The changes to Astrologian are upsetting

[Sylvain]

How about a card that adds mp and mp gen to give to myself or anyone else that dies and needs mana? that's useful

? Like when do you ever miss mp? Beside after death.
Personally I feel they should just get entirely rid of mp. It's not something I engage with. I'm always between 70-95. Lucid Dream on CD + whatever the healer's mechanic grants mp. If anything it is an annoyance as it takes a button slot.

If they'd remove mp there'd be 0 impact on gameplay beside maybe rez spamming which could easily be fixed by giving a charge system to the spell.

How about a card that adds a 1000 shield barrier thats usefu

It is, we got it, just much weaker (too weak, I feel 500-600 would be a good number)

how about a card that gives a burst of run speed in combat?

If it isn't AoE then it's not really useful and I rather leave that to SCH Expedience.
Everyone complains about homogenization but then want something unique from another job.
Like... I get a personal free sprint once every 2min? alright sure... but it does feel out of place.

How about a card that stuns the enemy?

You can't stun bosses, you want a card that can only be used on trahs pack in dungeon? like that's the definition of useless.

How about a card that reduces enemy mitigation?

So a DPS card, acting as a debuff, so the a debuffing divination.
They'd need to allow us to apply cards to ennemies. But then people would fuck up so they'd need to make that "only this card" can affect ennemy. Too convoluted. So basically they'd make an AoE DPS card which we alraedy have, it's called Divination.

How about a card that spreads a dot to a second enemy or turns the dot aoe?

Same as the above, cards are buff. Not debuff.
They could just make that gravity does that effect tho.

[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.

[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.

[Fyce]

- We will have to wait 1 minute at the start of each wipe in raid now.

That's not the case. You begin instances and respawns with Astral cards already loaded.

[KanataNanaya]

That's not the case. You begin instances and respawns with Astral cards already loaded.

oh. that's not too bad i suppose.

[glamazon]

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