonable to assume that the company that created reaper and sage, jobs so easy and safe I was bored of both just by looking at the tooltips, is going to continue to make things easy and safe? Like I'm not gonna fault anyone for being optimistic, but I *am* going to call them delusional and out of touch with the design philosophy they've been running with for literal years.

The healer development pipeline!
Step 1. Healers are unpopular. Deemed too hard. Remove complexity and depth from healers, add bloat.
Step 2. Have your devoted fans claim that the fights will surely be harder with all these new mit/healing tools!
Step 3. Don't make fights harder.
Step 4. Have your devoted fans claim that the mass simplification to jobs will surely be so they can build off of this brand new base in the future!
Step 5. Don't add onto jobs.
Step 6. Get ready for the next expansion, and continue to wonder why the role is still, if not more unpopular. Repeat from Step 1.

[Azurarok]

You just know some goobs are going to insist 'wow Seraphism so cool, clearly this means we're going to take so much more damage that we won't even have time to spell the word Broil, let alone cast it!' and then the content hits as hard as currently (that is, not enough to require a healer in dungeon runs), it's like a broken record

We also have this response from YoshiP regarding healer dps and healing requirements from one of the EW Media Tour interviews

tldr they claim they try to increase healing requirements, but they also don't plan on going so far that the healer has to constantly cast healing spells and keep track of their mp, or else that makes clears too reliant on how good your healer is. Increase in Item Levels as content ages lowers healing requirements too, and it's "inevitable" that leaves healers with less things to do.

[KanataNanaya]

We also have this response from YoshiP regarding healer dps and healing requirements from one of the EW Media Tour interviews

tldr they claim they try to increase healing requirements, but they also don't plan on going so far that the healer has to constantly cast healing spells and keep track of their mp, or else that makes clears too reliant on how good your healer is. Increase in Item Levels as content ages lowers healing requirements too, and it's "inevitable" that leaves healers with less things to do.

No matter what they do, it's useless. we are uncertain of the card's specific, but the defensive and heal cards are either useless and not fun, or too OP and people will bitch, there is no inbetween, because the supposed effect are really basic, not some brand new elaborate thing that's exclusive to AST. Other healer has to be able to perfectly heal the same fight without the cards (Because if you don't, then the basic AST kit will be weaker at healing than other jobs, which is probably not the way to go)

It's precisely why HW/SB era was good. each healer focused on one specialty and worked well with each other.
In a raid setting:
WHM was the abundance of heal, so the other healer can focus on their thing. Their damage in Cleric stance was very decent too. Regen was good so they could stay in the stance for longer.
SCH got the damage, which was always a good thing, all those DoTs was fun for most SCH mains i knew.
and AST was the damage top up, along with the flexibility to certain situation with cards.

And now, i don't need to remind anyone of now. Not in progs but if the team is decent you could solo heal ALOT of fights on reclears. They have increased the healer's heal potency, increased the damage on screw ups, but overall the heal checks ain't that high.

lead to a super stale state of healers. I felt like the balance team went the WoW route where they imagined healer has to heal constantly, but the fight design team went as they did since the early day.

[Zolvolt]

The continual blaming of casuals is also getting old, even I was salty at them to begin with going into SHB with but ykno what? A lot of the people who want things simplified are also the more hardcore or midcore, the ones pushing content and realise hey x or y is pretty annoying for me. Also a lot of the hardcore pc players are already using a variety of third party tools to make the game easier for them anyway all while crapping on other people for playing poorly. Hilarious considering they are using more crutches to play than the casuals they crap on, one AST enjoyer ik wouldn't even play the job without his macro to play his cards for him, still considers himself better than others. Meanwhile I moved my party ui closer to the middle of my screen to allow for faster swapping between targets during burst for throwing cards. Casuals often don't even leave feedback at all, they play or they don't. Only the more invested players leave the feedback most of the time. They matter just as much as you or I do, much as I miss my positionals on MNK.

This so true oh my lord. Even my friends do this. I've actually heard friends saying "I can do this on any job it should be easy for you!" to people all while streaming ultimates of them using that mini map that shows you where all the mechanics will be, or the the one that puts important debuffs big over the middle of the screen, and also the one with arrows showing where to look or go. It's bananas.

We also have this response from YoshiP regarding healer dps and healing requirements from one of the EW Media Tour interviews

tldr they claim they try to increase healing requirements, but they also don't plan on going so far that the healer has to constantly cast healing spells and keep track of their mp, or else that makes clears too reliant on how good your healer is. Increase in Item Levels as content ages lowers healing requirements too, and it's "inevitable" that leaves healers with less things to do.

I will give Sqaure-enix credit, they absolutely amped up tank busters in endwalker savage compared to shadowbringers. The job I felt like I could cover 95% of them alone was astrologian. *pug scholars can only energy drain it it turns out lol* Unfortunately tank defensives scaled a bit too well, and they are too strong now. If that wasn't there tank busters would've been in a good spot this expansion. The other healer and mp management and stuff, yeah, the mark was definitely not even close there.

DT ast to me feels like the devs are trying to merge SB and ShB Ast but the thing had to give up was rng.

Now if only they could bring back buff manipulation again, like RR and Time Dialation (still stings they are referenced in Ast questline)

This is exactly how I feel about Astro.

And now, i don't need to remind anyone of now. Not in progs but if the team is decent you could solo heal ALOT of fights on reclears. They have increased the healer's heal potency, increased the damage on screw ups, but overall the heal checks ain't that high.
.

Do y'all remember how fun it was to heal the end of e12s when it's just destroying the raid constantly? Like your first clear, not farm when the phase got so short it didn't matter. Can we have more of that happening and preferrably not the final mechanic of a fight.

[Kissune]

We also have this response from YoshiP regarding healer dps and healing requirements from one of the EW Media Tour interviews

tldr they claim they try to increase healing requirements, but they also don't plan on going so far that the healer has to constantly cast healing spells and keep track of their mp, or else that makes clears too reliant on how good your healer is. Increase in Item Levels as content ages lowers healing requirements too, and it's "inevitable" that leaves healers with less things to do.

If they're telling us it's inevitable that we will eventually not be healing much, if at all, then what is with their continued refusal to give us stuff to do that isn't healing? AST's card system was 'stuff to do that wasn't healing'. Ppl may not like EW/ShB system but the thing it did better than StB was be that added complexity to a dps rotation. It wasn't so overly important that if shit hit the fan or prog needed extra attention that you couldn't just drop it to focus on healing without being completely fucked over by not drawing cards that could potentially help with a bad scenario, but it wasn't so useless that once you did have a fight on a smooth lock that you were left without something to engage in and optimize. That's why I prefer the ShB/EW card system, bc of where it actually fit into your kit. It wasn't part of your support toolkit, bc that would mean AST would either be a weaker healer base with a random chance to be average, or a decent healer base with a random chance to be stronger than average. Both of those have major flaws, due to how fights have been continually designed. A weaker AST who relies on RNG to make up for it is needlessly punished by bad luck, and a stronger AST who doesn't have to rely on RNG to make up for it ends up at a point where the only thing they're drawing for is for something that immediately impacts the situation, and outside of prog the only situation is 'optimize more damage' bc you've solved everything else. The ShB EW kit definitely had room to grow, and have 6 flat% raw dps buffs could definitely have changed and become more unique, but rather than expand on it they decided that it would be better to remove the illusion of choice that stb cards in current fight design would have had, and just not even make the lack of decision making they provided as clear as day. And this might just be me, but I don't think that's a step in the right direction.

Gosh I would give up so much of modern AST's kit to go back to HW/SB AST's card kit. At least we get unique card buffs back. I will not miss ShB/EW's card kit.

I am absolutely gonna tell people how the deep magic works when it's pretty clear they forgot if they think DT cards are the best thing ever bc they took one aspect of StB card design, dropped literally everything else, while parading this around as a good thing. It's just yet another 5 steps away from stormblood but this time with the illusion of a step forwards. Unique effects mean fuck-all if we can't do anything with them but use or do not use them. They've got more in common with exaltation and essential dignity than anything that came out of stormblood cards. But I guess I needed to 'play stormblood' in order to see cards as, idk, more than just their effects and instead as the sum of their parts, huh? Because they aren't going to add complexity. They're gonna look at all the former WHM mains and misled stormblood AST players picking up the job, think 'rework successful', and then dance around the idea of adding complexity and skill back to the job bc that's a risk and they do not take risks. How do I know this? Well, considering we've had 3 expansions now of simplifying AST, I think at this point expecting the 4th to magically change the pipeline when it's worked for them so far is just like, the definition of insanity.

It just reads as extreme delusion and cope to look at DT and think 'omg stormblood cards yaaaayy' and thinking about all the ways you're gonna think soooo hard about how to use them when the answer is 'the exact same way you used ED and exaltation but now a card shows up over their head'. But hey, what do I know about healing design? I've only been maining the role since shadowbringers, right? I can't possibly know how current fight and healer design work.

Do y'all remember how fun it was to heal the end of e12s when it's just destroying the raid constantly? Like your first clear, not farm when the phase got so short it didn't matter. Can we have more of that happening and preferrably not the final mechanic of a fight.

God I miss Aspho. Curtain Call, FoF, Death's Toll... (the macrocosmos cheese felt like an oversight, and that a genuine healcheck was intended there). It gave me hope that rapid AoE healing checks and enforced GCD burn would be more commonplace.

[LynxDubh]

snip

I'm waiting till I see the full kit from the media tour before I make a full judgement on the card system. If it's not fun enough I will voice my dissatisfaction if needed. But for now, I'm not really interested in debating walls of text when we don't have all of the info on DT AST's kit.

[Kissune]

I'm waiting till I see the full kit from the media tour before I make a full judgement on the card system. If it's not fun enough I will voice my dissatisfaction if needed. But for now, I'm not really interested in debating walls of text when we don't have all of the info on DT AST's kit.

"Wait until the job action trailer." "Wait until the LL." "Wait until the media tour." "Wait until live." "Wait until the first tier." "Wait until the ulti."

The EW experience, take two. But I'm sure things will be different, this time!

[Zaytex]

"Wait until the job action trailer." "Wait until the LL." "Wait until the media tour." "Wait until live." "Wait until the first tier." "Wait until the ulti."

The EW experience, take two. But I'm sure things will be different, this time!

''Wait till 8.0'' when you ask why AST's difficulty and skill expressive gameplay was removed as we all inevitably play it in the beginning of DT.

Just wait dude, things will get better I promise! Not like we have 4 expansions to go off of and the design of healers being chipped away at over and over and over and over and over.

None of us need to play AST in DT to know its a complete downgrade in complexity, nuance, APM or skill expressive gameplay. People thinking a single target mitigation/heal card is going to be any more interesting than another stack of ED or Exaltation (if they did add it) have no idea what they're talking about