Astro Card system is useless!

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

AST has so many oGCD healing abilities now. And still spams Malefic forever. This rework has made the nuke spam even more apparent in AST.

This is what I’m literally feeling for general healer rework, but more palpable on ASTs. I used to have a reason—ever so slightly—to weave in CO/CU in w2w pulls in addition to their other ST heals/mits. If all of that fails there’s always GCD healing to fall back to even if that was rare. Today? I have so many of these ‘small tools’ that they adds up to the point I’m not even needing to fall back to GCD heals, ever.

Is this what people envision as the perfect gameplay—“Anything that gets in my way of casting Glaroilficosis saves Lily are a blight!!!”—today?

[Amecoeur]

And this is exactly why cards should be randomised. This is so dry, formulaic and joyless, it feels more like data entry than an RPG.

Though I'm usually for the reliability and consistency I do agree with you. Astrologian in theme is supposed to be uncertainty and foretelling.

[Payadopa]

Though I'm usually for the reliability and consistency I do agree with you. Astrologian in theme is supposed to be uncertainty and foretelling.

Cheers. If people prefer the methodic approach they can take one of the other three. Jobs in general should have a range of play styles. Not just with/without cast bar. Personally, I don't understand why we even have so many jobs when none of them are allowed to be at least somewhat different to one another.

[Arohk]

They seriously made 5 Hotkeys for the cards, lmao, Astro has the worst job design of all jobs.
Still gonna level it to 100 and never touch it again , just like before.^

using this card makro:

/micon "Umbral Draw"
/ac "Play I"
/ac "Play II"
/ac "Play III"
/ac "Astral Draw"
/ac "Umbral Draw"

this should be ONE hotkey, NOT 4!

[Marxam]

the only issue I have with the current card iteration is that Umbral/Astral Draw feels redundant to me. It's a 60 sec cd that simply allows the use of Play. You can achieve the same effect by simply having 2 charges of Play 1,2,3 respectively at 60 secs. The cards would be best described as ogcds and lack the defining traits that all cards are associated with, luck. I know what card I am getting, when I am getting it, and how I will get it so to call these cards instead of ogcds is a bit of a stretch.

[LU_K]

THEY REDUCED THE DRAW COOLDOWNS FROM 60 TO 55 WHAT A JOKE! lmao

[AngelicDeath]

Gave it another go and still just meh with it. To many added card buttons on a full already hot bar for me. I had to remove my rescue and sprint and place them on a job hot bar changer just to have it all. And what changes did they do? Nothing seems like it lol also I never mind the rng of astro I never complained until this expansion about astro either even when they kept changing it up I tried to make do. This will be a class like monk I get to 100 amd forget about

[Tunda]

They seriously made 5 Hotkeys for the cards, lmao, Astro has the worst job design of all jobs.
Still gonna level it to 100 and never touch it again , just like before.^

using this card makro:


this should be ONE hotkey, NOT 4!

what this macro do?

[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.