Ast Cards

[Ari_Calithiel]

To be frank, I hate the new card system with a passion. It feels meaningless when 4 of the 6 cards essentially go to the tank and the tank does not need them as they are all decked out with their new mitigation and self sustain. To quote another poster, the cards feel like fluff. I do not feel as though they contribute in any meaningful way to aiding my team or better assisting in the fight.

The way FFXIV's system works is everyone is a dps with the healer and tank roles having a few extra buttons that allow them to take damage or heal it. But a team's goal is to kill the boss as fast as possible before the boss kills you. So why is it that the card system of EW and ShB which focused on maximizing this core belief of FF combat, the card system which focused on improving the team's dps was scrapped for this... Fluff? Playing Astro is a challenge anymore. The main skill expression of the class is gone and replaced by preassigned, scripted cards with only 2 of them having any real impact. And for those advocating for the mitigation card, we already have single target mitigation. Why do we need more? If a tank is that bad at rotating their mitigation that we need more mitigation to help them, then there is a problem with the tank. No other healer has more than one single target mitigation.


I did not mind the randomness of the cards. It gave me, and I'm sure, other Astro players, a chance to flex their skills by reacting on the fly. But now, every minute I get 1 useful cards and 2 others I dump on the tank. I had hoped and prayed that 7.05 they would revert these awful changes, but all they did was apply a bandaid in the form of removing the cool down on the play. Yay... I can now play my 4 useless cards faster. Please give us back the old card system at least until you devs can figure out what else to do with astro in 8.0. I truly hate this new one.

[PyurBlue]

The current system could be improved, but I'd rather not go back to EW cards. Damage is always useful, but I like variety and having cards that don't need to be played immediately most of the time.

Having multiple mitigation options isn't a bad thing. It could even be argued to be a good thing because it means there is the potential to combine different mitigation tools to increase effectiveness which can be more interesting that just having a dedicated single use button for it that's always the same. SE could probably lean on this more and make the support cards have more of an augmentation effect on other skills, though the main problem remains the undertuned damage of most content.

[Ari_Calithiel]

The current system could be improved, but I'd rather not go back to EW cards. Damage is always useful, but I like variety and having cards that don't need to be played immediately most of the time.

I agree, multiple mitigation isn't terrible. But it is only truly useful at the beginning of a tier. Once people start to gather gear, it becomes entirely useless. The healing increase on target card only works with GCD heals and more often than not, your scholar is sprealo-ing on times when you won't have the card available and you typically don't need to spam GCD heals. And if you do, you would use Synastry, not the card. The HOT and shield cards are so entirely useless. I know the official forums hate using 3rd party tools and sites, but if you were to go on FFLogs and look at the actual healing done in fights from those cards, it is a miniscule fraction of your actual healing. It is so little I honestly won't be bothered using it unless I have no other buttons I need to press in my oGCD.


At least with the DPS cards, you had a need to use them. I was never bored using them because I personally was always trying to optomize when to use them. Trying to catch the Dancer's dance in the card or giving it to the Reaper before their enshroud. I feel like the people who say they are boring were never really trying to use them when they were the most useful and instead just tossed them out whenever they felt like without thinking about when it would be most beneficial.

[PyurBlue]

I agree, multiple mitigation isn't terrible. But it is only truly useful at the beginning of a tier. Once people start to gather gear, it becomes entirely useless. The healing increase on target card only works with GCD heals and more often than not, your scholar is sprealo-ing on times when you won't have the card available and you typically don't need to spam GCD heals. And if you do, you would use Synastry, not the card. The HOT and shield cards are so entirely useless. I know the official forums hate using 3rd party tools and sites, but if you were to go on FFLogs and look at the actual healing done in fights from those cards, it is a miniscule fraction of your actual healing. It is so little I honestly won't be bothered using it unless I have no other buttons I need to press in my oGCD.

Healing will always be secondary to DPS in FF14 unless there are drastic changes made, but the cards never become entirely useless. People do make mistakes and even late in a tier you might encounter new players, unless you never play outside of a static. I consider the separation of DPS and support cards to be a fair solution. The DPS cards are the main cards and always will be while the support cards don't feel like a hindrance since they don't cost you a DPS card.

Optimizing the DPS cards gave them some extra depth but even with that they didn't feel all that significant to me. The gains stood out the most if you're going for a speedkill but otherwise they'd be hard to spot. This is absolutely a case of differing opinions but the support cards feel more meaningful, outside of the role wide issues with healing which are external to the cards themselves.

People have been crying for cards to have different effects. Squenix gave it to us. And people still aren't happy. That is the point I'm making. The cards are redundant and mostly useless. I'm with most other people in wishing for abilities that affect the cards. However, that was not what the majority were screaming for. They wanted unique effects.

The powercreep of tank healing and healer abilities happened while people we asking for the card effects. I think that contributed to what we ended up getting. When people were originally asking for the varied cards it was with the idea that tanks wouldn't be self sufficient and heals didn't have such an overabundance of heals. This can be fixed by scaling back healing abilities.

[RhiaCeallach]

Healing will always be secondary to DPS in FF14 unless there are drastic changes made, but the cards never become entirely useless. People do make mistakes and even late in a tier you might encounter new players, unless you never play outside of a static. I consider the separation of DPS and support cards to be a fair solution. The DPS cards are the main cards and always will be while the support cards don't feel like a hindrance since they don't cost you a DPS card.

They do cost you dps cards though since they made 4/6 cards utility. As people have said in the last few pages, the utility cards COMBINED might give you 200-250k healing during the course of a 9 minute fight. Celestial Intersection on its own does 500k healing with its shield + heal.

Unless they massively buff the utility cards or give abilities that let you buff them during the fight, they are useless and will continue to be useless. You brought up an example of people making mistakes or having new players in your group but a random 400 pot shield or 15s regen isn't going to save them nor is it going to be your first choice when trying to save them considering how many better tools you have at your disposal. If you're so desperate that you need to use the cards to save them, you are most likely out of everything and about to wipe considering even a benefic II would do more healing.

Optimizing the DPS cards gave them some extra depth but even with that they didn't feel all that significant to me. The gains stood out the most if you're going for a speedkill but otherwise they'd be hard to spot. This is absolutely a case of differing opinions but the support cards feel more meaningful, outside of the role wide issues with healing which are external to the cards themselves.

It doesn't need to be a speed kill/ parsing group for the DPS increase from the cards to matter or feel significant. A freestyle samurai might do more than enough damage to clear a fight but someone doing their rotation properly would still help you clear faster and help you avoid later mechanics.
Randomly throwing out cards isn't going to feel impactful but if you know how many cards you're supposed to give out at the 1/2 minutes and time them with when people start their burst, it will add up and help you kill it faster, which in turn helps you avoid mechanics during prog/ reclears.

Even if we're talking about doing your last reclears and everyone having almost all the gear they need so you'd end up skipping mechanics anyway, what sounds more fun: i) Learning to spot when people do their burst so you can buff them and use your cards at the right time or ii) Have two cards that you play every two times that you always put on the same people every single pull?

Lastly, this is slightly off-topic but everyone complains about how easy healers are to play and asking for more buttons, which is fair, but Astro was the last played healer in Endwalker even though it was (arguably) the busiest and most complicated one until you learned when you're supposed to give out the cards. Is it a replacement for more dots/ dps abilites? No, but it sure is more interesting than spamming 1 and giving out a whooping 2 cards every two minutes.

[PyurBlue]

They do cost you dps cards though since they made 4/6 cards utility. As people have said in the last few pages, the utility cards COMBINED might give you 200-250k healing during the course of a 9 minute fight. Celestial Intersection on its own does 500k healing with its shield + heal.

The SB cards are the only case where I'd say support cards could come at the cost of DPS cards. It would be possible to have as many DPS cards as we did in EW with the current system if draw's CD was reduced or if DPS cards auto refilled a couple of times.

As for the ranking of total healing values, I don't see why it's so important. There is always going to be a mix of contributions from different abilities and they won't all contribute an equal amount. The ones that top the list are more often than not the ones that can be used more frequently. Which ever skill ends up healing the most through the fight isn't necessarily the most important. With enough incoming damage any amount of skills can have a use. This is true even when it comes to DPS. BLM is a prime example. Fire IV is going to be the biggest component of damage because it gets cast the most. Despair, Flare Star, and Xenoglossy are all stronger and more important to get under buffs. A healing example would be Collective Unconsciousness. The HoT has a lot of uptime so it's going to rank high but that doesn't mean it's the only heal needed.

Unless they massively buff the utility cards or give abilities that let you buff them during the fight, they are useless and will continue to be useless. You brought up an example of people making mistakes or having new players in your group but a random 400 pot shield or 15s regen isn't going to save them nor is it going to be your first choice when trying to save them considering how many better tools you have at your disposal. If you're so desperate that you need to use the cards to save them, you are most likely out of everything and about to wipe considering even a benefic II would do more healing.

You're not limited to using a single ability at a time. Arrow by design only has value when combined with other tools. Your 400 potency shield can be a 400 potency augment of another shield and your 15 second regen can stack on another regen to speed up healing or sit on someone with a vuln up while you're waiting for something bigger to come off CD.

It doesn't need to be a speed kill/ parsing group for the DPS increase from the cards to matter or feel significant. A freestyle samurai might do more than enough damage to clear a fight but someone doing their rotation properly would still help you clear faster and help you avoid later mechanics.
Randomly throwing out cards isn't going to feel impactful but if you know how many cards you're supposed to give out at the 1/2 minutes and time them with when people start their burst, it will add up and help you kill it faster, which in turn helps you avoid mechanics during prog/ reclears.

Even if we're talking about doing your last reclears and everyone having almost all the gear they need so you'd end up skipping mechanics anyway, what sounds more fun: i) Learning to spot when people do their burst so you can buff them and use your cards at the right time or ii) Have two cards that you play every two times that you always put on the same people every single pull?

There is a massive difference between performing correct rotations and applying buffs. The maximum damage boost that an AST could provide would be to maintain 100% card uptime on the entire raid with the appropriate cards. That would be 6% damage for the entire group. Over a 12 minute fight that's a difference of around 45 seconds. That's a lot, but card uptime is closer to 10%. So a realistic perfect AST is going to subtract maybe 5 seconds from a fight through cards vs an AST that doesn't card at all. To cross check that with data I looked up a random EW log on fflogs and the cards count for about 600 DPS out of 86000 in P12S. Any amount of DPS may be just enough to push the group over a threshold to skip mechanics but in most cases it takes a group effort and subtracting any single component doesn't change the outcome by a lot.

When it comes to how cards are played since FF14 is so scripted card plays may end up being memorized which I don't find the most engaging, but I can understand the desire for it to return. Personally, having a lot of options for the support cards is about the same for me. I don't mind that they don't always have to be used and I actually welcome that ambiguity that the DPS cards don't have.

Lastly, this is slightly off-topic but everyone complains about how easy healers are to play and asking for more buttons, which is fair, but Astro was the last played healer in Endwalker even though it was (arguably) the busiest and most complicated one until you learned when you're supposed to give out the cards. Is it a replacement for more dots/ dps abilites? No, but it sure is more interesting than spamming 1 and giving out a whooping 2 cards every two minutes.

There are a few different opinions in that discussion. Some people want more healing buttons or an increased need to use the buttons we already have, which is something that EW cards can't provide. For those seeking more DPS options the cards could be counted as a solution as long as people were comfortable managing target swapping.

[Zolvolt]

The problem with astro cards right now is largely community perception on healing. Astro cards effects are not going to save someone from death by themself, so many astro's just opt to not use them. (even the bole despite how strong a 10% mitigation CD is). Many astro's seem to not understand how the arrow works too, which doesn't help things.

But right now astro's mitigative and restoration cards are designed to make mechanics comfier, or to throw on someone who messed up a mechanic, where as the community seems to think that if it doesn't directly prevent death then it's not worth pressing. Which is pretty silly honestly. I wouldn't complain if the cards got a buff, but it'd be nice if players just learned that mitigating more = a good thing.

[Sani2341]

The problem with astro cards right now is largely community perception on healing. Astro cards effects are not going to save someone from death by themself, so many astro's just opt to not use them. (even the bole despite how strong a 10% mitigation CD is). Many astro's seem to not understand how the arrow works too, which doesn't help things.

But right now astro's mitigative and restoration cards are designed to make mechanics comfier, or to throw on someone who messed up a mechanic, where as the community seems to think that if it doesn't directly prevent death then it's not worth pressing. Which is pretty silly honestly. I wouldn't complain if the cards got a buff, but it'd be nice if players just learned that mitigating more = a good thing.

It's more that I have more than enough tools that do the exact same thing often on shorter cooldowns, with better potency. and by the point I ran out of all of those, the cards aren't gonna save the aoe lickers butt either.

[Ari_Calithiel]

The problem with astro cards right now is largely community perception on healing. Astro cards effects are not going to save someone from death by themself, so many astro's just opt to not use them. (even the bole despite how strong a 10% mitigation CD is). Many astro's seem to not understand how the arrow works too, which doesn't help things.

But right now astro's mitigative and restoration cards are designed to make mechanics comfier, or to throw on someone who messed up a mechanic, where as the community seems to think that if it doesn't directly prevent death then it's not worth pressing. Which is pretty silly honestly. I wouldn't complain if the cards got a buff, but it'd be nice if players just learned that mitigating more = a good thing.

Like I said in a response to another person, the actual healing done by those cards is nothing. If you go to any Astro's logs on FFLogs and look at the actual numbers, it is miniscule. I know people here don't like that site because of the parsing and whatnot, but it is useful in seeing what the actual math comes out to be. And it is not amaze. Unless you have nothing else to do, those cards aren't really worth it. Especially the regen.

[Zolvolt]

Like I said in a response to another person, the actual healing done by those cards is nothing. If you go to any Astro's logs on FFLogs and look at the actual numbers, it is miniscule. I know people here don't like that site because of the parsing and whatnot, but it is useful in seeing what the actual math comes out to be. And it is not amaze. Unless you have nothing else to do, those cards aren't really worth it. Especially the regen.

Yeah if you look at logs for people who utilized all of the uses of their cards properly the healing adds up. On an 8 minute fight with 5 uses of bole, 5 uses of spire, 5 ewers, it well over 239k total healing/mitigation. Thats more than multiple casts of aspected benefic. Thats more than 7 uses of horoscope helios. Thats more mitigation than 4+ uses of exaltation.

It's not the cards don't do any meaningful mitigation, it's that people don't know how to look at logs or use their cards correctly. In order to claim that the cards don't do anything you would have to concede that most of astro's toolkit does not do anything. Which is silly.