Thank you for the Astro changes coming in dawntrail!

[Aelin_Ashryver]

The thing is that nobody disliked ShB AST, hell it was significantly ahead of SCH who was the floundering one

It was the EW changes and the EW changes alone that made everyone hate the job

Outside of divination being powered by seals which forced overuse of redraw when it still had 3 charges there was basically nothing wrong with ShB AST besides a bit of flavour that could have been added later (like adding certain effects to the existing cards

Whether you are a proponent of SB AST or later versions we all agree that EW AST is the worst version, but that doesn’t justify basically making it not Astro anymore

I think every SB ast enjoyer will disagree with you there. I hated the change to the cards going into SHB, I still managed to find enjoyment in SHB AST thanks to sleeve draw but it still felt far worse and more boring outside of that to play. Hardly takes a genius to recognise who should get what card when you drew it in SHB or EW for that matter. Having a reasonable understanding of the other jobs and you're good to go.

But I do agree EW AST was the worst by far and after giving it a solid try to stick with it I swapped to heal a tier as SCH and then moved out of healing entirely due to missing my AST for years. I have very much enjoyed delving more into DPS roles and hope to give PLD a go in the coming tier on an alt. Got my first ultimate done even, hoping to carry on with progging UCOB over summer.

I'm so happy with the job changes coming I am glad I have so many housing alts I can actually raid on most of them this summer since I will have more free time \o/ woooo

I will give this new AST a go and advocate we get back some of our card manipulation and a touch of rng, but that will be hard so long as parsers cry over it. I feel that the manipulation return is more likely if we all agree and advocate it.

[Kissune]

I think every SB ast enjoyer will disagree with you there. I hated the change to the cards going into SHB, I still managed to find enjoyment in SHB AST thanks to sleeve draw but it still felt far worse and more boring outside of that to play. Hardly takes a genius to recognise who should get what card when you drew it in SHB or EW for that matter. Having a reasonable understanding of the other jobs and you're good to go.

But I do agree EW AST was the worst by far and after giving it a solid try to stick with it I swapped to heal a tier as SCH and then moved out of healing entirely due to missing my AST for years. I have very much enjoyed delving more into DPS roles and hope to give PLD a go in the coming tier on an alt. Got my first ultimate done even, hoping to carry on with progging UCOB over summer.

I'm so happy with the job changes coming I am glad I have so many housing alts I can actually raid on most of them this summer since I will have more free time \o/ woooo

I will give this new AST a go and advocate we get back some of our card manipulation and a touch of rng, but that will be hard so long as parsers cry over it. I feel that the manipulation return is more likely if we all agree and advocate it.

Well I hope you enjoy your white mage with card vfx, and I hope you realize fast that it's nothing like stormblood cards.

Also as a 'parser', jobs with RNG are way more fun than jobs that aren't. If AST has no RNG, the only thing that'll determine my parse is crit RNG and keeping my gcd rolling, along with killtime. With EW AST, it was my own skill and reactions on top of those things, meaning I wasn't just spamming pulls hoping I had a sufficient amount of critical hits and lord draws, it could also offset the RNG with good dps card placement and proper tracking of burst timings and effective DPS under a card. AST was complicated in EW, and anyone who says otherwise just didn't even give optimizing it a try. They just saw the surface level 'card do same thing' and gave zero shits about anything else. It wasn't a fuckin non-standard BLM level puzzle box rotation that needed a spreadsheet to figure out how to squeeze out a 20 potency gain, sure, but it required you to think, and think fast. The difference between a good AST and a bad AST was night and day, and the amount of damage that good card placement actually accounted for wasn't nothing. And fuck, y'know what, even if the damage increase cards gave wasn't that big... at least it would be something. At least there would be something to work towards. Bc right now I see AST being mildly amusing in week 1 prog and completely lifeless and dull for the rest of the tier, whereas before I at least still had card RNG to keep me on my toes and make pulls feel different. Now I'd just be begging for someone to fuck up so I can briefly feel something again. And that's a general healer sentiment.

Every time I think of 'oh but the parsers wanted the job to be boring' I think of this video, and specifically this timestamp. Anyone struggling to understand my view should watch it. I don't want AST to be "meta". I don't want it to be "consistent DPS". I want it to be engaging, and fast, and fun. Let white mage exist for the one button rotation fans, I liked having something, ANYTHING to do beyond occasionally throw out my ogcd heals/mit and press malefic.

[Aelin_Ashryver]

Well I hope you enjoy your white mage with card vfx, and I hope you realize fast that it's nothing like stormblood cards.

Also as a 'parser', jobs with RNG are way more fun than jobs that aren't. If AST has no RNG, the only thing that'll determine my parse is crit RNG and keeping my gcd rolling, along with killtime. With EW AST, it was my own skill and reactions on top of those things, meaning I wasn't just spamming pulls hoping I had a sufficient amount of critical hits and lord draws, it could also offset the RNG with good dps card placement and proper tracking of burst timings and effective DPS under a card. AST was complicated in EW, and anyone who says otherwise just didn't even give optimizing it a try. They just saw the surface level 'card do same thing' and gave zero shits about anything else. It wasn't a fuckin non-standard BLM level puzzle box rotation that needed a spreadsheet to figure out how to squeeze out a 20 potency gain, sure, but it required you to think, and think fast. The difference between a good AST and a bad AST was night and day, and the amount of damage that good card placement actually accounted for wasn't nothing. And fuck, y'know what, even if the damage increase cards gave wasn't that big... at least it would be something. At least there would be something to work towards. Bc right now I see AST being mildly amusing in week 1 prog and completely lifeless and dull for the rest of the tier, whereas before I at least still had card RNG to keep me on my toes and make pulls feel different. Now I'd just be begging for someone to fuck up so I can briefly feel something again. And that's a general healer sentiment.

For the card themselves EW ast has little rng vs what it did in SB given again it's all dmg, just ranged vs melee. It wasn't complicated, another poster put it nicely... something like middling difficulty I feel is more appropriate. A little thought was there but it was not complicated. EW ast is so poorly thought out and it was so painfully obvious they told us mid expac they will rework it. It wouldn't shock me if they saw AST's already small player base plummet even further.

Maybe you as a parser don't cry as much from rng (so you say but I'll take it at face value!), but you weren't here when others were in the forums crying about fishing for balance and their 'cursed' runs with few balance pulls during SB. And you can go peek at reddit the amount of people who are happy and upvoting changes, there are hundreds of them. For many it's specifically for them NOT liking RNG. So yes getting the rng back in will likely not happen. But I do like the idea someone said of making lord and lady our manipulatiuon tools for the cards, that could be fun. I look forward to finding out the best places to put our new cards in encounters and finding those moments again like in SB I can throw a utility card at someone in a crucial moment.

So yes I'll be having fun with AST in DT, it's still not like the WHM in how it heals no matter how much you like to compare the two. You still think about timings for placements of your heals more vs a WHM. If we get more time related mechanics for AST as well I'll be thrilled. You carry on being spiteful to every person that is happy with the changes though, I'm sure it'll help!

You can do what I did if you end up disliking AST, play other jobs. If you want difficulty and thought you can try some BLM like I did, it was good fun and I look forward to playing it more!

[Kissune]

For the card themselves EW ast has little rng vs what it did in SB given again it's all dmg, just ranged vs melee. It wasn't complicated, another poster put it nicely... something like middling difficulty I feel is more appropriate. A little thought was there but it was not complicated. EW ast is so poorly thought out and it was so painfully obvious they told us mid expac they will rework it. It wouldn't shock me if they saw AST's already small player base plummet even further.

Maybe you as a parser don't cry as much from rng (so you say but I'll take it at face value!), but you weren't here when others were in the forums crying about fishing for balance and their 'cursed' runs with few balance pulls during SB. And you can go peek at reddit the amount of people who are happy and upvoting changes, there are hundreds of them. For many it's specifically for them NOT liking RNG. So yes getting the rng back in will likely not happen. But I do like the idea someone said of making lord and lady our manipulatiuon tools for the cards, that could be fun. I look forward to finding out the best places to put our new cards in encounters and finding those moments again like in SB I can throw a utility card at someone in a crucial moment.

So yes I'll be having fun with AST in DT, it's still not like the WHM in how it heals no matter how much you like to compare the two. You still think about timings for placements of your heals more vs a WHM. If we get more time related mechanics for AST as well I'll be thrilled. You carry on being spiteful to every person that is happy with the changes though, I'm sure it'll help!

You can do what I did if you end up disliking AST, play other jobs. If you want difficulty and thought you can try some BLM like I did, it was good fun and I look forward to playing it more!

The playstyle of AST that I had was gone, and it's not gonna be found in other jobs. And why would I want to jump to another job (like BLM, which btw is ALSO losing it's high skill expression optimizations due to the literal death of non-standard BLM) either when they've already shown they're willing to cut all difficulty for the sake of people's aesthetics?

EW AST had stuff to do outside of healing. Now it's healing is even more predictable, even more standard, and it's all the people who couldn't hack the job who needed it to be super easy and streamlined who kept begging for that. If people really didn't like RNG, they could go play any of the other 20 fucking jobs that don't have it! So yes, I will continue to be spiteful, because I'm pissed off that I am losing my favourite class in favour of some streamlined homogenized mess that barely, and I mean BARELY thinks about its heals more than white mage. The healing gameplay I liked is still there, maybe, assuming earthly star, horoscope, and neutral sect are even still around at all lmao. But it's there in the absence of the other entire half of the job, which has been replaced with a shitty handful of single target utility that we already had an overload of.

And you know what? Yeah, AST RNG in EW/ShB wasn't as much as it was in StB/HW. But it was still. There. It was something to think about, something to do that made EVERY PULL DIFFERENT. Do you see that part? Do you see those three lines when you continue complain that there was no substance to EW cards? Did you go through AST and just close your eyes when you pressed draw and put it on the same people every single time, not even caring about seals or the melee/ranged modifiers? Because then yeah, it had no RNG for players like that. And for the people out there, who liked having that kind of optimization, who liked having to think about the cards they were playing, who liked optimizing through quick thinking and mechanical skill, AST was all we had.

Like fuck, hearing you even say 'I look forward to finding out the best places to put our new cards in encounters and finding those moments again like in SB I can throw a utility card at someone in a crucial moment.' just makes me roll my eyes BECAUSE YOU COULD ALREADY DO THAT! You had that gameplay already! That was never taken away, it was just called fucking exaltation! Or intersection! Or aspected benefic, or essential dignity, or fucking synastry for gods sakes. That's not unique and interesting gameplay, that's just the exact same mechanics that every other healer has to deal with. EVERY healer has to 'find the best places to put their abilities' whether or not they're called a card or not. They do the same fucking thing, the differences are microscopic. You are starry eyed and overjoyed for a rework that gives us nothing new, just waves their hands and say wow look, we turned an ED stack and exaltation stack into a caaaaarrd! It can be used the same amount of times, in the same places, isn't that so interesting and I just cannot fathom how you can be so smugly indifferent to what is being lost to make that happen. The people who didn't like RNG should have just played a different fucking class. Because they HAD options. We don't, I don't. And that's not fair. I paid my sub, I put thousands of hours into this game and I found most jobs unfun. Didn't like playing white mage, sage, or scholar because they were too boring. AST was fun as hell, and it was the card gameplay that made it interesting. Maybe, just maybe, square enix should stop listening to people who just keep wanting to have their classes mechanics handed to them, and are thankful for the one dps button rotation slop we've had for three entire fucking expansions.

I am not mad that you are happy with the changes, I'm mad that you are happy about changes you clearly don't understand the actual like, picture of. You see card vfx with some new text and you go wild. You claim to love stormblood cards but you will happily drink up this slop that has nothing in common save for a superficial attempt at presenting cards as 'unique effects' when they cease to be unique cards once you get the exact same ones every time. All while mocking me for having enough of my main being transformed all for the sake of people who would have found the exact same gameplay they demand in some other healer, but just want their preferred aesthetic.

If you're happy with the only thing standing out about AST being earthly star and macrocosmos, sure. Do that. But I'm not going to sit here and pretend like that's healthy for the game, and that making all the healers have minor differences is going to truly make AST a glorious job again, and I'm not going to entertain the opinions of someone who keeps worshipping stormblood card design while simultaneously saying 'looking forwards to dawntrail AST!!' because at that point the only thing I can think about is how logically inconsistent that is. You can play the job, and convince yourself you're having the most unique, interesting gameplay with the highest of decisions to make while you hum and haw about when to use your brand new mitigation card you're guaranteed to get every time on a tankbuster and autos and nod, telling yourself how that's so very different than the decision making process for exaltation or intersection, and how AST is so very different than white mage, because white mage doesn't have to think about intersection or exaltation, the have to think about aquaveil and benison, which are very different abilities and definitely 100% have different use cases.

[Eastwall]

Are they doing this to increase play rate in high end content? I play ast because l like the flaming orb l hold(just got my pyros weapon). I forget to press divination all the time, lol

[Aravell]

I don't see AST becoming that much more popular, maybe some WHM players will swap over, but it's mostly going to be movement within people who already play the role.

What's more likely to happen is a reduction in the total amount of healers. AST was the final bastion for some of us tired healer mains, my main job SCH was already butchered in SB and AST was my bastion because it still required a modicum of thought and the pacing was engaging. Gutting the final bastion of middling complexity within the healer role will make many of us just give up on the role entirely.

That said, another important point has to be acknowledged. You will never attract a DPS player to become a healer player, doesn't matter how much dumbing down you do, they just will not become healer mains. SMN is a different case because it's a DPS job, an easy DPS job will always attract far more players than easy healers or easy tanks.

[rawker]

SCH: I will throw an offer to AST to get the crit rate up back as a card. I don't need it as an oGCD ability. I often forget it exists... that's how disjointed it is with our kit.

[Rozeee]

I'll lastly end off, It's fine to have jobs that are less played then others, aslong as they have a strong playerbase who enjoys the job, Theirs other more entry level jobs if a more complicated one isn't for them.

Depressingly, I don't think this is their design philosophy. Ironic that they realized this with relic weapon, but not the jobs itself.

[Zolvolt]

Theres so many dramatic posts in here now. Seriously listen to yourselves. 'Astro was the last bastion for those of us who like complicated jobs'. I don't know how to tell you guys this besides just telling you, but Astrologian isn't complicated, it just has a busy burst window. If you want a busy burst window, there are plenty of dps jobs that have that. Also please stop mixing up APM with a busy burst window. They are similiar things but different. You can have high APM and a burst window that is not as busy as EW astro, which is obviously the direction they are going. You'll still hold your offensive card for double offensive back-to-back cards for 2minutes. It's also exhausting that people think seals/astrodyne are what define the class when those have only existed for 2 expansions. I understand that you may have enjoyed the experiment that astro has gone on the last 2 expansions but most of us, SEnix included, realized that Astro was poorly designed when Endwalker launched. They even came out and said they were going to redesign it during endwalker and the amount of work needed to do so it was pushed it to now. For all intents and purposes the way astro works currently was supposed to have been scrapped a year and a half ago. I'm not sure why anyone is pikachu-face shocked over it, when it was flat out said a long time ago. Then therse people supporting astrologian being an unpopular job. I don't think y'all realize just how much astro's popularity has dropped. It's staggeringly low compared to every other job and it has been dropping since shadowbringers even with the influx of players we've had this expansion. In terms of health of a job, astro has been on life-support and if the current design of astro had existed for another expansion then the class would be abandoned even by many of those who love it.

Just for comparison's sake, Astro in EW is in the exact same posistion that MCH was in stormblood. The design is in such a horrible spot that the class is only being kept alive by a small amount of dedicated players. Thats not good enough to keep a job healthy for expansions to come.
"but couldn't they have done X Y Z instead?"
they could take any job any number of directions. They have to consider and prioritize getting the job to a healthy state again and simultaneously putting it in a spot where we can build onto it instead of revamping it drastically every expansion. Just like they did with MCH, which has been a resounding success.

[Aravell]

I don't know how to tell you guys this besides just telling you, but Astrologian isn't complicated, it just has a busy burst window. If you want a busy burst window, there are plenty of dps jobs that have that. Also please stop mixing up APM with a busy burst window. They are similiar things but different. You can have high APM and a burst window that is not as busy as EW astro, which is obviously the direction they are going.

Who even said AST was complicated? I said "middling complexity", which is miles better than the no complexity of DT AST cards wherr everything is just handed to you for free.

Also, you and everyone else says that they're not reducing the APM, yet they've confirmed deletion of several skills that you'd weave. I don't see how they'd manage to keep APM the same with less weaves, but I know I won't be convincing you of that, so have fun with your new AST.