Thread: Astrologian 5.0 Discussion

I'm. I'm pretty sure I hate these changes. Not to healing and the dps ratio I'm actually 100% on board with that. But with the changing of the cards you've removed a lot of the flavor that came with the job I feel. But I didn't exactly want to state my particular feelings until the job came out. Generally with changes in any game for good or bad I can just go with the flow and see how they rock and either reaffirm or rebuff my previous worries. But this is probably the first time a change has happened that I just can't stop thinking about in my daily activities.

This might get a tiiiiiny bit wordy for something just talking about some cards but...
And feel free to disagree with me.


Class Identity

I mean why did people come to AST to begin with? What drew you in? For me when I saw that they were adding it I immediately renewed my subscription towards the tail end of HW (by which I mean starting over again for reasons) and blitz WHM all the way up till the end of ARR just so I could immediately and easily slide into AST. If you couldn't tell, my naming convention was partially influenced.

So I see the trailer and:

• The AST draws the cards and deals them out
• There's an element of randomness here (one of my favorites)
• Each card had a unique effect.
• It's motif is based around the stars, divination, and readings? With a small portion of time manipulation

Well consider me sold. The randomness and unpredictability of just exactly what you were drawing but how in theory every card could potentially have it's place was right what the doctor ordered. I had thought with everything said and done the existence of any card was good enough for taxes to certain aspect of our kit.

The Balance

I'm pretty sure an AST would be making a liar out of themselves if they didn't say it was a somewhat cathartic experience pulling this darn card. Especially in HW where your options, while varied did not include something called Spear in it, which would annihilate the dps you threw it on.

And I've seen to death the arguments about "Balance fishing" from here and elsewhere

• DPS is all that matters on speedruns
• Bole isn't that useful after progression
• Those other cards are only used in dungeons
• AST needs consistency

Frankly AST was conceptually designed around it's nature of randomness and use of our skills would help us assuage some of that while not eliminating it.

Personally I think if consistency in increasing damage was so important they could have just allowed for reverse readings of the cards you draw which flips their effects and applies a debuff on the boss.
Ewer provides magical vuln
Spire provides physical vuln
Bole is just balance but maybe weaker.

Problem solved. Right?

Divination

So this skill might be the best thing ever since sliced bread. Like maybe the reduction of our cards to basically 3 versions of itself will be made super exciting when attached to this skill.
I'm not sure. I don't think "various effects" are easily replaced with "the same effect but spread" when it comes to satisfying the fantasy of divination in play. Not to mention that with the changes to our cards they're technically "harder" to use well conceptually since now they're just dps centric and rotation dependent.

7th dragon VFD has a similar effect with it's duelist class but in that game there were more combinations of "colors" you could use and the actions themselves had different properties and uses.

I think this ability could work well if there were various effects depending on the combination of seals you had. Wouldn't that have been fun?

Conclusion
Not sure I have one to give. Just a wordy post about how against I am to the new changes. There's something real and tangible about job identity that feels like it's being lost here. As always I'll defer judgement until release. I'm sure Yoshi and his team went through more deliberation than we are doing right now. And realistically I don't know why I'm so against the new direction our cards are being taken. While this has indescribably dampened my desire to play the job to a very large degrees, I'll put my faith in Yoshi and at least try it out.

Maybe it plays and feels the same owing to divination?

TL;DR
I'm still "wait and see" but this kind of bums me out.