Quote Originally Posted by Payadopa View Post
I'm not a big fan of the seals in general but I think it's better than what we had in ShB. If it were up to me I'd bring back the old SB system. All this fishing business didn't affect me, but here we are.
Fan of the pre-ShB AST cards aside, there was still a measure of “fishing” involved—but really only at the super high levels of play where AOE Balance was God and others were just subpar. I can recognize that, at the very least. HOWEVER. I still preferred the card flavor over what we got in ShB, and I’ll never be able to deny that. Even if it’s just me being an AST boomer or whatever kids these days would call someone like me.

That said, I liked the busy aspect of ShB AST cards only because there was just this immense satisfaction of pulling off that ridiculous opener with OG ShB Sleeve Draw, and it just felt good. I personally didn’t have much comment on the Sleeve Draw changes in ShB—I took it either way at the end of the day; but I respect the loss of busy-ness/finger gymnastics others missed from it.

And as far as Astrodyne is concerned, to me it feels more like SE is throwing us a bone to keep a semblance of what AST used to be. Still a bit on the shallow side but, again, better than ShB's version.
I do have to agree with this. I think they were trying to return “buff flavor” to the job, but also kind of ignored what the original buff flavor was that AST offered. It wasn’t about buffing ourselves, but the party when it came to various card effects: AOE Balance, Enhanced or Extended Spear on a BRD/MNK, Enhanced Arrow on a BLM, using that Bole on a tank in a dungeon pull so you had more DPS uptime, holding that Ewer for yourself in case you died because this EX party doesn’t have a physical ranged (so no Refresh) and the BLM is being stingy and won’t Mana Shift you, etc.. That was the buff flavor ASTs like. Not this pointless Astrodyne garbage.

As much disdain as I had for the ShB card system as an AST boomer, I’d rather it over Astrodyne. Even if Divination wasn’t my favorite raid buff.

With that being said, AST's MP generation needs to severely nerfed, I'm sorry. lol
What even is the point of an MP bar if I never go below 90% unless I go out of my wait to spam heals or raise.
I would like to see the return of actual mana management. Not to the extent of where you are begging for people to please don’t die because you can’t spare the mana to Raise (ShB AST was like this at times before they added some mana regen to it—I just think they went super overboard there). But we definitely don’t need this bottomless pool of mana where you can ignore the MP bar or throw it off in a corner somewhere because it doesn’t matter. As long as AST isn’t MP negative, that’s all I care about.

All things considered the current AST is as good as it's gonna get with SE's narrow mindset. I don't want to say I'm super happy about the changes but I'm glad they gave it at least some flavour back, if that makes sense.
I just wish Astrodyne’s flavor was meaningful. That the buffs you get from it have virtually no impact just makes it pointless skill bloat on top of other pointless skill bloat the job already has. Make Astrodyne more meaningful and give some sort of RNGesus mitigation, and I’m down for the way it functions. Even if it will just be a shadow of the buff flavor AST once had.