I only picked up Healer classes in ShB so I never got the chance to try pre-ShB Astro, thus ShB Astro is the one I grew to love. I was wondering why the class felt so bad as I started levelling it in DT, until I realized that Astral/Umbral draw has become a glorified 2 minute buff. They took the part of the job I enjoyed a great deal (the randomness and business) and arbitrarily condensed it into a fixed and simple system so that it could fit into the 2 minute window and it feels awful. It feels really bad being outside of burst with nothing to do, and it feels bad in burst because I didn't work towards any of what I'm doing, we've gotten two role-specific Dragon Sights in exchange for getting rid of feeling like I'm constantly supporting my team with buffs throughout the fight.

I don't get why they keep taking jobs that have specific niches that develop their own fans who are very attached to their class, and gut them so people who weren't playing them anyways can enjoy them more, it's really frustrating, especially when everything outside of class design has been so good! Hell, Pictomancer is the best designed DPS in the game in my opinion, and I'm hearing similar sentiment towards Viper, so it's not like they can't design good jobs anymore, they either don't know what to do with old classes or put all their resources into new jobs and left the rest to cook on the sidewalk.

TLDR; The randomness and business was the appeal of Astro and the class no longer has that, I wish they'd stop stripping classes of their gameplay identities out of fear that job complexity would alienate new players, or whatever their design philosophy is now. I suppose I should have been more vocal about the jobs I loved when they were actually fun to play.