Quote Originally Posted by Seraphor View Post
It's not 6 skills though is it, it's only 2 or 3. Draw, Play and Minor Arcana.

Having played AST for 5 levels now, having come from an position of initial disappointment, it's growing on me again.

Potencies could do with tweaking, CO and CU feel a bit like wet noodles, but it's nice to know they're there for a healing boost.
But once you get Intersection, it's nice to throw out the odd shield in Diurnal, as it's on such a short cooldown. Coming from a DRK main, it feels like what shields should be, situational to react to incoming damage spikes.

I've actually enjoyed healing dungeons now though, I'm making full use of Lightspeed (previously used purely for Gravity spam) and Synastry (often ignored before ShB) and it feels more engaging.


The cards... aren't so bad.
Balance needed a slight nerf, let's be honest, and once you factor in the fact that Balance was a 1-in-6 before (or a 16.6% chance, 36.6% chance when factoring in redraw) with Arrow and Spear not being as effective, the potencies averaged out aren't that much lower. Given that you've basically gone from a 36.6% chance tops to a 100% chance, the nerf seems proportional. From 10% to 6%, on a half duration, is 30% of the averaged potency, and 40% on a Minor Arcana. It's almost perfect. Given that over the course of 3mins you'll use 3 of the base cards (30%) and between as many as 6 Minor Arcana with Sleeve draw (40%) it's basically the same 36.6%.

You've basically lost the RNG aspect entirely when it comes to individual cards, and only need to worry about it for the seal mechanic. That is to say, your outgoing rDPS is no longer RNG dependant, the RNG is entirely contained within your personal mechanic management.

When it comes to Divination/Expanded-Balance, it's a similar situation, but it is a nerf.
Again factoring in redraws, you had a 26% chance to draw an Expanded-Balance over a minute*, you now have a virtually 100% chance to gain a full Divination over 3 minutes, so 33% efficiency in comparison to that 26%.
33% over 26% is... 126% as efficient, and at 6% instead of 5% damage up, it's another 16% more potent for a total of 142% of the averaged potency. Plug in the halved duration, and it's 71% as efficient as the old Expanded-Balance. If you want to give Divination a like-for-like potency, then it could be reduced to a 130s cooldown, therefore a neater 120s cooldown would actually be a slight buff.

As for the agency of choosing where the cards go, this is what I was most concerned about when we first got the tooltips, and initially, it bothered me. But it's really just a matter of adjusting. Choosing where to apply to ranged or melee, is fundamentally no different from the axiomatic application of crit to BRD/MNK, or speed to SAM/BLM. You just lose the grey area of "I don't have a BRD or a MNK, where does this Spear go?" which to me always made it feel more disappointing that I hadn't drawn a Balance instead...


I'll not check if all the math is correct, but instead I'll asume that it is, because from where I am standing it does not make a difference if those changes were a nerf, buff or a clever mathematical formula that balanced it out perfectly.

My argument being, that for me personally it is not all about efficiency. Of course I want to play efficiently but I want to actually have fun while doing so. I loved the versatility of the old card system, even if I was balance fishing most of the time. Having a kit of situational cards at my disposal and being able to use them felt way more rewarding than mindlessly slapping the same buff on players every 30 seconds. Even if they tweaked numbers and made card buffs +50% damage for 15 seconds - I could not care less, because it would still be the same boring, uninteresting mechanic we have now.

I know not everyone will agree with me here, but I'd prefer the array of strong card options we had beforehand, situational as they were. So for me problems lie within Astrologian's new core card mechanics - not exclusively, but in parts. Numbers can be tweaked and adjusted quickly. Entire mechanics cannot.

During expert roulettes I find myself sometimes drawing ewers and boles, whishing their old effects were back so I could spend my mana more freely or help my tank mitigate through all those adds he pulled in overconfidence.

Those cards are far from the only thing that went completely wrong in my eyes though. What about interesting Skills? Does it feel awesome or impactful to use the 'reworked' Celestial Opposition? Or Horoscope? Or Divination? I'd wager that... no, it does not(at least for me it certainly doesn't). Awesome was stacking all those HoTs/Buffs on a tank and use Time Dilation to extend them all at once - it felt powerful, even more so when timed so they'd fall under the previous Celestial Opposition extension effect. Even using Neutral Sect feels awesome because by all uselessness and overhealing the ability provides it at least give the impression of making a difference.

In short: using those skills feels/felt rewarding. Using the new cards/Horoskope/Divination/Celestial Opposition fails to deliver the same, leaving Astrologian with mostly uninteresting stuff, that replaced something superior in terms of fun factor.