Question to AST mains:

[PercibelTheren]

Things I like:

- the aesthetic and pretty effects
- the card buffs because it makes me feel useful even when I don't have to heal
- cards giving me something to do between casting Malefic
- having mitigation on top of having heals and having the ability to shield the party at least a little
- delayed healing in Earthly Star, Horoscope and Macrocosmos
- the fact that I basically never run out of mana between Astrodyne and Lucid Dreaming

Things I don't like:

- the RNG of Minor Arcana
- one button DPS rotation combined with hitting like a wet noodle
- I don't have to use a good 2/3 of my healing tools unless something goes horribly wrong, but that's an issue with all healers currently

I'm honestly really worried about the advertised rework in 7.0. Astro is the only healer I find engaging to play, please don't make it a complete WHM copy.

[Eastwall]

Well... I play it often in pvp.. So l guess l will say why l like it in pvp. Limit break can really boost my burst damage and shut down enemy dps. If l run into people that know what their doing, it would be fun. Such as s summoner Let me buff Him with my lb before he cast bahamut. Although ast heals less overall than whm, healing is instant and the double cast being ogcd can really help a teammate to survive. The cards' aoe effect ignores line of sight, So it really fun to buff my teammates from behind the walls. Lastly, the bind and root from gravity and double cast gravity is really good to secure a kill after someone guards, or use on 2 separate targets to peel for me or my team.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Likes:

1. Pretty, over the top VFXes.
2. Arguably the most support-ish amongst 4 healers.
3. Animations are elegant, looks great on any character.
4. PvP AST is fun.
5. Delayed healings such as Earthly Star, (buffed) Horoscope, Macrocosmos, & (arguably) Exaltation.

Dislikes (although most are shared by other healers as well):

1. 'Why do you even exist'-buttons such as MA & Undraw;
2. And somehow lore-breaking buttons like Neutral Sect also survives the purge whereas nocturnal sect had to go? lmao
3. How all the button presses are condensed into that 2m reopeners but leaving the rest of 105s mind numbingly boring.
4. I miss old redraw stacks & sleeve draw.
5. Synastry is left on the dirt unexplored further.
6. Cards are all basically "bigger dps buff vs smaller dps buff".
7. The fact that the gain between 3-sealed vs 2-sealed Astrodyne is so miniscule, people can pretend it doesn't exist at all.

[ASkellington]

Likes:

1. APM, card weaving
2. Tarot/Stars aesthetic
3. Macrocosmos, Exaltation, Horoscope, Earthly Star/delayed heals

Dislikes:

• Earthly Star/Collective Unconcious's radius
• Lord/Lady of Crowns (would be better if I could choose to sacrifice a card to become one of them instead)
• Synastry being purposefully useless. Let it work on oGCD single target heals.
• Neutral Sect and removal of Nocturnal Sect. Because AST could have been a stance dancer but no, because SE.
• Being a WHM clone. What? We couldn't be a stance dancer or a regen/delayed healer sub-50?

Hates:

• Astrodyne. It wasn't good when it was Divination and its worse somehow now.
• Undraw. Still. EXISTS.
• All six cards are basically the same buff. Why have 6 cards then? And why consider us the buffing class when we only give one (1) buff?
• AST is by far the worst class in the game to solo in a game where the devs are pushing for it to have a solo experience.

[Renathras]

Interesting.

I appreciate all the perspective, thank you all.

[Darnath]

The cards although they were a bit too simplified in Endwalker. Gives me something to do when healing is actually pretty low (for somebody who lives and 'dies' in Duty Finder that can be rare) and feels good to buff up the DPS and tanks and something other than DoT and single nuke spam. Plus dropping the Earthly Star for a bit boom is neat.

So many ways to recover from a poopstorm that happens every so often in DF. And mana for days between card doling, AstroDyne and Lucid Dreaming (bitter over the Thin Air nerf)

And prefer throughput over shielding so SCH and SGE are out.

[ForsakenRoe]

like: aesthetics, cards give something to do other than malefic spam, support-themed identity, delayed-heals are an interesting concept

dislike: cards are all the same, cards have to all be used in burst windows (no 'adapt to situation' anymore), noct sect deleted instead of effort made to make it work in a rework to the kit, neutral sect somehow survives the purge, APM is too high in burst windows and too low in non-burst, minor arcana is the worst of both worlds(damage competing with nondamage utility, plus 'cannot predict when the utility will be available'), too many skills that are pointless/niche (synastry, undraw, minor arcana system arguably) leading to hotbar bloat, macrocosmos is a GCD when it could just be a non-damaging OGCD to make it less clunky to apply, earthlystar doesn't smoothly scale (detonating at 0s is the same as detonating at 9s of charge)


my fixes:

make cards have unique effects again, keeping them single target to make them easier to balance
make Minor Arcana use the full deck, and use it as a way to break up the downtime between burst windows (this adds more 'i am supporting' flavor to the gameplay)
make earthly star give a stack each second, and at 10 stacks it gets the power it has now. this means detonating at 9s is not as punishing as it is now, as you'd miss out on a much smaller amount than currently
delete some useless things like undraw, merge some older skills like Helios>Asp.Helios, and make room for new stuff (or just to declutter the hotbars)
maybe bring back nocturnal sect, and give the class the ability to stancedance to apply shields (this is part of a 'destroy the pure/barrier split' move), neutral then is 'does both sects at once' as a moment of power-CD
make macrocosmos an OGCD that does not deal damage



Oh wait you said AST mains, the forbidden site claims I was an AST main in Aspho thanks to P3S, does that count

[IceBlueNinja]

I like nothing about ast anymore, the cards are dull and boring with barely any lil benefits, ast is just more a powerful better copied cheaper whm clone now since it cant stance, stormblood ast was and forever will be the best that is all I can say. As stated at the start of ew I went fast to grab my sage job and drop off my globe immediately. Though I say I do not like ast anymore there is good I can say of it going back to my second point that its a powerful healer which so much heals that half of them sometimes you do not need and they are useful, its mana mp is infinite which is crazy when it was back in 5.0 it had the worst of way of getting mana back then, lucid/draw/astrodyne=no way you should ever be out of mp. It spells are ofc the prettiest out of the 4 healers and the sfxs on its spells is all lovely. But yeah I want stormblood ast back plain and simple.

[Gullis]

Likes:
Cards offers something else to do when you are just pressing 1, so its a bit more engaging than the other healers.

I like the delayed healing spells like star, macro and horoscope, that makes gameplay slightly more fun.

job Aesthetic and spells visually are very nice.

Dislikes:
Cards are somewhat boring, but when DPS is the only thing that matters in current gameplay, it seems hard to add other things for them to do, that would not just be worse options - Minor Arcana being a current example

Feels bad to play, when the group is terrible, usually making me play another healer when queing with randos

Not a fan of Minor Arcana RNG. This is mostly a problem due to how lacklustre enemy damage output is. You always want the damage card, healing card is useless

Synastry feels useless, never uses it

[Zeastria]

Likes:
Cards offers something else to do when you are just pressing 1, so its a bit more engaging than the other healers.

I like the delayed healing spells like star, macro and horoscope, that makes gameplay slightly more fun.

job Aesthetic and spells visually are very nice.

Dislikes:
Cards are somewhat boring, but when DPS is the only thing that matters in current gameplay, it seems hard to add other things for them to do, that would not just be worse options - Minor Arcana being a current example

Feels bad to play, when the group is terrible, usually making me play another healer when queing with randos

Not a fan of Minor Arcana RNG. This is mostly a problem due to how lacklustre enemy damage output is. You always want the damage card, healing card is useless

Synastry feels useless, never uses it

Synastry isn't useless..it has saved many tanks from dying on lower level content xD
It almost dobbels your healing (Benefic II and Aspected Benefic // when you heal the same target you place it on.