Astro Card system is useless!

[Alice_Rivers]

And they cut that... I would ask if they're insane, stupid or just hate healers/the players but then I look at WAR and realise the balance team at SE is incompetent. That's just ridiculous.

[Ramiee]

After careful consideration the incredible job design team at CBU3 has heard loud and clear about your issue with the card system.
We will now remove the cards and instead every 20 seconds you gain a new resource called a "sign" which you can use on an ability for healing a single target, healing a single target but STRONGER! and finally healing the entire party!

[Rydia_Misuto]

Stormblood AST was best AST. Nuff said.

No one has ever been more correct than you. What makes Astro great is RNG. They're not giving us Corsair, they're not giving us Gambler, Astro was the closest I could have. It had buffs that felt impactful and meaningful (what is this '6% every 2 minutes' nonsense?), it had two different stances so you were always beneficial to have, it had a wonderful card management minigame, each card had a different purpose and there were reasons to want some over others, and eating cards to buff the next card was excellent. There has never been anything that hits as high a high as sleeving a balance, burning an enhance card, and then drawing *another balance* and blasting both DPS in a dungeon with a giant power spike during their DPS rotations. Getting to feel relevant, having cards be a HUGE deal. Not some minor meaningless damage buff.

I will never forget that when I complained about the murder that they committed in Shadowbringers, the official response was "We hear you, you don't like AST now, so we made it that if you mess up instead of only a 2% buff it's now a 3% buff. You're welcome! That's what you wanted, right? "

Give me random card draws and make cards matter so I actually care what card I get. Give me limited tools to manipulate RNG. The change to prevent you drawing the same card again after shuffle was as far as it needed to go.

[imajinary]

I honestly refuse to play DT AST.

We have SGE now for more coolness and easy to learn class. Give us Stormblood AST back. Make the class feel like its own thing!

*I'm tired of the illusion that we have so many cards* when it's either two buffs (for melee or ranged DPS as it was in endwalker) or whatever this cyclic garbage is now, 4 cards to tank and 1 for melee dps and 1 for ranged. ugh.

It's okay if the class is harder to play at the start, until you get used to them. It's just literally a matter of time anyways and it's much more fun when the core mechanics actually have some meaning.

[Crafoutis]

My FC leader told me to come and voice my opinion on Astro.

Astro feels strong, but boring. One of the things I enjoyed about previous Astro was the excitement of Drawing.

Also my Play I, Play II, and Play III are useful, but unnecessary. Meaning my Umbral Draw and Astral Draw are simply for mana injection, and on Xhotbar my Play1-3 have no place on front-and-ready face buttons, and while them being on oGCD is useful, their usefulness is minimized by their lack of accessibility and occupation bloat.

My kneejerk thoughts on the matter would be I wish I only had one Draw, and one Play. I want to be Drawing frequently, and Playing frequently. And I want to not know what I'll be Drawing in order to get that excitement: "Oh man! I just got a Melee-DPS boost card, and we're about to hit a burst window, my Monk is going to love this!"

To summarize: Drawing is currently boring (to me). Playing is boring and bloated. I wish I was Drawing a single unknown card more frequently and only using one button to play that card.

Edit: In fact, thinking about it just put Draw and Play as a single transform button. If people want to keep it separate, we have that transform toggle functionality in-game now with 7.0. Do that, that would be fun to me.

[KanataNanaya]

every expansion they take something from us AST main...

[OverThere]

Honestly if they rework the astro system again they should give us back diurnal and nocturnal sec but they'll swap back and forth betweet the 'range' and 'melee' cards sets that sorta do the same thing we have now but all those cards have a 6% damage buff on them for their respective classes, so it doesn't feel like their just for tank. Hell have one of those range cards restored mana on the person it's used on so it gives Astros a situation if they really want to dump the mana card on themselves or on the casters that just rez two party members in a prog group. Bit of a side note but looking at astro pass iterations I really just wish the devs picked one that they like and stick with it, because honestly even tho I only picked this game up around ShB I'm getting really tired of learning how to play my job for the 3rd time

[KanataNanaya]

Give me random card draws and make cards matter so I actually care what card I get. Give me limited tools to manipulate RNG. The change to prevent you drawing the same card again after shuffle was as far as it needed to go.

They were sooooo goddamn close with perfection.

At the end of SB there was like at least 3-4 failsafe to make good use of any Draw.

Draw > Bad? Royal Road > Still Bad?: Redraw x2 stack > Still bad? Minor Arcana = almost always good(Lord = good, Lady = sometimes good)

If anything, They coulda just let people choose what they want for minor arcana. Target a mob? DPS, target a teammate/nothing? Heal, bam. every single card will get used effectively.

[Ilyn]

Been playing around with it for a while and I actually like it , I think it's fun if you mainly use play 2/3 cards to enhance other like abilities , Ast has always had that " stack to enhance" usefulness.

Need a boost for Essential Dignity slap Synastry and Arrow on
Want super shield .. Celestial Intersection with the Spire , if you really need more add Neutral Sect/Aspected Benefic . Super Mit barrier
Tank Buster incoming .. Exaltation and Bole
Need alittle extra Umphh to your regen .. add Ewer and maybe stack those AOE regen abilties with it ( not saying you should ... but you can lol)

Also knowing I can have Lord of Crowns up during 2 min is nice

@ 1 thing I would change though is switch the effect of Arrow and Bole for better color coordination Green for Bole to associate it with more healing and Arrow which is blue for more dmg mit . Play 3 is cool as Spire which is Yellow I can easily associate it with shielding and Ewer is blue for regen

[Azurarok]

Wait is Essential Dignity affected by Synastry? Last I checked it only works with single target spells and not abilities.

A thing I don't like about this card system is that you don't get to hold onto any card for later. Every minute you pretty much have to burn/toss what cards you have drawn for the other set.
This strange window still gives us the decision making where if you happen to have the right card for the situation you can use it, but it feels a lot more artificial than what RNG would've given us.

The devs basically have control over what options we have since fights are on a set timeline. It's just another part of DT's job design being dead set on killing flexibility, really.