The changes to Astrologian are upsetting

[Awful]

I miss back in HW when AST had more of identity and time magic it was such a thrill to not only extend or empower your cards, but your own regens and AoE regens, there were choices that impacted the whole group a lot from proper card usage/buff uptime. You could also go Noct or Diurnal Sect to change the way you wanna play the game and fulfill that perfect versatility of a hybrid support role.

Now? AST is so far gone from what it is now and it pains me to see everyone so visually upset over a lot of the Media Tour show cases and the lukewarm job trailer, the real nail in the coffin is the lack of job identity across the board because going forward with DT is going to stagnate it but I hope it doesn't. I want to remain hopeful for DT but at the moment I just keep scratching my head at all the changes since ShB and the route XIV is going in.

[awhitet]

I'm really surprised they decided to bring back single target defensive cards, AST is already super strong in single target healing/mit and now you even have 3 charges of ED.

They better ramp the damage to tanks and party this expansion otherwise these new abilities and changes are going to be useless and just sitting on CD.

[Ioletia]

I feel pretty poor about arguing in Square's favor at this point. I really thought they would have at least thought any of this through, but they didn't?

The damage cards are still divided into melee/ranged, but now they're set. So, if you're in a duty roulette with two ranged or two melee DPS, you would have been better off playing a different healer as Astro's damage mainly comes from buffing their allies (See Fall Malific's 250 potency against WHM's Glare at 310, SCH's Broil at 295, and SGE's Dosis at 330 that also heals). Only having two damage cards at all means that you're even more tightly bound into the two minute meta- where you'll be Astral drawing and saving that up for a minute before playing your damage card, Umbral drawing your next damage card, playing that card, and then using Divination > Oracle while the damage cards are still active on your DPS. It's literally worse now as you have even more things to weave in to be effective.

And then there's Neutral Sect > Sun Sign. Neutral Sect already requires other abilities to be useful at all, unlike Temperance or Holos or Illumination/Expedience that just naturally give an effect without requiring a combo ability. So, Square has literally just given Astro's a two oGCD Temperance or a 2 oGCD + GCD Holos. It's literally worse. A 10% mit is already such a common thing that unless DT has massive raidwide damage spikes, it's just going to be another niche "healing" ability that you only use when you remember it. Because, honestly, the shield on Neutral sect is so pitiful (and I need to use Aspect Helios so rarely) that the ability itself should really be removed altogether for something more functional.

The non-damage cards are all oGCD worse effects that require even more buttons. On paper adding more "Play" buttons to replace Redraw/Undraw/Astrodyne comes out neutral, but how often did those abilities get used? Redraw was an occasional thing if you were shooting for Astrodyne seals, which few seemed to care about. Undraw was never used. And Astrodyne was basically on a 1.5 minute timer. Now? Every sixty seconds you get to scramble around with one necessary and two functionally unnecessary cards split across three buttons- and the Lord/Lady.

None of this makes the Astro better. These are all strict downgrades from what the class is now. Hell, keep the kit as is- don't even add any new abilities- and I bet Astro would be fine until 8.0.

[Local_Custard]

tbh my thought is: I am disappointed in the DT changes and you have said everything I could have said about AST better than I could. I will still suffer and play the job, though. I am stubborn and morbidly curious. There is a chance I'll main another job but AST is very hard to replace... I love playing support and constantly keeping my hands busy.

I'm especially disappointed with the cards- if I cannot keep busy I get bored. Cards serves a nice halfway solution for that (not perfect but it works).

Another thought: will the new play abilities invalidate my current AST macro I setup? The macro setup is 8 macros, one for each party member. I used the keyboard numbers 1 through 8 for the corresponding player (I am a controller player). I'm not sure if this makes giving out cards more efiicient but it does make it more comfortable for me at least.

Edit: if I am presenting any misconceptions do correct me

[Sylvain]

will the new play abilities invalidate my current AST macro I setup? The macro setup is 8 macros, one for each party member. I used the keyboard numbers 1 through 8 for the corresponding player (I am a controller player). I'm not sure if this makes giving out cards more efiicient but it does make it more comfortable for me at least.

Edit: if I am presenting any misconceptions do correct me

Most likely you'd need x3 as many macro.
On the other hand, with only 2 DPS cards every minute, my guess would be that only 2 macro would be needed. Just 1 for the best melee and 1 for the best range.
The other cards act as regular ogcd, so unless you need a macro to weave any single target healing action, they'll just function as is.

[Local_Custard]

Most likely you'd need x3 as many macro.
On the other hand, with only 2 DPS cards every minute, my guess would be that only 2 macro would be needed. Just 1 for the best melee and 1 for the best range.
The other cards act as regular ogcd, so unless you need a macro to weave any single target healing action, they'll just function as is.

Jebus crust that sounds like a macro nightmare in the making if I have to do 3 times the size of the macro. Hopefully I will not need to do that.

I am now thinking of the healing cards but unsure when I'll use it.
...I can think of a case where I purposely join the most chaotic duties on purpose just to find any use for it at all. Or if I can tolerate DT astro just enough that I might take it with me to higher end duties as I go through higher end content chronologically. I'm not sure if I will though- I have a hunch I'll eventually drop DT astro sooner or later and main a different job. Maybe fisher will finally fully claim me...

[MitsukiKimura]

After going over the new changes and seeing what has happened, wanted to give my take on the AST changes.
First and foremost the Astral and umbral draw skills allowing you to draw 3 cards + whichever lord or lady. Seeing as only one of those cards is damage besides the Lord of crowns, this makes 2/3 cards a non factor during the opener/2min burst windows. My take is that you will just have to hold them but end up using them before the next draw is off cooldown.
We had a much better Ast system with Royal Road and spread. Most of the complaints were people just fishing for balance but that is a minority.
Astral Draw/Umbral draw being 60 seconds. This makes the class feel less engaging than the 30 second draw we had before. It also nerfs the MP gain from drawing cards since you are drawing less. I believe this needs to be sorted back to normal draw on the 30 second timer again.
If the parsing community wants to bicker about losing their damage cards might I suggest bringing back sleeve draw on a 2 min cooldown that gives all damage cards?
With the new card buffs, I can say Bole and The Ewer seem to be decent but I might suggest The Arrow and the Spire being changed completely since they already have Celestial intersection charges and the spire would only feel like another charge. The Arrow I would suggest reworking entirely. 10% Hp recovery on healing actions is a bit underwhelming given the current fact that it forces you to play the Astral deck on a 60 second timer that shares with Umbral draw.
These are just some of my thoughts. Though I am only suggesting my concerns and improvements. Removing the RNG entirely from Ast will not help people grow onto the job. Strangely enough having to adapt on the fly brings more life to the class making the player adapt to the situation with the hand they are dealt with.

[glamazon]

Why can't we just have royal road and spread back?

[Cleretic]

I had to take some time to chew on how I felt about these changes, because I wasn't exactly expecting why I don't like them. And I think it's because, in concept and in isolation, they don't sound that bad. But ultimately, the changes are to an end of giving us less attack buffs and more damage mitigation and healing... in a game that's constantly been making that part of healers less and less necessary.

There's a universe where this is the best version of AST ever, marrying the variety of the pre-Shadowbringers cards to the reliability and constant usefulness of the post-Shadowbringers cards. ...but this isn't that universe, because if I'm frequently in teams that don't need a healer, why do I care about more healing options?

This is a game that never passes up an opportunity to give a tank self-sustain--and will rarely leave the DPS without any, either. And I understand that this is generally about making sure that teams don't fall apart if their healer is terrible, which is at least an understandable angle; nobody wants their night ruined because one of their random teammates happens to be an idiot. But that's gotten so extreme with specifically healers that at this point we've reached a point where healers, frequently, just don't feel necessary.

It's a problem on both the low and high ends of content difficulty. On a regular dungeon roulette, if my tank is a Warrior or Paladin they have enough healing that I'm just consigned to being a Glare/Dosis/Broil/Malefic-bot that, depending on the dungeon, might occasionally get to hit Esuna. (And Warrior doesn't even need to take a DPS loss to hit that.) And in higher content, your Extremes, Savages, Ultimates? Once everyone's gotten it down enough to regularly kill the thing, the very first angle of nonstandard approaches is always 'can we do it without healers'--and frequently, the answer is 'yes'! In that world, where is the excitement in getting more healing options coming from? I'm already obsolete on both extremes, and history suggests that I'm only gonna get more obsolete in the next ten levels!

The worst part is the cards used to save AST from this problem, but they now only exacerbate it. They were the best answer to the fairly logical follow-on question from this situation; if we're not gonna get more use out of more healing buttons, what buttons should we get? And to most of the community that's always been 'more damage-dealing', but that's never done it for me; if I wanted to play a DPS I would be, I'm not interested in playing a diet DPS. The cards provided a different option: non-healing support, in recent form specifically through damage buffs. That works, that's the logical follow-on; if nobody needs healing, I want to support them in the thing they do need, and in this game that's pretty much always 'damage'. Sure, I wasn't always flinging cards, but thirty seconds comes up often enough that I never just felt like I was a Malefic-bot. The seals were a nice extra dimension too, but I get why not everyone liked them.

And now, the cards are just... more healing. More of the thing we didn't need. Why am I supposed to care? I genuinely don't think I'll ever play most of those cards, because nobody's going to need them.

[KanataNanaya]

as usual the more we know about it the more concern arise.

- We will have to wait 1 minute at the start of each wipe in raid now.
- Guaranteed to be gimped on dungeon runs with only 2 melee or 2 ranged.
- All 4 defensive cards are useless as expected. For each of the card we already have a superior version in our kit for similar effect. Aspected Benefic, Exalt, celestial opposition, and Essential dignity. why even bother.

Also confirmed that I can absolutely remove play 2 and Play 3 out of my hotkeys and still play the job to the best of its potential. Hell, probably more fun tbh.

on the plus side, removing play 2 and 3, replace play 1 with 2 marcro that play 1 to your 3rd slot and play 2 to your 4th slot. bam, less button and less worries about targetting.