Thank you for the Astro changes coming in dawntrail!

[Supersnow845]

This is where your emphasis should be because this wasn't the case when the current raid tier started. But now everyone is maximum geared, and you can solo heal the fights (with enough support from dps jobs). Unless we're doing prog fully geared it's just not the case.

I meant that as in “as of endwalker” not “when we have 15% echo and BIS before entering P9

[Zolvolt]

A

I meant that as in “as of endwalker” not “when we have 15% echo and BIS before entering P9

Tanks have needed lots of external cd's to get through tank busters as of endwalker. It's the one major thing about healing this expansion. Have we forgotten how big of a deal p4s, p8s, p7s, and others had such big tank buster and tank damage that couldn't just be covered by earthly star and sacred soil. If your claiming thats not the case I have a hard time believing it because it was not the experience I had. The buzz within the community around it this expansion has been high too. I have had the experience like you said, but only once everything was on farm and we had a lot more gear so what you said definitely lines up with that experience. As for the echo, I haven't done any savage this expansion with the echo, I usually get my 8 clears for the chest and stop.

[Rozeee]

But now everyone is maximum geared, and you can solo heal the fights (with enough support from dps jobs). Unless we're doing prog fully geared it's just not the case.

Please don't act as if you need gear to solo heal savage. People solo healed P4S week 1 . Release date of Asphodelos savage is 4th Jan, this video is 10 Jan.

[Zolvolt]

To be fair they only solo-healed the door boss.

[Rozeee]

No they did not.

[Zolvolt]

No they did not.

I stand corrected. That is impressive, that final part of p2 can be difficult to heal with 2 people let alone 1. Astrologian is a really great job. Unfortunately it was sage that got all the solo-heal credit in the next tier though.

[glamazon]

crit autos don't exist anymore, so highly variant boss damage just does not exist.

Utility should be a bonus for healers. Our primary job is to heal and our kit covers that all of the cards should be bonus not necessary but nice to make things a little easier so you could scrap all healing with cards and just have the cards do the bonus buffs and debuffs that help but are not live or die.

After going through some of your points i just don't get it. What's wrong with a bonus? A mana regen? scholar speed buff has helped you act like it doesn't matter but it does. If its on cooldown and you can't use it does that mean it wasn't useful when it was up? If all the cards are just nice bonuses that help but are not required to win a fight then that should be fine right? They help. They don't win the fight for you. You make a lot of great points primarily leading me to think that ff14 fight design is one dimensional, flat, and stale. it limits so much when it comes to jobs and what they could do.

[Kissune]

APM on AST is going heavily down, and let me explain why. In burst now, in EW, we have 9-14 weaves. Between 3xplay, 2xdraw, 1xdivi, 1xlightspeed, 1xdyne, 1xminor arcana, the absolute minimum is 9. Then, after that, you have up to 2xredraw, 2xlord, and an extra dyne every 6th minute burst window, leading to 14. That's a lot, I'll give them that. That's 7 straight GCDs of double weaves, likely with a haste buff, and I genuinely can't think of another class that weaves that much. I will agree, something needed to change there. As much as I loved it, and thrived in it, by the end of TOP I was starting to feel the wrist pain, and I'm kbm. But one of the big things I loved about it was the burst never felt the same. If I had a ranged card first over melee it changed the order I needed to target people, or possibly my priority in some cases. (Summoners bursted harder in the first few seconds of a 2min and didn't do nearly as much over the rest, meaning a card was most effective on them early and fell off hard later, whereas a bard would be more consistent over the course of the burst window and might even snapshot their DoT which was a very valuable thing to catch.) I might have had to redraw, even twice, if I was presented of the same type of card, or possibly greeding for a seal just for my own enjoyment. The last part wasn't optimal, but by god it was enjoyable. Dyne itself, loathed as it was, I had to use at a different point each burst, finally looping at 8 minutes. The burst window was the most exciting part of AST to me bc it was different every time.

Now... We get exactly, and I mean exactly, bc there's not even a variation on WHEN you play the cards, every button in this burst window is used at the exact same time, on the exact same people, every time. 5-6 weaves. That's it. I only say 5-6 bc I don't know if the new divination follow-up is a gcd or ogcd, I wasn't paying attention for the flash in the trailer. Play, divination, lord, draw, play, possible divi follow-up. That's it. That's the burst. That will always be your burst. Doesn't matter the fight, the comp, the timing, the duration of the fight, nothing. Your burst is as static as a white mages. It is about as busy as a scholar, who presses chain, aetherflow, EDx3, chain-follow up (which we know is an ogcd). Technically scholar is more busy but I'd be surprised if dissipation survives given how much people bitch about it. Honestly I'd be surprised if energy drain survives, given how dedicated they are to making healing as easy and unappealing as possible. Healers will only be asked to heal and press their one dps button, and that's it. Bc that's definitely not the major cause of the healer drought given that it is so. Fucking. Boring. To play if you're not actively healing, which you rarely are.


To the guy I have muted who says stuff like 'oh the APM won't change bc you will be playing more single target cards than ever'... That's just wrong. I did TOP on release. I did DSR on release. During the entire length of a 19 minute fight, I cast, on my very first TOP clear where I was still shaky and overhealing.... 6 Exaltations. 9 Intersections. And 5 Essential Dignities. This is a 19 minute fight. For 13 minutes Exalt was sitting there, unused. For 14.5, I had charges of intersection sitting there, unused. For 16.5 minutes I had charges of ED sitting there, unused. But that's ultimate, right? Healing isn't really needed there, nor is single target mit. What about savage?

Well... During P8S p1 my very first AST clear was... 2 exaltations. 7 intersections. 4 EDs. In a 7 minute fight. During P8S p2 it was 2 exaltation, 11 intersection (wow!), and 4 ED. 8 minute fight. You say that 'there was never a time where they were just sitting on cooldown' but during the alleged hardest tier to heal mine just were. I was undergeared, too, bc my static insisted that gear go to dps and tanks first. And even with that, I just did not need to use them all. Even on a mechanic that requires as much ST healing as natural alignment, I barely used anything. Maybe you just love to overheal, but if that's the case just play white mage or sage that gets actual benefits for doing just that. So considering I was literally never ever 'out' of ST healing resources that I needed... why do we get more? Why do we need more? Abyssos was apparently the hardest tier to heal, and yet these two clears I refer to were a blue and green in regards to healing. I wasn't chadding my cohealer, we just straight up didn't heal very much together bc we didn't need to. He got a 27 to my 28 in p8sp2, and a whopping 8 to my 52 in p8sp1. Like I'm sorry, but we just do not need more single target healing in this game. And even if we did, they could have just given us more charges of what we already have rather than completely removing cards as a system and handing us an aetherflow with pre-assigned lustrate and aquaveil built in. Cards could have been made less busy, sure. The ShB system was many things, but it wasn't 'busy'. DPS cards could have been made more interesting, flat% isn't the only damage buff in this game. But instead, we get nothing. No dps cards, no utility cards, bc the appeal and playstyle of drawing from a deck and using what you get with each pull forcing adaptation you get the same useless tools every single time you press the button. I'm never going to run out of ED charges and be thankful I had that 'healing card' from what is essentially a permanent uptime aetherflow... I'm just gonna think 'why is this not a 4th ED charge if I am just going to use it like one'. Same with a mit card and exaltation/intersection. We just simply do not need this utility, and even if they do bump up the damage and healing requirements of Dawntrail, which after an expansion of watching warriors solo heal every dungeon in the game I doubt... Why the hell did they not just give us more charges of abilities we already have instead of taking the only thing that seperated AST from the other 3 healers away? I'm so sick and tired of having to argue with people that these new skills are actually useful bc it feels like I'm the only one that actually played AST in anything other than dungeons with apparently the worst players knowing to mankind, who can't possibly make the connection of 'heal you unlock by pressing a button called draw' and 'heal you unlock by pressing a button called aetherflow' aren't the same fucking thing? Like I seriously don't understand how people can look at the upcoming system and feel like it's in any way new or exciting unless they're coming from the perspective of a non-AST player who is just happy to have a brand new basic ass healer with a starry aesthetic bc everything that made astro interesting is gone. The slight differences in stuff like earthly star, macro, and horoscope are all that's left but if that's the only thing that distinguishes them then it's a failure of game design. These new cards suck. They're boring, they're slow, and just bc they look like cards doesn't mean they feel or act like them. Giving me a bunch of extra mit and healing options isn't what I cared about. I had those. What I wanted from the AST rework was engagement, and this is anything but. It might not look like white mage, it might not be exactly like it, but it's going to play so similarly in 99.9% of situations that it won't matter. You heal the damage, mitigate the hits, press the one dps button otherwise. I won't even need a job gauge on my screen to play the class to 100% efficiency.

And having all these people screaming about how 'well we wanted cards that had a bunch of wacky effects that can't be relied on or a bunch of stupidly situational and niche ways to do the exact same fucking thing as a flat% damage buff anyways' just makes me sad for this games future. Square enix at least recognized that you can't have mixed dps and utility effects in the same deck with RNG bc that makes them either unplayable or broken, and that's horrible for static fight design. So rather than say 'no' to the people demanding fancy and unique cards, they did this. And now no one is happy, except people who apparently think the identity of AST is pressing an ability called draw, and not thinking about what it does.

Utility should be a bonus for healers. Our primary job is to heal and our kit covers that all of the cards should be bonus not necessary but nice to make things a little easier so you could scrap all healing with cards and just have the cards do the bonus buffs and debuffs that help but are not live or die.

After going through some of your points i just don't get it. What's wrong with a bonus? A mana regen? scholar speed buff has helped you act like it doesn't matter but it does. If its on cooldown and you can't use it does that mean it wasn't useful when it was up? If all the cards are just nice bonuses that help but are not required to win a fight then that should be fine right? They help. They don't win the fight for you. You make a lot of great points primarily leading me to think that ff14 fight design is one dimensional, flat, and stale. it limits so much when it comes to jobs and what they could do.

Bc scholar expedient is predictable. Most people in the raiding scene don't use it for its speed boost anyways. They use it bc it's a 20s mit. I think the last time I remember it being relevant was wroth of flames... and like... wroth of flames was clearly doable without it. There's a big difference between getting a mana regen 'sometimes' and a speed boost 'sometimes' vs being able to reliably and comfortably know when it's happening every time. I'll be real, if the dawntrail tools we were getting were just tools on top of our kit and nothing else, I wouldn't have cared. I would have questioned what we actually needed them for, but I wouldn't have minded. We got a bunch of tools in EW from ShB that made me ask 'why do we need this' like exaltation and the more charges on our healing CDs... but bc cards were still fun, active, and rewarding, I didn't care. Now we're getting even more tools that are making me ask 'why do we need this' bc we didn't need them in EW either, but this time it's at the cost of that card system I found active, fun, and engaging. Pressing a button every 60s to gain access to buttons I basically already had in the rest of my kit but now they have card vfx is not fun to me. It's not interesting. I don't think about them like cards, I just think about them the same way I do essential dignity or celestial intersection. It's there if I need it in a fight, and once I've decided on where I put it in a pull, it stays there. Even if you can make the argument of 'well what if there are mistakes' like... I'd just use ED? Like I always have? And if I run out of ED and the only thing that saves me is the healing card I got a minute ago... it's not gonna make me think 'phew, thank god i drew that' it's gonna make me feel like 'this could have just been a 4th ED charge bc I use it the exact same way.'

[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!