Astro Card system is useless!

[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.