A Question for Astrologian's Designer and Astrologian Mains Current, New, and Old.

[Eset]

(Hi! Right away, I typed 5160 characters not realizing there was a cap of 3000 characters so I'm just going to just post the post in two parts.)

Having started playing FFXIV right before patch 5.5 around March 2021, I was immediately drawn to Astrologian - I admired how gorgeous its animations were and how it always felt different from pull to pull and kept myself engaged. Fast-forwarding to patch 7.01 dropped mid July 2024, I find myself extremely confused about where the job is now and I am extremely dissatisfied by the possible idea of waiting around two to three years until patch 8.0 to witness any substantial changes.

At the moment, one of the most common complaints about the healer role in general are the DPS rotations, or more so the lack thereof. I always confused about the PvE design of Astrologian, because I would think to myself: "is a potential obvious answer to making Astrologian's damage kit more interesting not just lying in the PvP kit?". I'm mainly referring to the spell "Double Cast" which is an oGCD action that copies the previous spell casted and adds an additional effect onto them! It's two charges with a 15sec cooldown, and for example when Malefic is casted, it can be immediately followed up with a Double Cast version which reduces the recast time of Double Cast of 10secs. I'm not saying the exact effects needed to be copy and pasted, but throughout my time playing Shadowbringers, Endwalker and now Dawntrail, I always heard players reminiscing about the time magic Astrologian used to have and I always think investigating "Double Cast" in PvE could be interesting! (More interesting than what we have now, anyways.)

I wanted to wait until the Extreme trials to form my own casual opinion on the state of the job right now, and specifically the cards system - which I was initially super optimistic about hearing of cards doing different effects! However, although we're nearly just a month into Dawntrail. I find myself already tired of the Astral Draw and Umbral Draw. Maybe I should wait until the Savage tier to really get my thoughts together, but I think the removal of RNG/randomness from the cards was detrimental to my enjoyment of the job. I especially think the minor arcana feel completely useless, whereas the six standard cards can have their time to shine occasionally but ultimately I find the effects are quite boring and that we already have enough shields, mits, regens, etc to sustain the party.

I'm a nightmare case in the way that I don't have many ideas, but I can only identify what doesn't feel fun and where it feels so many more interesting things can be done compared to what we have. Again I can't help but let my mind wander to the PvP card system, where cards are still random, do different things, and are AOE. Although they'd still probably need an extra layer of something to really flesh them out and reflect the fact that we're on the sixth expansion of the game!

[Eset]

In Patch 7.01, we saw the introduction of a whole new stack of Lightspeed. The duration was kept the same, and the cooldown was reduced to 60secs. This change worries me slightly, just because it has so far made Astrologian feel extremely strong. I really thought it'd just be the cooldown reduced to 60secs or a new stack of lightspeed with the duration reduced to 10secs. The only reason I mention this is because I'm wondering if this is going to be seen as giving Astrologian enough for the foreseeable as this'll make Astrologian considerably easier in the upcoming Arcadion Savage progs, but maybe I'm worrying too much.

I didn't know where to insert this in my whole spiel but another old mechanic of Astrologian that current players always hear about is the ability to manipulate buff timers in the form of time magic which sounds so interesting to me and I'm always curious why this was ever removed. It does sound crazy strong but personally I really do think fun, job fantasy and uniqueness should always be prioritized and that number adjustments can come swiftly later, and those sort of interactions sounds like they have so many possibilities!

I do also think the barrier and regen split of the healers has been a complete failure, and I can't help but wonder if we're going to see something like nocturnal sect down the line when the next healer in how ever many years comes out to balance things.

Hindsight is everything and I really felt like Dawntrail could've been the opportunity to really swing big and been a celebration of the trial and error over the course of the five previous expansions, but unfortunately Astrologian in my opinion does not reflect this journey at all. I would love to take a moment though to say that the encounter design team deserves all the flowers so far, and that all the normal fights, dungeons, extreme trials have been a pleasure to do blind! I just hope the job design team takes more swings sooner than later, asks themselves what about each job drew people to them in the first place and make them stick around, and not worry too much about appealing the masses who won't stick to the job in question regardless. I do wish there were more opportunities to get a peek into the philosophy and long term plan of the job design team.

Thanks a mil for reading!

[Post]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. If you're interested in fitting everything into one post, you can circumvent the 3000 character limit by editing a post after posting, though if you're on mobile you must be viewing the forums in non-mobile mode because there's no edit button on mobile for some reason.

The only question I saw was related to the pvp kit's double cast, and yes, that'd certainly be something that could make PvE AST's offense more interesting. I even enjoy how Doublecast seems to pull from the Nocturnal Sect idea in a better way than "just pick one before the fight starts and you're locked in". Part of the reason the pvp kits feel so much more interesting is that they are designed around fewer buttons with tradeoffs, you're locking yourself out of some healing if you use Doublecast to deal damage, and you may miss a critically important Gravity if you always wait for Doublecast to be ready when you use it.

I don't really have a lot to specifically say about AST in this case because I think a lot of where it currently is has more to do with their preoccupation with PvE design as a whole, and maybe to a lesser extent trying to balance the jobs within the healer role. In contrast of PvP, for a long time the PvE jobs have been being designed towards allowing players to 'play perfectly optimally,' removing any chance for missing damage output because of a nebulous 'it feels bad' sort of reason. Symptoms of this are things like bosses with gigantic hitboxes for melee uptime, bosses centering themselves automatically so tanks can't leave their butts in the lava or whatever, group buffs and certain healer actions having gargantuan range, actions having charges to allow for never overcapping resources, actions like true north to ignore potential positioning mistakes, knockback immune tools that ultimately invalidate that as a mechanic bosses can use, stuns and gap-closers being changed to not also deal damage to allow for 'pure utility' actions.

The line of what makes playing a job feel fun or feel monotonous, executing your rotation properly feeling rewarding or feeling like a foregone conclusion probably lies somewhere different from person to person. But currently with job design, whenever someone introduces an idea on the forums (note that this isn't necessarily how the devs might actually go about it) it's immediately viewed through a lens of 'how does this fit into the 2 minute rotation; you'd lose uptime because of x; it should align with y action from z job.'

Ergo, it wouldn't surprise me if the devs also think along those lines given how they streamline the game, and are hesitant to add anything that really shakes stuff up, usually settling for what they view as alleviating general friction most players have with the job. This often results in only the dedicated players to a specific job being changed able to quickly point out where they're losing agency as a result of those changes, and many others looking at them and shrugging, not really feeling the issue. Despite PvE fundamentally being a scripted dance while PvP is push-and-pull and watching your allies as much as your enemies, most people seem to be more comfortable with a 'correct answer' for every encounter that doesn't involve perhaps 'dirty' solutions like holding onto Plunge for 20 seconds because the boss is going to use a knockback then and you'd lose uptime if you used it on cooldown.

[Raikai]

I feel they could've gone a bit further in the Card design they proposed for Dawntrail, because how the defensive cards were made looked like it was done by a person who never played AST to begin with. Did they need a single target shield when there's 2 stacks of Celestial Intersection? Did we need a single target regen card when there's THREE Essential Dignity stacks that heal for a ton?

For the cards, instead of a shield, it could've been a 5s sprint buff. Instead of healing taken, could've been healing done, so it became a healer's card. Instead of a regen, it would give 10s of a Leech effect. The single target mit is more useful, however.

I do agree a lot in the barrier/regen healer thing. They literally shot themselves on the foot by creating that distinction because the eventual fifth healer will tip the scales of this balance. And imagine the slap on the face of Astrologians if this new healer gets to 'flex'.

[Wildheaven182]

There is no astrologian designer, i'm afraid. Or maybe it was chatgpt.
There are 4 job designers and all of them play warrior.

[Wildheaven182]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. If you're interested in fitting everything into one post, you can circumvent the 3000 character limit by editing a post after posting, though if you're on mobile you must be viewing the forums in non-mobile mode because there's no edit button on mobile for some reason.

Not possible, the technology to edit posts from mobile doesnt exist.
But have no fear! Square Enix is always on the cutting edge of technology and not about to back down from a risk!
They'll just have to develop a new game engine to run on internet browsers, setting your computer on fire and exploding your phone in your hands.
Should take about 10 years.

[Wildheaven182]

Alright ill be serious.
Any amount of creativity with cards would save astro. We're kind of at a baseline point where it's just more ogcd fluff. Draw card that does healing thing, slap someone with it. One of them does damage buff, slap a dps with it.

But like the pvp kit, the cards could make astro genuinely unique from the healer standard by altering how it does fundamental things, rather than just being white mage for people bored of white mage.

The issue is that would require any amount of creativity or programming skill from the developers.

[elioaiko]

There is no astro designer let alone healer designer.

Tho there should be. In an ideal situation, there would be a designer for every role.

But I imagine the devs just sit in a room with a 50 page task list for jobs. 47 of those being for melee dps, 1 for casters, a footnote for phys ranged, and tanks and healers share 1 page that's only half filled.

[PyurBlue]

I feel they could've gone a bit further in the Card design they proposed for Dawntrail, because how the defensive cards were made looked like it was done by a person who never played AST to begin with. Did they need a single target shield when there's 2 stacks of Celestial Intersection? Did we need a single target regen card when there's THREE Essential Dignity stacks that heal for a ton?

Multiple shields have a use because the same shield can't stack with itself. This gives Spire a purpose as a buff to other shields which can be valuable. I personally like the mechanic of shields negating status effects that rely on dealing damage if they aren't broken. However that can take a substantial amount of a shielding, and making a single shield strong enough to do it reliably could be game breaking, so that might be why many shields are on the smaller side. Something like Spire helps you get bigger shields through combination with others like CI. Spire also doesn't have a heal component so it's a better choice than CI as a preapplied shield if you're really trying to optimize, though that won't matter very much with the current state of healing.