Goodbye Astro

[NorthernLadMSP]

People exaggerate the old system's RNG aspect...since AST had tools at its disposal to help with RNG like Shuffle and Sleeve Draw etc. It was not as unstable as some people assume.

Some people (not saying you specifically, but just in general) also exaggerate the usefulness of the old system.

[Hatstand]

Fin it truly was optimal to balance fish, then the system needed rebalancing. That, and they needed to replace spire with something actually useful. That said, that could have been achieved without totally gutting the system. Just nerf balance to the point that it's optimal to try to use whatever you get to its best potential (using tools like royal road and shuffle) and maybe add new tools for using unwanted cards. My personal suggestion was to keep divination but have it charge by sacrificing cards to it, such that after you sacrifice 3 cards to it you get an aoe damage buff that will give slightly less dps than using 3 individual arrows or spears. Now every card can be a dps buff, but you still have the versatility of the old kit, and have different offensive options.

What we didn't need was a new system where optimal play is so slightly better than non-optimal play that you start to wonder whether it's more optimal to ignore trying to play optimally in favour of better applying your rules attention elsewhere. It's better than a system that could be played (pretty much) optimally by a program with only two if/else statements.

[Sebazy]

This. I used to use Bole on the Warrior in A12S as a means for them to tank their final large add safely in Deliverance whilst I solo healed at that stage. I don't think I ever remember a clear where I didn't open with Balance and then get a Bole in my pocket in time for those two adds.

I completely get why SE went with the new card system. It's undeniably more consistent and they've actually got a chance of balancing this setup unlike the old one. It just feels so stale in use to me though, the button bloat and APM requirements around Sleeve draw just put me right off it.

[suplejou]

Bye

[Tahldon]

Well, I suppose that is that...

I'm incredibly disheartened to hear that this is the direction that the devs have decided to steer Astrologian.

I've only mained healer since the far, far days of 1.0. When AST first debuted, even though it was seen as inferior to the other healers (in potencies and so on), I mained it because it was the exact sort of healer I'd always wanted and I loved the lore. The cards felt like we were dipping our hands into fate and making things happen with what we were dealt. It felt good. This new system just feels like we have just been twisted by the arm to provide "The Balance". AST is just the peon of other Jobs to provide them with flavorless Damage buffs, apparently... Neither our experience nor the lore matters.

With that said, for a Job I mained exclusively since it was introduced, I will simply turn in my Globe to the GC for seals and wash my hands of it as well.

In the live letter, the devs seemed to respond to the AST question with a slight hint of frustration so maybe they are equally as frustrated as their vision for the job, which many enjoyed, has been reduced to... this.

In any case, I will abstain from playing the job. Hopefully my one voice will join the many others in the player reports to come as tangible feedback of our dissatisfaction with how the job stands at current.

[Mesarthim]

That's funny because a lot of people seem to have a differing opinion. "Absolute Garbage?" Are you sure we're talking about the same job here that I mained all the way throughout late heavensward and all of stormblood?

[Brandedblade]

Except for all the times where matchmaker gives you a configuration where you are getting none of the cards you actually need (which renders half your cards worthless and pointless) and refuses to give you the seals you actually need (which renders divination mostly worthless). Not to mention the fact that the effects are so weak and so short lived that the Old cards stomp on them in terms of gains.

Which is why AST is in such a terrible position that no one wants it except the people who only care about how high their personal numbers can get padded damn the rest.

I am going to be honest, I get far more worthless useless cards with the new AST then I ever got with the old AST. I also get frustrated far more often thanks to the seal system and the melee/range split. At this point if they want to stick with this simplified mess they may as well remove the card system entirely and just give us 3 buttons: A button that buffs a single target on a 30 sec cooldown, the 120 sec cooldown button that buffs the party, and a button that resets the single target buff button and grants 2 charges. Doing that makes the system achieve what the current card system was supposed to achieve while eliminating all of the current systems negatives. The lore of the class will still be destroyed, but at least we wont work harder then other classes who achieve similar results in far fewer button presses for their raid buffs.

In the old system Bole was useful in all content that was not optimized content, which is 95% of the content in the game. Ewer always had a use. In truth thanks to minor arcana all cards were never useless, never worthless. Spire simply needed a rework because it was too niche out of all the cards. I never heard of any card becoming obsolete.

While I agree that it feels bad when you draw nothing but melee cards with 2 ranged in a dungeon and vice versa, I'm calling bull. The difference between a 1 seal and 3 seal divination is only 2% so while yes ofc you should min max it's a small enough difference to not feel bad in my opinion. A 3% boost is still a damage boost anyway, and you also have to remember that healers benefit from the ranged cards and tanks from the melee cards. So if you absolutely positively cared about making sure the strongest version of the card goes out, you do have the option of buffing the tank with melee cards and yourself with ranged.

And so what if Bole and Ewer where occasionally useful? It doesn't change the fact that relying on RNG to help a bad tank mitigate or to sustain your resources is not a healthy design for a class that honestly should lot have those things tied to randomness. At least with the current card system you are providing the same consistent effect, the potency of which is slightly effected by your luck.

[TankHunter678]

While I agree that it feels bad when you draw nothing but melee cards with 2 ranged in a dungeon and vice versa, I'm calling bull. The difference between a 1 seal and 3 seal divination is only 2% so while yes ofc you should min max it's a small enough difference to not feel bad in my opinion. A 3% boost is still a damage boost anyway, and you also have to remember that healers benefit from the ranged cards and tanks from the melee cards. So if you absolutely positively cared about making sure the strongest version of the card goes out, you do have the option of buffing the tank with melee cards and yourself with ranged.

And so what if Bole and Ewer where occasionally useful? It doesn't change the fact that relying on RNG to help a bad tank mitigate or to sustain your resources is not a healthy design for a class that honestly should lot have those things tied to randomness. At least with the current card system you are providing the same consistent effect, the potency of which is slightly effected by your luck.

3% is so minor you do not even notice it. 6% likewise is also so minor you do hardly even notice it. Throwing it on a healer or tank works but ultimately the damage boost is so short lived that it becomes merely a drop in the bucket over the course of the overall fight. Such small buffs work when they have a long duration, not a short duration. This is why the Dancer standard step buff is so good, because it lasts an entire fight and does not lose potency. This is why the old AoE balance was so good, because it could last up to 40 seconds on the party and 55 seconds on the top DPS. This is also why you need to have all 3 seals for divination to even try to be worth its cooldown. Popping it with 4% or merely 5% just is not worthwhile for the cooldown. If the cooldown were shorter or the effect longer it might have been worth using regardless.

Oh and Bole was good not just for bad tanks but for good tanks to mitigate more. The more damage that got mitigated the less healing that had to be done which resulted in more healer DPS to help speed up the run. Ewer was helpful not just for you but for others as well. All you have to do is look at how high the demand was to have a BRD or MCH for refresh, even when their DPS was bad. Not to mention of course how much MP gravity spam could eat up or the high frequency of death in 24 man content.

As it is now we have the options of almost no impact but useful or no impact and useless. With nothing that can be better then expected, only worse then expected.

[Sylve]

Except for all the times where matchmaker gives you a configuration where you are getting none of the cards you actually need (which renders half your cards worthless and pointless) and refuses to give you the seals you actually need (which renders divination mostly worthless). Not to mention the fact that the effects are so weak and so short lived that the Old cards stomp on them in terms of gains.

Lets take the worst possible situation. 2 Melee DPS in a Light Party. Half of my draws are going to them. But the other half go to me. Who is also DPSing. Are you suggesting that Healer DPS is worthless and pointless?
Getting 3 of the same Seal is harder to do than getting 3 different ones.
At the worst possible outcome of only 2 different Seals, We only lose 1% damage off the Divination. Ohnoes, the horror.

Which is why AST is in such a terrible position that no one wants it except the people who only care about how high their personal numbers can get padded damn the rest.

Anyone capable of analyzing logs will spot padded numbers in an instant. This argument also lost all of what little weight it had when FFlogs started awarding the rDPS contributions to the job that provided the buffs.
Given that ASTs were included in week 1 E4S clears, you are wrong.

I am going to be honest, I get far more worthless useless cards with the new AST then I ever got with the old AST.

As I said before, unless you're implying Healer DPS is worthless you are just using buzz words to make it seem like a problem exists where it doesn't.

Arrow on a MNK, SAM or NIN screwed with their rotations by causing drifts in buff/debuff applications and burst windows. They had specific SkS breakpoints they achieved for an optimal rotation, messing with that messed with their DPS.
In the current game, getting random bursts of SS has even more potential for screwing up rotations and cooldowns lining up with how things like the Gunbreaker DoT skill works, among others.
MP was a non issue in all content. TP was a joke.
Those cards had less value the better geared jobs got.

And if you really want to get 'simple', Aside from Bole 5 of the cards were +Damage buffs in various roundabout ways with Balance being objectively the best card.
Even Minor Arcana could screw you over, getting a Lord when you needed/wanted a Lady for Healing. And in doing that, you robbed your party of 30 seconds of boosted damage potential.

It was possible under the old cards to go minutes without meaningful buffs to the party. If you were Royal Roading the first draw to always empower your next one, you had 50% uptime on card buffs. Every MA use was lost damage.
You had a 50% chance to draw a DPS card to start with, so despite the 30 second duration we had a 50% uptime there too over the course of a long fight.

Take off the rose tinted goggles. Old cards had very specific, purely RNG based periods where they were stronger than current cards in very specific moments. Any bad luck strings rendered the entire system literally pointless.
New cards give a reliable rDPS boost across multiple fights. Old cards could never provide that reliability and they sucked as a result.

[TankHunter678]

Lets take the worst possible situation. 2 Melee DPS in a Light Party. Half of my draws are going to them. But the other half go to me. Who is also DPSing. Are you suggesting that Healer DPS is worthless and pointless?
Getting 3 of the same Seal is harder to do than getting 3 different ones.
At the worst possible outcome of only 2 different Seals, We only lose 1% damage off the Divination. Ohnoes, the horror.

Healer DPS is going to be worthless when the tank is doing wall to wall pulls and you spend far more time trying to heal them through all the damage they are taking and cannot spend any of that time DPSing yourself.

Anyone capable of analyzing logs will spot padded numbers in an instant. This argument also lost all of what little weight it had when FFlogs started awarding the rDPS contributions to the job that provided the buffs.
Given that ASTs were included in week 1 E4S clears, you are wrong.

63 ASTs making up 3.2% of the healer parses. While the amount of SCH and WHM parses increased by more then triple going into week 2.

As I said before, unless you're implying Healer DPS is worthless you are just using buzz words to make it seem like a problem exists where it doesn't.

Except of course when so much is pulled or so much damage is taken that you are struggling to keep up with the damage intake and cannot effectively DPS. Which makes your DPS worthless. Even now WHMs expect their co-healer to do all the healing for them.

Arrow on a MNK, SAM or NIN screwed with their rotations by causing drifts in buff/debuff applications and burst windows. They had specific SkS breakpoints they achieved for an optimal rotation, messing with that messed with their DPS.
In the current game, getting random bursts of SS has even more potential for screwing up rotations and cooldowns lining up with how things like the Gunbreaker DoT skill works, among others.
MP was a non issue in all content. TP was a joke.
Those cards had less value the better geared jobs got.

And if you really want to get 'simple', Aside from Bole 5 of the cards were +Damage buffs in various roundabout ways with Balance being objectively the best card.
Even Minor Arcana could screw you over, getting a Lord when you needed/wanted a Lady for Healing. And in doing that, you robbed your party of 30 seconds of boosted damage potential.

It was possible under the old cards to go minutes without meaningful buffs to the party. If you were Royal Roading the first draw to always empower your next one, you had 50% uptime on card buffs. Every MA use was lost damage.
You had a 50% chance to draw a DPS card to start with, so despite the 30 second duration we had a 50% uptime there too over the course of a long fight.

Take off the rose tinted goggles. Old cards had very specific, purely RNG based periods where they were stronger than current cards in very specific moments. Any bad luck strings rendered the entire system literally pointless.
New cards give a reliable rDPS boost across multiple fights. Old cards could never provide that reliability and they sucked as a result.

If MP was a non-issue in all content then why was Refresh a requirement? Why was refresh needed in all raid content? Oh, because it was always an issue despite the better gear. Especially in content where death was common or content that was optimized with it in mind.

Yeah Spire needed a rework. I keep saying that spire needed a rework. Even in the post you quote from I said spire needed a rework because it was too niche.

And sorry to say I do not have rose tinted goggles. I am talking gameplay I had before this expansion dropped and made AST an absolute pain to play. You cannot have rose tinted goggles for something not even 2 months old.

Yeah the new cards are "reliable" so "reliable" that they induce frustration when they show how "reliable" they are when they screw me over. Where the old cards gave me possibility the new cards give me frustration.

Which is why if they want to stick with this path I say remove the cards entirely. If they want us to have reliable buffs then actually make them reliable. Remove the melee/range split and seals which only exists for the purpose of even having the cards to begin with. Make it so we got 1 ST buff button on a 30 sec cooldown, give us "divination" on that 120 sec cooldown, give us "sleeve draw" for resetting the ST buff and granting it extra charges. With all the extra buttons removed they could fill in those gaps with potentially extra buffs or fill in our weak points such as lack of secondary MP source.

Then we would have reliable, consistent buffs. Sure it comes at the cost of everything the class was built up to be. Sure it comes at the cost of a large amount of pissed off upset AST players. At least it would make the balance only people happy. It would also mean that we put about as much effort into the party buff as other classes do.