Thank you for the Astro changes coming in dawntrail!

[Aelin_Ashryver]

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.

That's so perfect xDD gave me a good giggle thank you

[Teno]

Yoshi p needs to STOP catering to these people, go play SMN or pokemon if you want cheap thrills

Pokémon is one of the most complex/hard games there is around my dude, please do not compare the absence of healer gameplay to it.

[Sani2341]

Pokémon is one of the most complex/hard games there is around my dude, please do not compare the absence of healer gameplay to it.

Tbf, Pokemon manages to hit the whole 'simple to pick up, complex to master' concept many here wish SE would at least attempt with some jobs rather well.

In pokemon:

You can just brute force the story mode as is with your starter and finish the story just fine.
You can also optimize strats, breed for IVs etc. to beat people in PvP or grind through Post game in gens that had one.

[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.

[Crushnight]

As someone who has played every single version of Ast this game has gone through, my fave is still Stormblood’s Ast (post 1.5 cast time on gcds) and it won’t be changing in DT, however I personally feel DT’s version is a step back into the direction of where I liked Ast.


Initial HW Ast: worse designed Ast by far couldn’t even do its primary role to an acceptable state, actively was a hinderance to take an ast over Whm/Sch.


2.2 HW Ast: best ast of HW had good complexity and felt more balanced to Whm, Sch was still a league of its own

2.4 HW ast: Overtuned to all fuck and the starting point of all current Ast design troubles , this is where balance or bust became a thing and shouldn’t have ever been a thing, yet people parroted it long past when they fixed this overtime meant (Balance was 20% dmg up ST and 10% for party, double Ast was viable comp)


SB Ast: still had some complexity, lost a little with Spear change to crit up, but for the better, same for cleric stance removal, overall the healthiest Ast at this point, yet “Balance or bust” remained prominent outcry and due to this ShB changes happened


ShB Ast: do you like vanilla ice cream? Do you like it with nuts or jimmies? Sorry not allowed the old strawberry or chocolate flavours here anymore only vanilla but hey we can give an extra scoop for you personally


EW Ast: 2nd worst Ast by a fair margin instead of improving ShB or reverting back to SB they somehow made it feel worse.


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.

Can’t do balance or bust memes still but it looks like it is trying to add strawberry or chocolate back into it, just instead of a server deciding which flavour you get, you are getting all 3 regardless whether you like them all or not.


I personally see more growth potential in DT Ast than I have done with ShB and EW Ast, it doesn’t feel like it is fixed in its design of “you can only buff damage with cards”

I still remember so many leveling dungeon runs with no mit tanks and the Bole card was the best card in the deck for those scenarios, and it feels DT version is moving back to actually feeling like me the Ast can do clutch heals/mit vs bad players again (bad players will always exist and Ast having ways to mitigate it for yourself I loved)

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

[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]

As someone who has played every single version of Ast this game has gone through, my fave is still Stormblood’s Ast (post 1.5 cast time on gcds) and it won’t be changing in DT, however I personally feel DT’s version is a step back into the direction of where I liked Ast.


Initial HW Ast: worse designed Ast by far couldn’t even do its primary role to an acceptable state, actively was a hinderance to take an ast over Whm/Sch.


2.2 HW Ast: best ast of HW had good complexity and felt more balanced to Whm, Sch was still a league of its own

2.4 HW ast: Overtuned to all fuck and the starting point of all current Ast design troubles , this is where balance or bust became a thing and shouldn’t have ever been a thing, yet people parroted it long past when they fixed this overtime meant (Balance was 20% dmg up ST and 10% for party, double Ast was viable comp)


SB Ast: still had some complexity, lost a little with Spear change to crit up, but for the better, same for cleric stance removal, overall the healthiest Ast at this point, yet “Balance or bust” remained prominent outcry and due to this ShB changes happened


ShB Ast: do you like vanilla ice cream? Do you like it with nuts or jimmies? Sorry not allowed the old strawberry or chocolate flavours here anymore only vanilla but hey we can give an extra scoop for you personally


EW Ast: 2nd worst Ast by a fair margin instead of improving ShB or reverting back to SB they somehow made it feel worse.


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.

Can’t do balance or bust memes still but it looks like it is trying to add strawberry or chocolate back into it, just instead of a server deciding which flavour you get, you are getting all 3 regardless whether you like them all or not.


I personally see more growth potential in DT Ast than I have done with ShB and EW Ast, it doesn’t feel like it is fixed in its design of “you can only buff damage with cards”

I still remember so many leveling dungeon runs with no mit tanks and the Bole card was the best card in the deck for those scenarios, and it feels DT version is moving back to actually feeling like me the Ast can do clutch heals/mit vs bad players again (bad players will always exist and Ast having ways to mitigate it for yourself I loved)

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

The thing is, even at the most generous interpretation, this isn't a step forwards by any means. If anything, it's purely a step to the side. They're restoring a modicum of the effects of the cards, at the expense of the interesting and fun gameplay of having to make do with what you get. It's all well and good to cope and pray that they'll add manipulation back to the job, but even then... would it even matter? Part of the joy of AST, I felt, was having no two pulls feel the same, even on reclear duty where everyone was on the same page and mistakes were extremely uncommon. Saying that you think the DT version lets you feel like AST can do clutch heals/mit vs bad players seems like such a hollow statement to me, bc it tells me that you don't like... idk, process the rest of the kit? Is EW AST suddenly unable to do clutch heals bc it doesn't have an extra 60s mitigation/heal button that every other healer does? Giving cards unique effects but making them completely static utility buttons doesn't do any more than giving us an extra charge of ED or Exaltaton, at the end of the day. You're not going to have access to more on demand spotting tools than you would have if they just increased the amount of our currently existing tools. And people who say this are really starting to confuse me.

It genuinely feels like people just see card vfx on generic, static healing tools with less complexity than aetherflow and just get excited about some fantasization about a return to stormblood when all the things that made stormblood cards aren't coming back. Like, this might be a hot take, but I don't think the effects of StB cards were what made them interesting. It was the randomness, as well as all the manipulation and control you had over them. All we got now is draw, and then playx4. And you can hope for more manipulation, or more buff transferral on the cards but... does it even matter, when you aren't going to have to even think about whether to burn a card with something like royal road or play it wholesale beyond the initial prog of a fight? How is this any more decision making than a scholar deciding if they're going to sacred soil or energy drain?

DT AST might have potential (like, a lot of it. It has to have a lot of potential, bc this base is so boring and simple that it really can't get much more braindead) but square enix has shown that they can only remove complexity from the healer role, and not add it, so I personally expect this job to just be boring, static, and painted with the illusion of the most fun mechanical system this game had. I'm not gonna ask people to like the ShB/EW system as much as I did, but I am going to say... do people really think this is more like stormblood, and is there anything the systems have in common beyond 'card do thing' in the absence of any kind of manipulation, RNG, or other system that ensures that the class continues to give you a unique experience several dozen pulls into a fight? I played AST bc I wanted each pull to feel different, to keep a long night of prog from blurring together from just pressing the same button over and over. With square enix's committal to killing any deviation from their assigned standard of play (goodbye non-standard BLM), I'm extremely unlikely to believe that AST will escape that same fate, and insisting that these DT changes are a step in the right direction when all we get is 'unique card effects' in exchange for 'literally everything else but the vfx' tells me that people excited about this only see AST's cards at their most superficial level. This isn't a brand new baseline, this is the best we're gonna get.

I would love to be wrong, I really would. I would be so overjoyed at playing an AST that once again requires me to think on the fly every pull without settling into a dull, spreadsheeted routine bc that is what all iterations of AST have had (yes, even ShB/EW. Even you have to admit that optimizing those classes took on the fly thinking) that the sting of being wrong would be completely irrelevant. But like forsakenroe said, I'm just gonna be a realist here. We aren't getting more than this, and just adding royal road to the 4 static cards we got wouldn't change a thing. You'd get a bump of decision making in prog, maybe, assuming that it doesn't just turn into 'buff the balance' and then once you settle into your routine you press your malefic rotation until the end of time.

And ultimately speaking, I still shouldn't have to pray that something goes wrong in a fight in order for me to have fun. AST had something for me to do, now it doesn't. And I don't think I'm ever getting it back.

[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.

[Crushnight]

snip

I’m just going to explain my view on why I think DT ast has potential.

DT ast has 4 cards at a time when drawn, this flips to the other cards on next drawing of the deck, so 1st set is always going to be rng on what we get but becomes known for every subsequent drawing.

Now a system like that isn’t bad but definitely easy and requires little to think about.

This system however CAN become more complex depending on effects of the cards

What we know so far:

2 cards will be damage
2 cards will be restorative
2 cards will be mitigation
Lord/Lady will be drawn as well

We are ensured 1 of each type.

Again simple and a downgrade to SB, whether it’s an upgrade over ShB/EW will depend on each card’s effect specifically.

Say 1 damage card is 6% ranged 3% melee, and the other damage card is the inverse. This then forces you to think who best put card on depending on party like you do now for optimising. This is now set to rotate between both after 1st one drawn so gone are days of all melee cards or all ranged cards getting drawn.

Next let’s look at restorative

Restorative is vague and opens up some paths, it could be a burst heal (Lady exists so I don’t think they will do this), it could be a regen heal, it could be a burst mp heal (say 2k), could be an mp regen. The mp burst being 2k can matter and even be a dps increase for say BLM who can get extra Despair in, it isn’t a lot but you do have to start thinking is this mp boost beneficial now or later. This is the potential DT card system has, it can be made more complex, whether it will, is down to the devs(slim hope but it is there).


Mitigation cards can also be made in a few directions, shield/buff/debuff, I didn’t see any card hitting enemy so I doubt debuff card exists for DT, but it effectively could in the future if devs want to add it, it is an option now whether as before it couldn’t be because every card needed to be melee or ranged and provide damage up.



For me and for what I can personally see DT as an upgrade over ShB and EW, but it really will come down to whether or not card effects boil down to just 4 effects with 2 coats of paint each or 8 different effects, if the former it’s going to feel as boring as ShB -> EW but even slower to interact with cards if the latter, it has way more potential to retain some complexity even if draws are slower but ensured.