New AST from a New Player

[Yanyami]

I've been a new player at the start of the Stormblood expansion.I picked AST to play as my main... i stopped playing the job after a week or two after i had hit the 70lvl... Wall to wall tanks were a plague for a new players... especialy as a Healer

- I remember SB AST card game goal was just chasing for the BALANCE card and believe in RNGsus... and it was an headhache sometimes. Don't you remember this :"Damn..should i keep this BOLE card for the next tank buster ? what if i get a SPIRE if i redraw ? But i could get a BALANCE too !" (and some dps died while you were pondering)... you redraw a card and get an EWER ...
- Let's be honest ... BOLE, SPIRE, EWER were just card you used for royal road.. and sometimes.. really rarely you used the cards for their effect... i'm not even talking about SPEAR and ARROW cards that were just seen as bad draws.

I gave up AST for WHM and things became way more easier without that damn RNG card game.
But let's talk about the Shadowbringer expansion. I've played WHM mostly.. but i decided to give the new AST a chance, and i found the job far better to play. The card game is more instinctive and i've never been brainfucked by it since. There's still bonuses to play the card game but it's no longer bound to RNG.. (thanks to the new minor arcana)
So yeah, for me the new AST rocks. But i understand others may not enjoy it.

I think we could come back to unique card effects as long as we keep minor arcana to switch the card to a dps buff. But the dev team wanted some kind of balance between the healers, maybe it would be really unbalanced with these cards.

oh and btw.. i never met any difficulties in healing as an AST for now.. even with dumb tanks that dont use their mitigation tools or dps seeking death in AoE for that position strike they need.. The only issue may be the MP cost of nocturnal spells (diurnal are fine) but nothing that some Piety melding can resolve.

[ZeroFool]

The healing seems to be in a good place with AST, which can probably be said for all the healers. I think the main points of contention has been less about each healer job's effectiveness in their role and more about how they feel to play, which while subjective and is a matter of taste, has been widely considered such a drastic departure from what was already enjoyed by many players for years to something so unrecognizable that long-time players have been dropping it en masse.

That's not to say that changes shouldn't be made; they should be made to maintain healthy engagement with ALL classes. But what the devs seem to have done is applied a sledgehammer to a doornail, leaving little to no room for compromise between old AST and new AST.

And there was such a large space for compromise too, if they even took the opportunity to explore them. The Minor Arcana conversions for example could have been the guaranteed DPS buff regardless of the card pulled, pleasing the big numbers crowd and the ASTs who wanted to preserve unique effects. Just anything that would indicate more than "We see people complain about not getting one card enough, so despite the fact that that is the point of the card mechanic from the start, we made every card the same without gauging how that would affect the people that have played and enjoyed it like this for years."

Compromise is meant to reconcile opposing sides. Now that they have acknowledged that "some people loved the old system, and some love the new" then maybe they can begin to work on compromise; the problem here is that they've set themselves up for an uphill battle to achieve a happy medium while also saying that they have no interest in even doing so.

[Nhala_Levee]

LunarShadow67

This is something you cant understand, until you dont play the real astrologian.
In final fantasy, every character made for having fun and meanings by they own ways. Now, astrologian is what you see. A healer with dmg buffs and without a realy helping spells.
In the old times, astrologian had a system that was fascinating, fantastic. Gived you the feeling to yell when you made a nice buff combination. As every 6 card had diferent buffs, those was useful even as they own, you could combined them for being more helpfull.
I learned all the cards and they every effects even alone or in "royal road spell" and when i draw a card, no matter which one, i saw every possibility of it and had the feeling "YAY now i made this combo, or that combo". It was a realy nice feeling and enjoying one.
But players nowadays just want a buffer for they raid content. Yes, raids are part of the game. But a very little part. And reworking a class to be just for that, is a very bad idea.
Now, when i draw a card, i just dont feel anthing, just drop it on someone, cause no matter anymore. No more possibilities, no more combinations. Astrologian simply lost that very nice feeling to "being completed something".

And no, it was not easy to play it. But it was much more satisfaction when you played it well. Now just feeling "eh, put card", cause every card is just the same. No matter what you do with it, just need to do it 3 times and boom aoe dmg buff. ONLY dmg buff.
I miss the possibilities, the ways as you can guide the fate with your cards. The utilitys.
Sadly as i told, you never can understand this, as you didnt played the real astrologian back in those times. It just a weak shadow of that. :/

[EaMett]

What I am most curious about is why they changed it; to whom were the devs listening to that when brought about these changes? Was there an absolutely vocal crowd who simply despised what AST has been since release? It's been mentioned that the simplification was to attract the influx of new players who were brought in by the expansion, but while I cannot speak for anyone but myself, I felt like AST on its own was already appealing enough. In fact, it was being disillusioned by the changes which drove me to voice my opinion.

They were listening to themselves. The core of the issue seems to be that they don’t have a separate class balancing team and instead it’s an effort put forward by the content designers with limited ressources.

Balancing dps is easy enough but once you need to do two-three-more way balancing (utility-enmity-healing-dps-mobility-ressource management) where one can directly affect the others, you really need dedicated people to the art and dedicated tools. It implies having a lot of hands on experience with all tiers of skill as well. I doubt the current team has much time to play at all tbh.

As a result they’ve been struggling to balance the game a lot and move away from meta and whatnot. This especially with healers whom they seem to have very little experience with in the first place.

As a result they made their life easier by homogenizing everything so all healers have «*equivalent*» skills, removing significant utility from many classes, removing enmity management, removing TP, etc. It all happened this expansion.

They made these changes to suit themselves while seemingly ignoring the player base that was asking for more complexity.

It’s a real problem and I’m amazed no influencers have gotten around to asking them the hard questions regarding this. Though it isn’t surprising considering none of them play healer.

[Side-Eye]

It’s a real problem and I’m amazed no influencers have gotten around to asking them the hard questions regarding this. Though it isn’t surprising considering none of them play healer.

That's the crux of the problem: the so-called influencers weren't there trying to find out information about all the jobs and roles, only their favorites. If even one of them had played AST even secondarily, they'd have asked WTF was happening with all the utility being removed -- or at the very least, why potencies of all the job's heals were being reduced to significantly LESS than other healers. I mean, if devs had truly intended to make heal jobs roughly equal, that was a piss poor way to start.

[Exiled_Tonberry]

Everytime the word "Pure Healer" is associated with any healer it just brings disappointment. SE wanted SCH and AST to be more like pure healers, and here we are.

[Astrololol]

They didn't even bother to patch up what they removed from the AST questline? NICE.
I miss the time buffs AST had. I could even make my sprint last 10 seconds longer, since celestial opposition gave every self buff +10 on their timers.
If they were that lazy with editing the AST quests, they probably rushed to make every card a balance, especially since they got rid of tp, and spire was a tp regen before Shadowbringers.

[Nhala_Levee]

About uselessness, yeah, its healing capability is very low compared to the other healers or even to the old astro.
As not everything rolling around hardcore raidings and premade groups, i many time met tanks in daily roulettes whos rushing forward and pulling too many monsters, cause they think astro is whm or sch. But its not. So we wipe. No matter what lvl we talking about.
In old times i simply avoided this with the "The Bole" card, what will gives 10% dmg reduction, and with combined that with the tank def CDs, it was enough to let me heal out that tremendous dmg he takes. (Yes, i always had one stored for this situations.)
Now, i simply cant do anything to save the bold tank. Spaming heal and hope its enough. But mostly not cause its heals not that much as the other healers. As that, sch have the skill to still gives 10% reduction with her dome looking spell (sorry i dont know the exact name) and still have a fairy with her who will heal, not so high heals but still a help. Meanwhile she capable of putting double shield on the target what is a huge utility for her. And even have a spell that instantly heals a high ammount if the target fall under 50% hp.

So, now get a better look, what have the astro. DMG buff. Hmm... it will dont save anybody. Have a hot. Not realy a big help. Or if the dungeon is high lvl enough, then can be shielded as Nocturnal sect. But far not that strong as the schs shields. You have the 10% redu aoe, but that is a stationary spell, so until you channel it, you cant cast anything else otherwise you broke your own casting. And what else you can do? Hm, nothing. Watch, spam, hope. And meanwhile, not even enjoyable too for me. Dont have the feeling as the old one when i pull the card and see the possibilitys in it. Lost the feeling "YAAAY".
So overall, i simply lost interest and yes, as the astro have the most smaller dmg spells and the most smaller healing spells, advancing in MSQ or just open world things are very hard or even impossible with it.

[Makeda]

AST of old faced an impossible to solve problem. A series of highly situational buffs coupled with one always useful buff and tied to random chance.

There were three solutions possible here:

1. Make them all do the useful buff and remove the situationals.
2. Remove the always useful buff and leave the situationals. If the useful buff is desired out it into a non-random skill.
3. Leave the cards but remove the random.

All of the old cards were actually good useful buffs. But 99% of the time only 1 of them was useful, and the others were vital at key moments but you had no ability to ensure having it when needed.

You don’t need an MP refresh or a buff to crit chance until you MEED it and then you really need it (the crit buff for instance, to squeak past an enrage timer on a progression raid in that first week when you just barely have it... that happens, and when it dies your a super hero if it was you that got your group over the line. But that’s a rare moment...)

Of the three ideas I noted, they chose the first; probably the worst possible choice for job flavor but best for matching how players adapted to the older broken system. I think the second fits the job flavor the best, and the third is lore violating but the most useful.

[Nhala_Levee]

AST of old faced an impossible to solve problem. A series of highly situational buffs coupled with one always useful buff and tied to random chance.

There were three solutions possible here:

1. Make them all do the useful buff and remove the situationals.
2. Remove the always useful buff and leave the situationals. If the useful buff is desired out it into a non-random skill.
3. Leave the cards but remove the random.

All of the old cards were actually good useful buffs. But 99% of the time only 1 of them was useful, and the others were vital at key moments but you had no ability to ensure having it when needed.

You don’t need an MP refresh or a buff to crit chance until you MEED it and then you really need it (the crit buff for instance, to squeak past an enrage timer on a progression raid in that first week when you just barely have it... that happens, and when it dies your a super hero if it was you that got your group over the line. But that’s a rare moment...)

Of the three ideas I noted, they chose the first; probably the worst possible choice for job flavor but best for matching how players adapted to the older broken system. I think the second fits the job flavor the best, and the third is lore violating but the most useful.

I totaly agree with that, need just the only one useful card from the deck. That was the defense buff. As a healer, it is not its role to give dmg buff, but defense it is. If dps is too noob to do dmg, just delete the game, thats all.