Astro Card system is useless!

[Ezina]

After seeing the "adjustments" done to AST I will not be touching the job again. Last fun job was stripped away from so many of us it seems. I leveled it to 100 as I level everything for the DOW achievement, did a few expert dungeons with it and such, but I just didn't feel the magic in it anymore. Knowing that I will get the same cards every other draw made me lose all interest in the job especially with the pointless 1 min... I mean the 55 second CD on draw. The identity of AST has been cut up, chewed, and spat out, and the cards being completely weak aside from balance or spear there's hardly a use for them honestly. Not to mention spire being a shield card. I question why we even have shield abilities when Nocturnal Sect was removed from the game. Why are we taunted with such abilities? Just so we can be reminded of what we lost? I didn't agree with them removing Sect stances as it let all ASTs play the opposite role if they were in the same group. Now it's just a WHM with two cards able to buff melee and ranged jobs damage.

After seeing the CD for draw only being reduced by 5 seconds it made me lose all hope that this job will ever regain any sense of its identity back. I moved to just playing Sage which isn't the most fun I've had, but at least I can deal damage and heal, but I'll enjoy that while I can as I'm sure this team has plans to remove any identity the shield healers have next on their list.

[delinquentDuet]

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.

[Middie]

Did the raids the other night as AST and the cards still feel clunky.

Half the time the non-DPS cards were just ignored, the value wasn't there for the GCD, and I had better tools available.

Someone else said it, and got flamed haha, but it really feels like a watered down Aetherflow. Hit it every minute, regardless of if I had cards left, the mana regen is more important.

In EW, yeah they're all DPS cards, but I was throwing them out quickly because they had clear value.

I still enjoy the job, but I do admit I care a lot less about the cards now which is a shame as it's part of the core identity.

[Zolvolt]

I will say there was too many dead space moments in the normal raids. Lots of cool stuff goes on, but even on Scholar thre was little roo. To need faerie tether, or AF that's not energy drain. Same with astro cards, just not enough going on frequently enough

[Zaytex]

This job went from constantly busy to having a whole lot of nothing to do. The malefic mashing really stands out more now that I have nothing to do outside the burst window unless damage or mitigation is required, which isn't always necessary given FF14's job design.

Massive L rework

[Ramiee]

Sat down to try new AST today to see what its like.
Yikes.

I get that people wanted utility cards but the lack of randomness makes it so boring. I think a better way of handling this is having the 3 buttons be; Damage card, utility card, redraw.
Damage card would be 3 cards one that buffs melees one for ranged and one for supports. Other 3 utility will be damage taken down, regen and shield. Might be better options. Make each draw random but you get a 1 in 3 chance and a garanteed damage buff and utility. Redraw works in the sense that it redraws all present cards so if you think the damage buff is good but the utility is bad for the moment you use the damage buff then redraw for the utility, reverse for reverse scenario and if both cards are bad for the situation you just press redraw and it redraws both, lack of button bloat.

[bitofabother]

I want to be clear, 55s draw helps a lot on the job functioning at all, the additional lightspeed charge feels great, macro potency being fixed is good...

but the cards themselves just... feel really bad. Astrodyne meant that even in some of the most boring content, we had something to do, and there was some thought around holding it or not in world content... I know it's not really something to optimize for, but without more frequent cards, FATES and such feel even worse on Astro than they did before. Not that the cards aren't somewhat useful effects for something like Palace, but ... I dunno. There's something really clearly missing -- I don't feel too bad when I hold cards for making sure Div gets full buffs, because the others are pretty useless, but it means that the main mechanic of the job just isn't there for extended periods of time if pulls are taking too long..

Out of combat free draw, maybe? Maybe that's too powerful. Dying losing all your cards not happening? That'd be nice, they'd probably feel pretty good as more recovery tools like that. Maybe the 50-70 experience doesn't matter at all anymore but it really sucks getting only 50 and below duties in roulettes for no reason.

[Rehayem]

New card system is meaningless. There's only 2 cards that are actually good, rest are only thrown at the tank. They should've been party benefits of sorts (think Arrow or Bole in PvP). The job used to be high APM but now it's just more Malefic spam.

But don't worry guys, just wait 2,5 years for yet another rework, and then yet another one in 4-5 years.

[Unyqua]

Maybe the other cards beside the DPS buff ones should enhance an existing spell...
like boost the effect of it so you dont really have the redundancy.
just a thought tho.

[Post]

Yeah, uh, maybe AoE balance was too strong comparatively to other cards, but they gave us Divination anyways to replace it. Why not just have ALL the new cards be AoE like PvP and toss Divination?

Still no RNG but then at least the cards wouldn't feel useless in the vast majority of encounters. They don't design bosses to focus damage on non-tank players, so unless your Tank is getting whacked (and how can they with all that THEY have, let alone all the non card free oGCDs we have) there's little for AST to do with its cards unless it's a really pedantic player.

That's what AST feels like to me, I'm not using the cards because they're fun or feel satisfying, I'm using them because they're there and they'll just go to waste. I'd say allow them to be converted into Minor Arcanas again but then it's just gonna be some half baked hopefully Lord of Crowns 'Energy Drain Spam', and that system's already weak enough on the job ostensibly designed for it.

I don't think this would fix AST or make it fun from where we are, but it would step towards making the cards feel central to its kit again. Honestly, they're starting to feel vestigial.