Astrologian Cards Can't Be a Coin Flip: A petition

[Rowde]

Spear for Bards (10% bonus to crit), Arrow for whoever needs/wants faster cast/recast time, Ewer for mana shortage or helping your co-healer get some MP back when Lucid was down, Bole on tank to spam gravity a couple more times, Spire for when the WAR/DPS ran out of TP because no one uses Goad. Using Bole to enhance cards for extra strength or Spear/Arrow to extend a card for whatever reason.
Just about every card has a situation use, I only ever fished for nothing but Balance on a full-party instance

You could throw Spear on Monk also for Chakra procs if no BRD.

But yah, only time I ever fished for cards was before pulls or while walking between fights in 24-player raids or dungeons.

[Xelanar]

I'm glad for the change mostly cause now I won't have to be fed troll cards on monk cause they feeling trolly. Now having all the cards do buff damage makes the most sense and is what 80% of dps want astro to use anyway. There is a reason Astros were made to -fish- for The Balance. So making all the cards that remain buff damage this is a win. Sides they had to change a few of those cards cause TP is dead and we still don't know how that effects damage and MP. So Astro being untouched after those two changes to the battle system is laughable at best.

I'm not trying to throw shade.. but I have to ask was there REALLY such a choice I keep seeing people say they lost? Cause as far as I know... everyone wanted you to use BALANCE. Noone cared about anything else.

I had situations in Dungeons with 2 melee DPS doing AoE, being out of TP all the time. Spire is the card of choice there. With TP gone this argument is dull at best though.
When raiding sometimes tanks use cooldowns in emergency cases. Cooldowns they normally need for tank busters later on. Bole helps there.
My co-healer dies and has no mana regeneration available -> Ewer.
Or if I am healing alone because my co healer is dead, I can use an AoE Bole to mitigate more.

All of those examples are situational and nothing astrologians would do on a winning run. Because sure - IF everything goes as planned we do want nothing more than spam balance cards all day long like we'll be doing with 5.0. It is those situational possibilities that made the job fun for me though. That and how I had to consider non-optimal card draws into my 'expectations'. I even liked the randomness that sort of balanced out the otherwise powerful card effects.

I'm not speaking for every astrologian ever though, but maybe this helps understand why there is an 'outcry' for losing non-dps-based utility entirely. Because players like me do not treasure DPS above all else.

Not that I believe 5.0 changes to astrologian are bad - they are just shifting the jobs focus, so it will appeal to a different target audience than me.

[Tsukino]

its not about power level, its about choices, playing the card minigame, and using the right cards at the right time. I could care less who was the top heal class in a savage raid. They could give whm a pearl spell which pulse dps every time they heal for all i care. This just gutted one of the most entertaining parts of the class.


Balance/streamlining for duty/savage is ruining the game

I agree with this. I came late to AST, but it became my favorite of the healers because making quick decisions on what to convert to a buff to alter another one, what to save for the next round, and just when to use more situational buffs like The Ewer really made it feel fun to play when I got the hang of it.

These changes seem to boil down to "the only thing raiders care about is The Balance, so let's just make Astrologian Balance Mage." Which seems especially weird given the changes to tanks.

[Reimmi]

It's a shame how the DPS is the only utility that matters crowd killed ast cards :/

[Pehrah]

The cards going to a flat damage boost is a logical thing. The reduced cool down of Lucid dreaming to every minute means constant mana regen plus with piety being the only stat that regens mana faster ewer is kinda pointless now, Spire is gone because of the tp changes, With tanks having so many cool downs and the fact that they can put some on others plus the amount of healing going on because things hit like a truck negates bole and all the other cards are a dps boost anyway.

[Dyvid]

AST prior to 5.0:



AST after 5.0:

[Insertcoins]

AST prior to 5.0:



AST after 5.0:

You say that, but I like to remind you alot of the other effects would be useless with no TP, Tanks having better CDs and more defensive options, Dancer being the party hugger of buffs now. Keeping ast's cards after that would be pointless. It only makes sense that the cards should buff damage.

[Clover_Blake]

I'm very, very disappointed on this. Astrologian is a class I've always loved and enjoyed playing, and now it has been robbed of everything that made it interesting for the sake of... I don't know, maybe for dancer to feel like it's the main buffer now? ;
I can only hope that 6.0 will give us our dear Astrologian back (T____T)

[Shalan]

You say that, but I like to remind you alot of the other effects would be useless with no TP, Tanks having better CDs and more defensive options, Dancer being the party hugger of buffs now. Keeping ast's cards after that would be pointless. It only makes sense that the cards should buff damage.

Because making all six cards do nothing but give a straight up boost to melee or ranged DPS is braindead and boring compared to the old card system. There's no variety, nothing to think about between casts, nothing I can use in them to react to different party setups or situations. I can't prop up an ailing player or give a hefty boost to a good one.
All I can do is a flat 3-6% DPS boost to melee or ranged with all my cards, and that's boring.

Sure, TP is going away, so you can take Spear and make it do something else. But that still leaves me with four other cards for different situations that didn't need to be changed.

[Dyvid]

You say that, but I like to remind you alot of the other effects would be useless with no TP, Tanks having better CDs and more defensive options, Dancer being the party hugger of buffs now. Keeping ast's cards after that would be pointless. It only makes sense that the cards should buff damage.

You can create new effects. The charm of AST was the gamble of the draw and deciding how best to spend it. It could have been a healing potency buff or they could have just made each card a main stat buff.