Goodbye Astro

[Violet_Galaxy]

Slightly off topic, but did they ever address how they are going to rework the lore behind the cards? I just think that's rather lazy of them to change the way the cards work but not actually change the card images. Anyway, what drew me to AST was the RNG aspect of the class which made it unpredictable and fun to me and it looks like that is gone for good. Sad panda I am. Even with the buffs, it's just a really clunky and boring class to play.

[Almostward]

Slightly off topic, but did they ever address how they are going to rework the lore behind the cards? I just think that's rather lazy of them to change the way the cards work but not actually change the card images. Anyway, what drew me to AST was the RNG aspect of the class which made it unpredictable and fun to me and it looks like that is gone for good. Sad panda I am. Even with the buffs, it's just a really clunky and boring class to play.

They said no changes are coming to Astro. So I'm guessing they gave up with the lore also.

[Brandedblade]

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.

Geez, it's almost like AST cant single weave most of its cooldowns on its AoE nuke, and that one of its main ogcd heals also doesn't do AoE splash damage, and doesn't have a cooldown that expressly allows it to instant cast both its healing and dps spells.


Oh wait.

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.

Because to be blunt, MP regeneration and stacking worked differently in 4.0. Ewer wasnt bad because its effect was bad, but because it was tied to RNG and therefore an unreliable source of mana regen. Refresh and Mana Shift (which btw where used more to extend Foe's on a brd then to actually restore the party's mp) where guaranteed effects and therefore could be planned around the use of. Now mp is a flat static value and piety helps increase the regen rate, alongside the fact that Lucid now has a higher uptime.

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.

Because people would get salty that their cards are gone. As much as the forum hates the cards as they are now they're still a system that adds an extra layer of uniqueness and monitoring to the class. God forbid the dev team try to keep the core aesthetic of the job intact and try to keep some level of the rng feel without making half of the effects niche at best and worthless at worse.

[TankHunter678]

Geez, it's almost like AST cant single weave most of its cooldowns on its AoE nuke, and that one of its main ogcd heals also doesn't do AoE splash damage, and doesn't have a cooldown that expressly allows it to instant cast both its healing and dps spells.

Oh wait.

Yeah, I've dropped tanks trying to do that. Wall to wall pulls are a nasty business when you do not have top DPS that can burn things down quickly enough that the tank blowing all their cooldowns and the healer trying to keep them up do not run out of cooldowns before the mobs take the tank down. Even the crazy tank players I know all say that when they get an AST they pull carefully because AST wont be able to handle the wall to wall pulls even with them popping invulnerability skills.

Because to be blunt, MP regeneration and stacking worked differently in 4.0. Ewer wasnt bad because its effect was bad, but because it was tied to RNG and therefore an unreliable source of mana regen. Refresh and Mana Shift (which btw where used more to extend Foe's on a brd then to actually restore the party's mp) where guaranteed effects and therefore could be planned around the use of. Now mp is a flat static value and piety helps increase the regen rate, alongside the fact that Lucid now has a higher uptime.

Lucid has a higher uptime and MP issues remain, such that RDM had to get its entire ST rotation slashed in terms of costs because it was literally unsustainable and SMNs still complain about MP issues of their own. SCHs had to beg to get energy drain back so they did not enter a feast or famine situation in terms of MP. Noct AST is pretty much not viable due to its high MP costs and need for a secondary MP source as Lucid cannot keep up. It was not as much a problem in the past... because we had a secondary MP source: Ewer.

Because people would get salty that their cards are gone. As much as the forum hates the cards as they are now they're still a system that adds an extra layer of uniqueness and monitoring to the class. God forbid the dev team try to keep the core aesthetic of the job intact and try to keep some level of the rng feel without making half of the effects niche at best and worthless at worse.

Not any more complaints then what we have now. What we have now is just as bad on the lore front and worse then that in usability or reliability. What uniqueness they had was stripped away for simplification. With less monitoring needed then other classes need for their gauges.

And guess what? The devs killed the core aesthetic of the job which is tied as much into the lore or the cards, effects of the cards, and feel as it is the pretty graphics. They seriously could make that one button ST buff ability use the same animation we have now using a randomized card appearance and nothing would change. You just would not have to deal with the clunky frustrating system that one single card being all the cards produced.

[Side-Eye]

Ewer wasnt bad because its effect was bad, but because it was tied to RNG and therefore an unreliable source of mana regen.

Ewer wasn't necessarily "tied to RNG" because IF doing new content or otherwise finding yourself (or teammate) running into mana trouble often, you could set Ewer aside to use it when you needed it. In fact any utility could be set aside like that. There were times when I was healing a squishy tank who thought s/he HAD to pull big .. so I'd set aside Bole, use it on a big pull, and when I drew Bole again I'd set it aside. I viewed these as an extra, not a necessity, *because* there was still RNG and it was possible not to see a specific card before you'd want to use it. *shrug* I thought it was fun.

Indeed, the beauty of the astrologian, at least the 4.0 version, was that its great variety of tools was a bit limited by RNG and you couldn't just click any utility on demand -- but the class ((WHEN PLAYED WELL)) had elegant methods of mitigating the randomness. You could plan some of those methods in advance depending on environmental variables, such as what kind of boss fight was coming up, or whether you had a weaker geared tank, whether there was a DPS check to get past, etc.

It's sad to read from people who apparently never played AST to its full potential. When I hear things like "fishing for balance" or "only two cards were useful" -- I see a red flag, someone whose comments should probably be disregarded, or at best, taken as a third-party perspective.

[KanameYuuki]

God forbid the dev team would respect its lore and core identity, cards are gone, the devs should at least had the courage and go all the way instead of that half made job.

People keep bringing, X card was great but not reliable then its "useless", well yeah, AST was unpredictable that's whole the idea, a literal Job based on RNG, on a game full of rotations and scripted fights AST was the only one with some leeway for free form and improvisation, god forbid there is something like that for players who enjoy it, you get a defense boost and need it then you use it, otherwise redraw, spread for later if you know a pull is coming, burn for RR or minor it, same spire same ewer. Now it has been completely sanitized, you don't even have to take the effort of getting 3 different seals with the new 5.05 change.

Fights are so boring I even started to count bosses auto attacks and casting the needed heal just to keep my mind focused on anything.

For AST like us who had learned and took decisions in all kind of different situations about when or how to use X card feel nothing but boredom looking at Blue = melee , purple = range.

And that was just the cards, we also have the loss of Time Dilatation and CO that gave even more strategy to the class, it was such a complete package.

[KanameYuuki]

And for the people who think this is just a small group of us upset, I would love if you check the JP side, so many first time posters going there to either express their disappointment or outright say they will quit AST altogether, with a ton of likes on each post too.

[Almostward]

And for the people who think this is just a small group of us upset, I would love if you check the JP side, so many first time posters going there to either express their disappointment or outright say they will quit AST altogether, with a ton of likes on each post too.

Really? It's that bad there also?

Guess I need to check that out

[Wawachume]

SCHs had to beg to get energy drain back so they did not enter a feast or famine situation in terms of MP.

That wasn't really the problem for scholar---at least not for me, and I think not for most people. The reason I wanted energy drain back wasn't for the MP or the damage, but just to have a button to dump excess aetherflow stacks, because wasting resources felt bad on a job themed partly around resource management.

To the extent that energy drain has helped with my mana situation, it's not really because it restores MP, but because I'm no longer hesitating to recast aetherflow if I haven't used all the stacks.

They seriously could make that one button ST buff ability use the same animation we have now using a randomized card appearance and nothing would change. You just would not have to deal with the clunky frustrating system that one single card being all the cards produced.

I think I honestly would have preferred that. I don't know that the new card system is more or less complex than the old one; I kind of think it's apples and oranges. All I know is that I enjoyed the complexity of the old one and don't enjoy the complexity of the new one. So if the old system had to go, I'd have preferred a really simple card system combined with increased complexity elsewhere in the job.

[Hanayumi]

Probably in the minority here, but I kinda like how the base cards are now, personally runs feel a lot smoother to me than they did before the changes. A couple things I am not enjoying however is noct, barely even touch that lately, so hope they figure something out with it and also kinda wish lord and lady did... something else, just find them kinda boring as "slightly" better versions of base cards... heck id take their old effects to be honest...