Astrologian Seals?

[Local_Custard]

Picking Balance and Cancer as my off-the-dome examples was probably a bad choice, because those actually do track completely as relating to the sun and water respectively, but both AST cards and the real-life zodiac's elemental affinities have some weirdos. One of the other water signs is Scorpio for some reason; meanwhile in FFXIV, The Spear is apparently a celestial card, despite it being partially for the god of the moon.

Ah, yeah that is odd- I did indeed write something about that on a chart I made but didn't really think about it too much. I think I'll take another look at the chart after reading up on the lore for 12. Maybe I should do a particular set of alliance raids when I finally get to log back on- I do know there is lore there too.

The seals really don’t seem to have any meaning beyond generic “things in the sky”

The 8 cards each relate to an element or an alignment
-balance- fire
-spear- ice
-arrow- wind
-ewer- water
-spire- lightning
-bole- earth
-lady- light
-lord- darkness

And each have some form of representation of both of their members of the 12

The cards also when they swapped effects in ShB still retain their alignment effect as the umbral cards are the melee cards (balance/fire, arrow/wind and spear/ice) and the astral cards are the ranged cards

The seals meanwhile have zero connection to anything, the sun seal sits on the fire card but the moon symbol doesn’t sit on the ice card, the seals don’t necessarily sit next to each other in the months either (as spear and spire or ice and lightning share a seal) when the lighting months are in early summer while the ice months are in early winter

The seals are a gameplay mechanic that has no actual relevance to AST’s lore

Oh right- I should definitely consider which months the cards are associated with and write that down on the chart I made. The more I learn the more I realize ast seals probably weren't that carefully made on the lore side of things

[Local_Custard]

I'm trying to see what I can understand about each deity to label them according to celestial, solar, and lunar. Some of obvious- Menphina is lunar because she is of the moon. Azeyma is solar because she is of the sun. Celestial is a bit harder to pin down, though I have Thaliak as a maybe. If the seals were placed with consideration of astrologian lore, how might you have distributed them?

[Anonymoose]

Personally, I wasn't seeing "lore about jobs" and "lore about job-related abilities" as conceptually 1:1 to begin with.

Personal opinions regarding overall [insert job here] lore don't factor much into my observation that, "it seems like we used to have more quests where the reward for the quest was unlocking an ability - and in that quest you'd learn about the lore of the ability - and sometimes the story even brought that ability into the events - and then (when the devs decided to start changing and removing abilities) they had to do a lot of text changes because those quests didn't give you those abilities anymore - and now it seems like they make fewer quests like that".



Kinda weird to have a whole spiel about leeches when we all have have esuna now, you know?

[WhiteArchmage]

When one sees the job quests from Shadowbringers on, it certainly feels like they're writing around our skills, giving themselves more room to keep the "soul" or "idea" of the job after changes. When they do explain your skills, it's during the introductory solo duty, which is easier to rewrite in the case of a major revamp instead of... well, Bard... and Scholar... and Astro...

Like many of the decisions I find... questionable, I chalk it up to ARR growing pains. I understand why they chose to integrate the job quests so deeply to the skills they were giving out, it makes them feel more immersive and gives weight to those skills... but also some were just not fun (particularly blocking SCH's cleanse until level 40 and having a mandatory cleanse in Brayflox, where you're capped at 34) so a rework was warranted.

[Cleretic]

It's also worth noting that, if we want to beat up on Paladin's job quests, they have always been like that. There's jobs that have had serious revamps whose job quests struggle with that (AST), there's more minor ones that still feel a little weird even if they mostly square it (SCH). But Paladin's never had a meaningful revamp or retooling; it's always had the problems it has in terms of the HW storyline kneecapping its Paladinliness.

If anything a revamp might find a way to fix it, maybe by putting a DPS-boosting tool at level 60 so you could frame that 'power goes to the strongest' thing as a slightly extreme interpretation.

[JepMZ]

Nope, no lore about the gameplay overhaul. I think it's supposed to be like zodiac sign associations, but it's redundant since each card already is a zodiac sign for each of the constellations. And it doesn't even make sense. The ice oriented card featuring the moon isn't even the moon seal. The earth oriented card is the sun seal? I feel like they only assigned the seals because they split of the 6 cards to magic buff and physical buff groups and thats it. They dont work like this during the original release. I try incorporating seals to ingame card readings, but it's temporary because it all can change for the next expansion