Astrologian 5.0 Discussion

[Allegor]

No one is saying it was perfect. Literally all that needed to be done was modify Spire and Balance really. "This" card system didn't need to happen. The old system didn't need to be as gutted as it was for a system people who didn't even really play AST seem to like (and if they did play AST and hate it then ???).

See here's the thing. They didn't have to do something because in case you haven't noticed AST popularity seems to have tanked quite a bit, unless I am mistaken. Drop the whole "no matter what X does, Y will be angry" stuff. AST didn't deserve this because guess what? There's 2 other healers for the people who didn't like AST before to play. Maybe one of them could suit them.

I really don't seem to be seeing sunshines and rainbows with the current AST, nor do a lot of other people if you've been keeping up with the community.

Balance could've been changed to direct hit, Spire to idk, bonus HP/movement speed/received healing/whatever, and keep the seals idea to proc Divination [but get rid of the stupid melee/ranged separation]. Old cards are back, the seals stay, there, best of both worlds.

[Billythepancake]

Ast is in a good spot numbers wise, it's just that some people dont find it fun, and that will always be a matter of perspective. Like I've said, and what the developers said, someone will always be mad about something and theres no point in trying to please everyone. They made this change because people complained about the rng and because they've attempted to reduce class synergies, hence why the cards only provide one type of damage gain.

As has been mentioned before, damage mitigation and resource management should never be tied to rng because you cannot quantify their value when you arent guaranteed to have it. And for the latter that had been removed across the board, why should only ast have access to mp regen when ranged physical lost their refresh and casters lost mana shift? Why does astro need Bole on rng when it already has access to shielding and Collective for damage mitigation? Why should it have access to crit and haste on an rng when it could just consistently provide damage buffs that can be consistently quantified and balanced around?

I get that y'all want nuance and for luck to decide what you have to deal with. But alot of the things provided from the old card system are at best things that shouldn't be tied to random chance and at worst removed from other classes. While they could improve the interactivity of the current system in some regards, what the current system provides is still the healthiest system for balancing AST's contribution to its group.

With the logic of "no matter what you do somebody will be unhappy" Why have anything? You could apply that logic to LITERALLY anything. Why have dogs? Somebody out there doesn't like dogs. Why have video games? Somebody out there isn't going to like your video game, it's a dumb argument, especially when we can see with the few resources we have that the VAST MAJORITY of people do not like current AST. If 90% of people like the old thing and 10% like the new thing, I dunno, a part of me thinks it's smarter to side with the 90%, especially if you're a company that relies on making people happy for a living.

[MintnHoney]

Ast is in a good spot numbers wise, it's just that some people dont find it fun, and that will always be a matter of perspective. Like I've said, and what the developers said, someone will always be mad about something and theres no point in trying to please everyone. They made this change because people complained about the rng and because they've attempted to reduce class synergies, hence why the cards only provide one type of damage gain.

So then the solution, to the complaint you're bringing up, is to give the AST player an entirely different kind of RNG (one that's more infuriating), along with a play style that console players have difficulty actually enjoying, all while tearing the job fantasy to shreds?
Who are they trying to please, exactly? Looking it over, it looks like they tried to please as little of their AST players as possible while, again, aiming to making the DPS players happy.

why should only ast have access to mp regen when ranged physical lost their refresh and casters lost mana shift?

1) Ranged Physical doesn't need to regen MP to continue to do their basic function.
2) Casters lost their mana shift to stop BLM, Yoshi's favorite class, from having to be anything more than a selfish DPS. It just so happens that this also puts additional pressure on Healers and RDM to avoid using too much of their MP for anything other than their respective basic function.
3) Because AST doesn't have an alternative Mana recovery tool like the other healers, and, frankly, needs it.

Why does astro need Bole on rng when it already has access to shielding and Collective for damage mitigation?

Why should Astro be the only Healer that is required to stand still and do nothing for a prolonged period of time in order to get the most out of its kit, and with a low return as well?

Why should it have access to crit and haste on an rng when it could just consistently provide damage buffs that can be consistently quantified and balanced around?

Because those are three separate kinds of buffs that aid different playstyles/builds/characters and which are, still, easily balanced around.

I get that y'all want nuance and for luck to decide what you have to deal with. But alot of the things provided from the old card system are at best things that shouldn't be tied to random chance and at worst removed from other classes.

They were removed from classes with the reasoning that only Dancer may have a "synergy," in an effort to reduce the amount of groups that formed based upon having "the best combination" aka a meta. Problem being, that thinking is incredibly short-sighted, because a meta will always exist when there are even the most minute of differences, therefore their ideas to stop a "meta" from happening was never going to work.

While they could improve the interactivity of the current system in some regards, what the current system provides is still the healthiest system for balancing AST's contribution to its group.

In the sense that no one else is allowed to have anything else, sure. I can't wait for their next idea to make healers more interactive and focused on healing, while remaining balanced: remove OGCD healing entirely. But, wait: they know it sounds bad, but, they're giving the healers another group healing GCD that does the same thing as your previous group-healing GCD, but they stuck a pretty picture on it for the icon and made it a role action!

[Shurrikhan]

...

(Note: I'm pretty much 100% in agreement here.)

1) To be fair, making MP a non-mechanic to the gameplay (more than hit LD once per minute) of all but a few jobs was already a pretty contentious decision. Even as dull as TP and MP outside of PLD, DRK, BLM, and maybe AST/WHM/SCH was/is, it was still a decent enough mechanic. It just needed polish when combining TP into MP.

2) I'd like Mana Shift back. It was a mechanic with no net gain, but great situational value. It felt... good. Heck, just change TP to MP, increase %MP on rez (e.g. to a rez's worth of MP), and decrease the absurd costs to physical AoEs to the same ratio to single-target costs as held by caster AoEs.

3) Agreed. This. So much this. WHM already has this across two skills, SCH across one. Why not one, which would be shareable at that, for AST?

[Sloprano]

(Note: I'm pretty much 100% in agreement here.)

1) To be fair, making MP a non-mechanic to the gameplay (more than hit LD once per minute) of all but a few jobs was already a pretty contentious decision. Even as dull as TP and MP outside of PLD, DRK, BLM, and maybe AST/WHM/SCH was/is, it was still a decent enough mechanic. It just needed polish when combining TP into MP.

2) I'd like Mana Shift back. It was a mechanic with no net gain, but great situational value. It felt... good. Heck, just change TP to MP, increase %MP on rez (e.g. to a rez's worth of MP), and decrease the absurd costs to physical AoEs to the same ratio to single-target costs as held by caster AoEs.

3) Agreed. This. So much this. WHM already has this across two skills, SCH across one. Why not one, which would be shareable at that, for AST?

Frankly I'd love to see them make mp not necessarily a non-issue but bake it into the playstyle like BLM does it or how SCH used to to it with Aetherflow giving a lot more. So you'd have another reason to want to activate AF soon as it goes off cooldown and need to make snap decision if you need a powerful AF heal or get mana back with Energy Drain.

That way WHM could get Shroud of Saints back with hopefully another hook to it for their playstyle and give AST their own interesting MP recovery thing that would flow naturally. Like wasn't there a card that gave mp regen, but also you could choose to sacrifice a card for some mp in a pinch.

[Punslinger]

I can't wait for their next idea to make healers more interactive and focused on healing, while remaining balanced: remove OGCD healing entirely.

I'm not gonna lie, that would actually improve matters significantly. Provided that direct-healing oGCDs were replaced by a combination of synergistic oGCDs (like Lightspeed, Plenary, Synastry, etc.) and more interesting GCD heals, of course.

Healing was a lot more fun in ARR than it is in ShB, precisely because in ARR we didn't have a half-dozen powerful oGCD heals to deal with tankbusters and raidwides. WHM had Bene, SCH had three charges of Lustrate, and that was it. There was a lot less downtime for healers, because we had to rely a lot more on GCD healing.

Healing has gotten easier and easier with each expansion, to the point that healers are now mostly just DPSers with a braindead-easy "rotation" who occasionally press buttons to heal people. And this is because with every expansion, healers got more powerful tools while fight damage as a percentage of HP stayed mostly constant.

In six years, WHM's oGCD toolkit went from this:

• Benediction
• Divine Seal
• Presence of Mind

Total: 3 oGCDs with 1 direct heal

To this:

• Benediction
• Tetragrammaton
• Assize
• Asylum
• Temperance
• Presence of Mind
• Divine Benison
• Thin Air
• Plenary Indulgence

Total: 9 oGCDs with 5 direct heals

And SCH's toolkit went from this:

• Lustrate
• Sacred Soil
• Whispering Wind
• Fey Illumination
• Fey Covenant

Total: 5 oGCDs with 3 direct heals

To this:

• Lustrate
• Sacred Soil
• Whispering Wind
• Fey Illumination
• Indomitability
• Excogitation
• Aetherpact
• Emergency Tactics
• Deployment Tactics
• Recitation
• Fey Blessing
• Summon Seraph

Total: 12 oGCDs with 7 direct heals

(And that's not counting Shroud of Saints in ARR, which was just an enmity reducer, or Dissipation since HW, which is a terrible cooldown that nobody uses.)

Is it any wonder that healers have so much downtime? In fact, there are so many healing tools even for WHM that WHMs use Assize on-cooldown for the DPS, since their other tools are more than enough to cover the needed healing from fights. And SCHs asked for Energy Drain back after 5.0, because they couldn't use their Aetherflow stacks fast enough.

[Allegor]

Tbh I don't know how people played WHM during ARR. I know content was likely much harder by those standards but in Raid roulette having only Cures and Medicas bores me faster than spamming Stone. SCH is much more interactive by comparison.

[Schan]

Tbh I don't know how people played WHM during ARR. I know content was likely much harder by those standards but in Raid roulette having only Cures and Medicas bores me faster than spamming Stone. SCH is much more interactive by comparison.

As that might be true I can tell you that only having succor as your aoe heal was pretty bad. Despite that I miss those times. Healers had clearer strengths and weaknesses and worked together well because they covered each other(granted it was just those 2). Then the devs decided to start giving every healer everything (aka covering their own weaknesses) so now we got this unfun state where everyone plays pretty much the same.

The feeling I got from HW is still my favorite but I have no idea if the devs were going for what I could feel from the healers back then. WHM had the power heals with strong aoe healing (and holy); SCH with the strong single target oGCDs healing and mitigation and AST as the super mobile healer with weaker heals but more utility (they dropped the ball on AST though).

But then we got powercreep when it came to fight design and mechanic vomit screwing over WHM who was the least mobile of the healers amongs other factors (if i sit her discussing how several factors screwed WHM over time I would probably stay here forever so i'm moving on).

I can see how that felt cool on paper but quickly clashed with fight design alone which makes me sad but I guess it wasn't meant to be.

[Johaandr]

They should have the second drawn card into force to use.
And have the 1st drawn card into royal or stuff.
Cards only usable in battle. Turn spire into dh and ewer into some kind of regen.
Lower balance dmg buff to 5 or 2.5. I dunno.

SE should stop and be like «no ast remains as it is now.»

[Impurrrsive]

Healing has gotten easier and easier with each expansion, to the point that healers are now mostly just DPSers with a braindead-easy "rotation" who occasionally press buttons to heal people.

Omg, this through and through harsh reality, a slap to the face. It is true... I didn't notice it before
The synergy btw WHM and SCH in ARR. Its something fun, each have weaknesses. Now we are just gods descended from heaven to save ppl from death, ironically ppl still die