Astro Card system is useless!

[PyurBlue]

I don't see why it should be mandatory that everything should be used every time it can be

It's nice to have some situational skills that don't just get pressed on cooldown always, though some players will be put off if a situational skill is so niche it almost never gets used. Low to non existent healing requirements are contributing to that but I still see it as an external problem. AST is pretty good right now, but healing overall is in a bad state.

[Alice_Rivers]

Low to non existent healing requirements are contributing to that but I still see it as an external problem. AST is pretty good right now, but healing overall is in a bad state.

This is absolutely something I agree with. I felt really good as a healer leveling through the 90-100 range, being undergeared for the dungeons, my tank also being undergeared and actually having to use our kits to get through. But I'll stop there rather than risk getting off topic.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

[...]Reading some of the posts here I can't help but think you guys want to hate current AST.

Those 'new' cards are literally "Exaltation/Asp Benefic/Intersection but Card VFX & worse". Those aren't really big to write home about when they could just give more charges to Exaltation & Intersection specifically while actually making the other 4 cards more interesting. Oooor sure give us all these 'different cards' but also drop us a Royal Road. That'll suddenly make the system far more appealing.

Glad you enjoyed DT AST though. Not for some of us, myself included. They claimed about requiring more time to 'rework AST' back in 6.3 after mentioning it months prior to that & wanting to push it back to 7.0. Well, look what they have cooked in the span of 2'ish years: more mit/heal we totally don't need lmao. Is this really the best that they're willing to do for AST?

[Kissune]

I am loving DT AST, going from two cards to six was huge, I may not always use all of them but I do use all of them and they're oh so very useful. Need more healing but don't want to (or can't) use Synastry? There's a card for that. Shield without spending a token? Got that too. Regen without spending a GCD? You bet. Then there's my absolute favourite: Mitigation, that has been a godsend way too many times. This version has had me leaning away from my WHM main status to play more AST. Do I miss Astrodyne? A little bit. But I'd rather have this level of flexibility all of these options to do more things, especially at lower levels. I'll take this over RNG of a mere two cards any day.

Reading some of the posts here I can't help but think you guys want to hate current AST.

I take offence to this. Because I did try. I wanted to *like* current AST, I really did, I gave it the fairest shot I could coming from older iterations, but ultimately it just feels bad to use. You say 'going from 2 cards to 6', but the way I see it we went from 2 cards to 1, as rarely, if ever, do I find that these new cards contribute in any way beyond the damaging ones. I find them to be too weak at absolute best. I ran extremes with AST for a while, and I remember distinctly remarking to my static that the cards feel useless when things are going right, and useless when things are going wrong. When I have to panic heal to recover, a 10% healing amp on one person or a 400 potency shield isn't going to make an appreciable difference especially when every weave counts, and believe me, I've healed ultimates. Throwing a 10% mit on the tank doesn't make a difference for a buster or any auto attacks when they are already capable of solo mitigating and healing themselves anyways. At least in Endwalker/Shadowbringers, my cards always felt good to play, even if the effects were simple and not all that varied. Now I'm stuck with the choice of either constantly overwriting them, or just... throwing them out to pad my APM. The Ewer is the only one I'd say that I actually notice the effect of, but it's basically just a way to put kardia on two tanks at once every 2 minutes.

At least in StB/HW, cards that weren't useful could be burned to make more useful cards better, or stored for a time later where they're useful. You have a 55s window to utilize the cards you're given, and if you don't or can't, they just feel bad. This isn't like letting celestial intersection or whatever sit at full charges for a bit, cards are supposed to be the core mechanic of the class. There's zero incentive to interact with it ever, and that's disappointing. Unique card effects mean nothing when they're so weak and so easily outmatched by basically everything else in your kit that there's no reason to use them.

The illusion of flexibility and power that has been put into these cards just makes me disappointed bc people will just see it at a surface level and not engage more than that. And it makes me sad, because I'm sure this is the iteration of AST that will stick, and that means that the class that made me fall in love with this game is gone for good. In its place is a shadow of itself.

Personally, I think that the Bole/Spire need their effects doubled, and Arrow needs a new effect for me to even consider picking it up. Bc right now I barely care to use any of them, to the point where I actually got frustrated enough to swap off the job midway through raid night because I was just so mad at how useless the cards felt. AST's general healing kit is the same old, and it's a fond familiarity, but these cards feel more like a tacked on afterthought than a core mechanic with any thought to it. I feel like I'm playing the only healer without a class identity at the moment, despite all the flavour baked in to its regular healing toolkit.

[Alice_Rivers]

I may have been overly harsh, if the cards were that much more powerful in HW/SB I can understand why it would feel lackluster to have this now, my only prior experience is the EW variant and getting into trouble while I learned to not play it like WHM and to me this is a huge opening of my options. While I can't speak to ultimates - I'm not even a savage player, I did use AST for the new extremes with several groups of randoms and being able to drop Celestial Intersection and Exaltation on one and the second CI with the mit card on the other to address dual tank mechanics felt wonderful, as did following up with an Aspected Benefic on one weaving the regen card for t'other. Similarly being able to use the cards to maintain dps players in all content without breaking my own gravity/malefic spam is neat.

I do kinda get wanting the buff the cards if they are to be a core mechanic. If the old gameplay was closer to the job lore as laid out in it's quests, I feel like I missed out.
I'm not too sure how much room there is for buffs though, just thinking over the potencies of their comparable skills. Even WHM's Divine Benison is only 500 potency of shield without a heal. Which does bring me to one of my first thoughts when I saw how they allocated the cards: 'Why do I get heal buff and shield together and mit paired with regen? It makes so much more sense to have heal buff with the regen and the shield with the mit' I feel like they'd synergise so much better that way. I won't argue against making cards better though, I just don't wanna go back to EW AST, those cards felt pointless to me; yes I got astrodyne and it's nice little buffs every minute and a half, it may just be because I didn't break out of normal content (without unsyncing) in EW that the 6% dps buff would become noticeable but I never did notice it. Maybe there's room for a compromise? They could give us two random cards per 30 seconds rather than three fixed per 60 and bring astrodyne back? I'm not sure how much I'd like that myself but it's an idea from my uncreative brain.

I do agree though about AST lacking in identity. It's kinda like a raid tuned WHM with cards and weaker damage. As a previously mentioned WHM main I feel that's also bland, hopefully they'll do something good in 8.0 but I don't know how much hope I hold for that given the apparent track record. I can only say I think this, like the dungeon/trial difficulty, is a step in the right direction.

Sorry for my initial reaction to this thread, it wasn't very thought through. While our experiences and thoughts clearly differ on the subject, your position makes sense.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I may have been overly harsh, if the cards were that much more powerful in HW/SB I can understand why it would feel lackluster to have this now, my only prior experience is the EW variant and getting into trouble while I learned to not play it like WHM and to me this is a huge opening of my options[...]

Speaking for myself: it's not about whether the cards are more powerful or weaker. It's more about having the agency to manipulate 'a useless card' into 'actually useful card'.

When I speak of "drop us a Royal Road", imagine there's this one hypothetical button that lets you sacrifice your unused Bole/Arrow cards to empower your next card play, whichever they are. Can you keep playing Bole/Arrow as it is? Surely do. You can even empower them if you wish to, there's the option for that. Hell you probably would consider that if you're suddenly paired with a bad tank: i.e. "What's this? I can turn my bole from 10% to 30% mit? Hell yeah gimme that!"

Suddenly all cards could becomes useful, not something that you throw out because 'lol it's a free mit/heal' which is exactly why we already have charged intersection, essential dignities, one exaltation, and plethora of other oGCDs. If they deemed that we DO need these extra single target mit/heals, then they could've just given us an extra charges of these and they still would have the space to create a better card system - we have absolutely no reason to sacrifice this design space for more or less the same purpose button 'but card VFX', that's so wasteful.

[Alice_Rivers]

That was a thing? I don't know where I'd put it on my bar but I'd definitely find the space for that kind of ability.

[PyurBlue]

I would welcome the return of Royal Road though I'm unsure about using other cards to trigger the buff effects. In a way the original RR made all the cards useful, but you'd almost never actually play something like Bole for the defense so the card itself felt kind of meaningless. On the other hand that wouldn't be as much as issue now since you'd know when Bole or any specific card is coming up. In another thread I proposed replacing Minor Arcana with RR effects which would be another option. I don't find MA very interesting at this point.

[Alice_Rivers]

That would certainly be a fair trade. Minor Arcana is a bit on the naff side, I find the heal useful now and then but it's nothing a quick helios can't do.

[Valmaxian]

That was a thing? I don't know where I'd put it on my bar but I'd definitely find the space for that kind of ability.

It was a thing indeed - it sounds like a lot of buttons, but it’s basically the same as our current four Play buttons; Draw, Play, Spread, and Royal Road. You could enhance the power of a card, increase its duration, make it AoE, or just play the card if you wanted. There was choice, flexibility, and what I consider “productive RNG” - the cards were random, but if you didn’t get what you wanted you could use Royal Road to make the next card better. Felt GREAT.