Attributes Hurts Astrologian

[Mikey_R]

Crit, Determination, Haste, Direct Hit..

My fantasy of the job is astrologian can give buffs to increase stats for period of time

They tried that in HW/SB, guess what, it all came down to Spread Balance as the one thing you wanted. You could get away with a spread spear, but it was deemed inferior.

However, regardless of that, I still do not understand the correlation between players having attributes and that being a detriment to AST having different cards. Having different cards that increase different stats is still a thing you can do, regardless of whether every job has a standardised set of stats or not.

Basically, Astrologian suffers more than almost any other job from the fact ‘party support’ has been completely condensed to ‘you give an damage up buff to someone’, when they could at least try to make it more interesting

Old cards were damage up (Balance), GCD speed up (Arrow), oGCD speed up [later changed to Crit rate up] (Spear), mitigation (Bole), TP refresh (Spire) and MP refresh (Ewer). Despite this, all everyone wanted was Balance and later Spear as a lesser Balance.

You also had the fact you could enhance cards to change effects, enhance (made stronger), extend (longer buff) and spread, made them AoE. there was quite a system behind it all, but it all boiled down to several things. The first being, you couldn't guarantee Bole would be up for a mechanic, so you couldn't rely on it over other tools. TP and MP refresh were made redundant by Bards/Machinists, plus, it couldn't be relied upon, plus you didn't know if the players in question had a Lucid/Invigorate about to come off of cooldown, which would make the card a wasted use.

This leaves Balance, Arrow and Spear. Starting with Arrow, getting arrow was bad, you went though your resources much quicker and so you were more likely to run out. Exception being BLM, having basically unlimited resources. Next, Spear. Originally being an oGCD recast reducer, it caused issues with alignment, especially for things like Trick Attack, plus, just like the GCD, the effect only took place if you used the oGCD when you had Spear up, which limited it's usefulness even more.

So, now we are at Balance and Spear 2.0 (crit increase). Both increased damage in different ways, Balance increased the party damage more mathematically than Spear, so it was the one that was preferred over Spear.

So really, it was down to RNG making mitigation/resource gain useless, one making the party do less damage due to lack of resources later in fights and the prevalence of damage is king that essentially forced players into spread Balance or spread Spear as your only 2 real options. If you want to have something more interesting, why not bring forward some suggestions, keeping in mind what has come before and how the player base treated it.