Thank you for the Astro changes coming in dawntrail!

[Zolvolt]

I'm really happy about the changes coming to Astrologian so thank you. Astro has been asking for many problems to be solved about the job, some of which were big problems pre-shadowbringers! Finally it has happened!

-Astrodyne's buffs and cd misalignment throughout an encounter

Solved by removal of Astrodyne

-Seals being a replacement for cards all doing the same exact thing

Solved by removing seals and implementing cards that do different things

- DPS cards always being superior than utility cards

Solved by dps cards and utility cards not competing against each other

- Astro's pain point of healing mechanics happening during the 2min burst and having "dead windows" where we aren't using card OGCD's outside of burst windows

Solved by having fewer dps-related cards and only impacting our APM negatively by 1 draw/card action. Spreading our APM more evenly across our rotation with the mitigation/heal cards is also helpful.

-Replacing/removing thoughtless action bloat with meaningful actions

Replacing 2 of our 3 draws per minute with 2 cards to use instead. APM is lowered slightly since instead of 3draws and 3 cards per minute (6 actions) we get 1 draw and 4 cards per minute (5 actions)

-Lord/lady being held and not being able to see it's cooldown

Solved by lord/lady not having its own draw button anymore.

Honestly all REALLY wonderful changes. Senix looked at the problems with Astrologian in Endwalker and in previous expansions and decided to tackle all of them! So honestly, thank you for that. As someone who has mained every iteration of Ast ever, I really appreciate this direction.

That being said, I have only a few concerns. One of which is that card manipulation is now seemingly completely gone. Card manipulation has always been a fun part about astrologian. I think it's a big part of what many of us enjoyed about HW/SB astrologian. Just being able to cycle your cards, redraw your cards, change your cards into a buff for other cards, or change your cards into a lord/lady. Any type of card manipulation that we had is now gone. It was pretty much dead in endwalker with redraw being our only option, but I still think it will be missed and I hope it returns in a future expansion in some way.

My only other concern, with the information we have so far, is that our cards might be a little bit too generic. One dps buff, one heal (hot or instant), one mitigation (damage reduction). Those are all great, but they don't have any flavor to them. So what I mean is that in any game, a buff that shoots missiles or debuffs targets that you attack while the buff is active will always be more fun than a button that just does +x% damage. -x% damage taken. If the new offensive card, and new mitigation card are too simple in such a way, then I think we should consider spicing them up for 8.x