How I personally feel about Astro [Astrologian Feedback]

[Mikezmilenia]

Hello, this is probably my first time posting in here and I'd like to convey a bit how I personally feel about astro.

I've loved the job ever since I started playing from Stormblood, and I know Ast always have the most changes from expansions to expansions. It was nice and stable in Shadowbringers, albeit it was kinda really bad in the first weeks of the expansion, but after the fixes then, it became a stable, and a nice clean streamlined job as a healer.

So coming to Endwalker, I've once more mained AST. (I love my starry n pretty effects, lol) But i wish some things could have been made better.

Some of the ideas that I personally think AST would really shine from its great ceiling play; would be increasing its RDPS capability since now, most jobs have 'Divination' ability like RDM's Embolden, MNK's Brotherhood, and even BRD's Radiant Finale. With wonderful buffs available to them, it kinda make AST's once most OP 'Divination' now would be not that significant, especially comparing it with BRD's ability to consistently buffs party (Battle Voice, songs, and Radiant Finale).

As a 'buffer' type healer, which boasts on AST's buffs, it would've been great if there would be an extra buff provided by AST for the party, not only on Divination. One idea that I have, is that why not turning 'Astrodyne' into a party buff, as it would've reward the 'correct' seal play of AST to its players, making the job feels rewarding for optimal play. And true, that Astrodyne's 2 seals is a haste (which might be destructive to the party), it could've been easily rectified by buffing the whole party's DET and DH instead of Haste. Perhaps a 10% increase shud've been okay enough to be on par with the other healers' dps ability. Giving this changes to astrodyne, might've solved astrodyne's skill that feels 'out of character' from AST design to buff the party.

The job currently feels overwhelmingly busy, though it is fun, but at certain time it does give really unnecessary stress for the player (well at least for me it is). I mean, it would be fine if such job would be rewarded with better party buffs hence increasing its ability to rDPS better.

Of course another thing is that minor arcana and the arcana play should've been just a single button, and it could've been set for the arcana play [Lord or Lady] to auto pop/execute after 60 sec if not manually executed, when minor arcana is off cooldown. Hence it would really help and alleviate AST's busy play during raid burst windows.

And since now that Lightspeed feels like a necessity to use during our 2 min windows since we became so busy, with Minor Arcana, Play, Arcana Play, Draw/Redraw, oGCD heals. it would be a nice Quality of Life changes should Lightspeed be 2 charges of 60 sec cooldown instead of one per 90 sec.

Well, that would've been so far how I personally think the current iteration of Astrologian could've been improved so much better.

[deusdormit]

Kinda controversial but I'd kinda like to see a expand button that puts a titch weaker buff on the whole party. Which for a full alive party would be collectively better and light party worse. Why? For the selfish reason of its annoying to have macro delay or scroll down to the middle of the party list on controller with a full party

[Connor]

I don’t disagree with any of these suggestions and I do agree that it’s disappointing that SE seems to want to move away from Astrologian being the ‘buffer’ healer.
Instead it just gets delayed / time-based / conditional (not sure what to call them lol) heals like Exaltation and Macrocosmos. It’s one of the reasons I haven’t actually levelled it yet.
I mean, not that there’s anything wrong those skills, they’re great skills and reinforce Astrologian’s identity as a time/space Mage, but at the same time why did we have to lose so much of our buffing capabilities and engagement with them? Divination is less exciting than Radiant Finale and that may as well be a passive that activated at 120s intervals. It’s not even the effects of the cards that bothers me anymore, it’s the fact that they mean so little to Astrologian now. Sleeve Draw no longer exists so we’re drawing less often, Shuffle no longer has charges so you can’t even try and fish for seals for Astrodyne like before. I mean, the only reason seals exist now is to give Astrologians a personal dps buff. I wouldn’t be surprised if next expansion the cards are either removed entirely or can only affect the Astrologian themselves, which would be a pretty tragic outcome

[Zolvolt]

I'm so happy with the playstyle of Astrologian right now and its so overpowered its a little silly. It has an answer to everything with the amount of Single target and party-wide OGCD's. The cards feel mostly good, though not being able to guarantee 3 seals is annoying. Astro doesn't even need neutral sect shields to be phenomenal and we just add those on top of everything? so strong. Macrocosmos is definitely overpowered and completely negates some healing mechanics which causes problems for whitemages having to work three times as hard to heal the same mechanic. I tried whm/sch(me) for healing up the death mechanic at the end of P3S and my gosh, I never want to be paired with a whm again when playing sch.