Even putting the randomness of cards aside can we talk about how borderline-useless and pointless they all feel? They’re (mostly) all just copies of pre-existing abilities

- Bole is just Exaltation but worse (no heal)
- Ewer is just Aspected Benefic with no gcd (on a job replete with powerful regens lol)
- Spire is just Celestial Intersection with no charges
- Arrow is a ‘unique’ effect, but given how many insane-strength heals Astrologian can pull off, I find it to be usually the card I can rarely ever justify actually using. I guess it’s good for making meme shields with a Scholar in a coordinated party lol, but also seems like a fairly ‘niche usage’ in general content.

I’d have been willing to forgive the complete overhaul of the card mechanics if the new version was even remotely interesting. But most of the time it’s basically just, use damage card, wait 60 seconds, cycle to Umbral set, use damage card. There’s really no ‘excitement’ to it at all in my opinion.

Some random shower thoughts on how they could be made more interesting:
- Bole could act like a Minicosmos and compile damage up to a certain potency heal. Alternatively it could increase the target’s max HP like Protraction. Some means of effective mitigation that can differentiate it from Exaltation
- Ewer as a healing card could go a few different ways. One (drastic) thing I’d suggest is returning it to an MP restore. Even if it just gave 2500 MP that’d still be enough for an extra raise, so it’d at least have some niche usage in like early progression content lol. And while MP management is already non-existent, that’s kind of why I think a MP restore could pass in the first place. MP can be managed to never run out anyway, so it wouldn’t majorly affect balance if Astrologian could throw out MP crutches lol. I think lol
- Arrow I think could actually be fairly interesting as a healing card. I’d suggest making it a spell speed / gcd increase. While it would cause issues with dps jobs, healers generally don’t have cool-down alignments to worry about anyway. And we already have Presence of Mind which works fine on White Mage. A gcd speed increase would also have double benefit for healers since it could be leveraged for either more healing or more dps. Alternatively I think making it a single target movement speed increase could kinda fit into a ‘healing card’; avoiding an aoe is the ultimate form of mitigation after all lol. Though that veers more towards ‘defensive’
- Spire I think could go a few ways. It could work like [Pan]haima and apply C amount of weak shields for its duration as opposed to just one (still weak) one. Either that or it could act like Ifrit-Egi’s old Radiant Shield and reflect a portion of the damage dealt back to the attacker, or deal damage of X potency to attacker for balancing. Maybe it still has a weak shield and the damage reflection only applies while the shield is active?

That’s just my thoughts on Astrologian’s cards. Not only have they removed a core aspect of the mechanic (rng), but they’ve replaced it with a system that just entirely worse in every way (in my opinion)