Astro Card system is useless!

[Valmaxian]

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

I take major issue with this. Before Dawntrail released I was one of those who defended the dev team and tried to highlight the potential utility of the new cards, citing the reasons you are enjoying it. But my experience after playing it *as my main job* since AST released in HW is that the new cards don’t add more to the gameplay of the job than what we lost. We already have great tools that do exactly what each card does, and it’s also about timing. When we draw a set of cards, you’ve got to use them within a minute otherwise it feels bad. And if you really don’t need Arrow, Bole, Ewer, Spire, and Lady, that also feels bad because you’re just tossing them out to get rid of them, cluttering the rotation for negligible gain.

Many players bring up HW and StB Astro because those iterations of the job featured card systems that were truly the core mechanic of the job, and each card could be changed to be useful in any situation.

People are upset because they want their job to be at least not worse than it used to be. The cards are central to the job, they need to be useful and feel good to utilize. For me, that’s just not the case anymore and I’m allowed to feel and express that.

[Mortex]

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.

Let’s be real here they could have just given us more charges on intersection and exaltation and ditch a decent chunk of cards and it would be the same. Like more times I can count I get draw off cd and still have utility cards up because I forgot them and didn’t need them in anyway shape or form.

[Alice_Rivers]

I honestly don't see any way in which the job now is worse than in EW, the randomness was irrelevant - yes there were six skins and six card names but there were only two functions, Astrodyne was neat but hardly the be all and end all. We have more options than before, I fail to see any way in which that is bad. I don't see why it should be mandatory that everything should be used every time it can be, that would just lead to throwing away Synastry and Neutral Sect for no gain simply because they're there.

I can't speak to HW/ST AST, I came to the game in 2021/2022, from what I'm seeing in DT and what I've heard about the old card system it could well be that they are better iterations of the job but for me this is absolutely a step in the right direction, I'm loving every minute of it.

[Supersnow845]

I honestly don't see any way in which the job now is worse than in EW, the randomness was irrelevant - yes there were six skins and six card names but there were only two functions, Astrodyne was neat but hardly the be all and end all. We have more options than before, I fail to see any way in which that is bad. I don't see why it should be mandatory that everything should be used every time it can be, that would just lead to throwing away Synastry and Neutral Sect for no gain simply because they're there.

I can't speak to HW/ST AST, I came to the game in 2021/2022, from what I'm seeing in DT and what I've heard about the old card system it could well be that they are better iterations of the job but for me this is absolutely a step in the right direction, I'm loving every minute of it.

I don’t think anyone is defending EW AST

DT just feels like a lateral move on AST’s worst iteration across its 4 iterations

We just went from bad complexity to redundant bloat

[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.

[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.