Astro Card system is useless!

[Tunda]

The only reason why I use cards to generate mana.. the system is so rigged I miss how astro can switch from healing shielding in shadowbringers.

Card system was way better in shadow bringers too

Please se return the glory of astro

[CyberNettrix]

Agreed! It's currently so chaotic to play that even for people like me who love the aesthetic I'm thinking I'm just going to go Whm. The cards are so weird this time around. They literally just need to bring back Shadowbringers Astro!

[ForsakenRoe]

It's hard to pin down what my favourite part of this new AST design is. Is it that 'The Spear' is a ranged card and 'The Arrow' is a healing card? Is it that they changed the card pairings AGAIN? Is it that the Spire is effectively a 3rd charge of Celestial Intersection, and the Bole a 2nd charge of Exaltation's mitigation? Or is it that they had to buff the DOT by an entire 15p per tick, to make up for the loss of RDPS we had due to using less damage cards per 2min cycle (instead of just boosting Divination's power)?

Sarcasm, if you didn't notice. It's a confused mess of a design

[HyoMinPark]

I’m not a huge fan of the DT AST card rework. I know that I will always be biased towards HW/SB AST because I adored the job during HW and SB, and played it more than my main job at the time—but even ShB AST wasn’t that bad in retrospect, despite how salty I was about the card rework and the loss of things like Royal Road and Time Dilation. I really enjoyed AOE deployment of cards back in “original AST”, or enhancing or extending a single card on someone. (As a BRD, I LOVED getting an enhanced or extended Spear back in SB.) It just felt more fun and engaging, and while there were still “useless cards” (looking at you, old Spire), at least Royal Road and Minor Arcana “put them to use”.

The current cards still have useless cards that I just toss out at random because what’s the point of them, and I have no system to turn them into something better like Royal Road or OG Minor Arcana.

Like sure, in theory, the idea of a mini-shield in Spire sounds good—but content also has to not hit like a wet noodle first. Plus, it’s redundant considering we already have two mini-shields in the form of CI and its charges. Lady of Crowns has been redundant since it was brought back, and it’s still redundant now. We simply have too many other oGCD healing tools at our disposal that using a Lady feels unnecessary, compared to SB where we didn’t have COpp as a regen, CU on a 60s timer, Horoscope, and Macrocosmos. We had Earthly Star and CU was on a 90s timer at the time, and those were our oGCD heals; so getting an oGCD heal in the form of Lady at least felt more useful and less redundant in my opinion.

Ewer being a single-target regen is actually kind of useful; I never thought of that and it’s nice to toss it as extra chip-healing on a tank or a DPS that greeded irresponsibly. But Arrow being increased healing potency? When healers are already incredibly strong in terms of their healing and content already incredibly weak in terms of their damage output? Seems unnecessary. For memes, I’ve been tossing it on my friends when they play WAR because I have no use for it.


I guess I really shouldn’t have expected much else. I think the idea of a split card system is good—but not in the current form. I have always thought having separate systems for damage cards and utility cards while keeping Royal Road and allowing the two systems to coexist would be better. A lot of the problems with HW/SB AST was just that damage cards were inherently better than the utility cards, and since both existed within the same system, the utility ones would always come up short. Separating “offensive cards” into one system and “utility cards” into a second, and allowing both to operate and exist independently of one another, and I think that would have solved the original issue. But that’s just my opinion.

Sorry if this was not explained well—it was written in between doing other things; so it might not be all that cohesive.

Tl;dr — I don’t like the rework. I still miss HW/SB AST. I would even take back ShB AST despite being salty about the death of my favorite iteration of the job being replaced with it.

[GrimGale]

AST has so many oGCD healing abilities now. And still spams Malefic forever. This rework has made the nuke spam even more apparent in AST.

[Valence]

ShB/EW AST had no card flavor.

DT AST has no card meaning or agency.

[Sani2341]

ShB/EW AST had no card flavor.

DT AST has no card meaning or agency.

Yeah.

Like the cards were all the same. But at least the gameplay rewarded using all of them.

DT AST had that reduced to a third, because the cards that aren't dmg are just one more flavour of skills we already had enough of. None of which were remoeved as far as I can tell.

[Ramiee]

Honestly I don't know how they can fix cards.
ShB/EW cards were boring but only made interesting by APM.
DT cards are rigid and thoughtless, the second you see your party you know how you'll use your cards theres zero personal choice.

HW/SB cards were not great either tbh, sure they were more interesting and probably the best system we had but still it was just The Balance fishing and maybe TP restoration and Mitigation during prog.

[Valence]

The problem is that we're trying to find interesting effects on support cards but the battle system is too thin to offer actual options to feed the concept beyond damage. Healing and mitigation is already covered by AST's toolkit (like all healers). What's left? MP? Nobody cares about MP anymore. Mobility? Sure maybe, but again, very niche especially if it's not AoE.

If they truly want to make AST unique and tied to cards, then a very wild option would be to tie up a lot of its current OGCD healing to actual cards:
- Balance: Damage
- Spire: Crit
- Arrow: Removes cast times or cuts them by an amount (like old lightspeed), casters dps suddenly best friends
- Bole? Unlocks Exaltation
- Spire? Unlocks Celestial Intersection
- Ewer? Unlocks Essential Dignity
(Bole, Spire, Ewer just one button use to immediately trigger the effect, no need for cumbersome press card, unlock ability, repress for effect application)

Reintroduce redraw with stacks to deal with rng. Keep or increase deck size to deal with rng and save cards you want. Start the battle with a semi randomized deck fill with cards.

On minor arcana while we're being wild:
- Lady: extends the card effect to AoE, smaller effects + small regen
- Lord: doubles the card duration, bigger effects + aoe damage

[Payadopa]

Stormblood AST was best AST. Nuff said.