I was invited by Square Enix to check out FFXIV Dawntrail early, and here’s how AST is changing as well as what I think it means for the future of the job!
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0:00 Intro
1:37 New Skills
4:03 More Info & My Thoughts
7:51 Tooltips
#ffxiv #dawntrail #mediatour
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Great insight! Congrats on getting invited to the media tour and I look forward to seeing your other coverage 🙂
Man I miss original Astro.
My first thought was that they've somewhat dealt with what I disliked about the job… but potentially ruined what I loved about it too.
Lightspeed being less hard-locked to burst (even if it's the optimal place for it in a vacuum) is great. No more random healing from Minor Arcana (worst button in the game imo) is great.
…but a) way less gain from knowledge, and b) if the outgoing damage isn't sufficiently high to require all these extra healing buttons, then my generally-busy healer job is even more dead than it was in ew 😐
Will probably still be my healer of choice, and I'm not going to despair as my cohealer overly optimises something I'm just dumping lady's on for safety (inevitably leading to a wipe next pull when I get a lord), but idk, it seems it'll be less interesting too.
Only 10% damage reduction and no healing effect? terrible😡
Nocturnal ast return pleaseeeee
The rework hasn't even been released yet, and I am already immediately seeing some fairly obvious issues with the job design here.
For one, the way Balance and Spear are implemented into card windows disincentivizes thoughtful card play in more ways than one. Balance being on even-minute windows and Spear on odd-minute windows ensures that going forward only melee DPS jobs will be exclusively receiving card buffs from AST during 2min burst phases. It also encourages me to only ever give my cards to the same 2 DPS jobs every time (one melee and one ranged respectively) instead of actually playing my cards around the individual rotations and performance of each DPS in the party.
At this point if they're going to commit to this card design around an Astral and Umbral deck it would be highly advised to just make Balance and Spear identical so at the very least I have a reason to spread my cards around. I understand wanting to have each of the 6 cards be unique for the job fantasy but come on…if the other 4 have unique effects does it REALLY matter if Balance and Spear are just identical?
I didn't expect it to happen but nonetheless I would have really liked to see Ewer restored to its original MP regen effect as a "curative card" not just because it would've given us a distinct party utility tool that no longer exists in the game for ANY jobs, but also because I genuinely miss the aspect of AST gameplay that revolved around helping your co-healer manage their MP.
It also would've been really sick given how the implementation of Darkside has changed, hypothetically allowing you to dump Ewer onto DRKs to directly increase their damage by enabling them to push out more Flood of Shadows. Alas…
Adding 2-3 more “play” buttons is extremely lame, and I think I’d honestly have taken the current card system over this but it was a great effort for ff14 at least to try something reminiscent of the good ol days of ast. The rest of the changes look really cool/good though so I’m gonna try it at least in Dawn trail.
missed opportunity to say "tell me what you hear, feel, and think about the changes"
I like that AST still has shield and even more damage mitigation options. The old Nocternal set memories live on.
i never got into Astro because of the complexity of managing cards, so these changes might be what it takes for me to finally give it a proper shot!
One problem that AST has with the new change is MP issues. Without lucid AST only generate 500 mp per minute. While the other healers SGE has 2100 MP SCH has 2k MP and WHM has 400+~ 5 mp free spells. So, around 2400~ per minute.
The number are a bit too low tbh
MY TYPE OF VIDEO
ASTROLOGIAN FOREVER!!
Very happy that the cards are getting their uniqueness back after two expacs of 'here's more damage, now unga'
If they are gonna mess with the cards so its mandatory rotation just remove the role requirement for dps… so it doesnt feel like one sect could suck more than the other
Astrologian was my least favorite healer already (and one of my least favorite jobs altogether) and after seeing these changes eh… I think it's staying at the bottom. The card system was part of what made it annoying to play to begin with, so this is just taking that same mechanic and making it less RNG but more complicated/bloated.
Just remove the cards entirely already at this point. This is sad. There is zero point to them being there anymore other than visual flair, they're just 1 min oGCDs. This effectively removes the card "system" and moves AST another step further into just being "WHM but moar purdy", and it sucks. I'm glad it was brought up a couple of times on the media tour interviews, and to have heard Yoshida mention that they'd gone too safe and they want to veer away from that and stop being afraid of experimenting further, I just wish they were applying this to jobs now rather than 8.0 or whenever. :/ Job design has suffered a lot more than the content design they seem to be focusing on for now.
Promised the moon given a big pile of shit :L
I like that the cards are more unique again but as others stated, hopefully they get more effects or at least share the benefits with you even if you cast on someone else
AST is currently my favorite healer and has been since I picked it up in Shadowbringers. I really enjoy the utility it can bring with its card buffs, so it's very disheartening to see them gutted like this. You're spot-on with saying that we often just sit on our oGCD heals because there are so many and the damage output in most content is nowhere near enough to give us a reason to use even half of them. But now 2-3 of the cards you draw are essentially useless because all they do is provide unnecessary healing/mitigation.
I understand that some players may dislike the randomness to the cards as they are now, but I think that's due in large part to how Endwalker made it so much more punishing to draw "bad" cards. If you draw a card with a seal you need but it's the wrong type, you are so heavily discouraged from redrawing now since you only get the one redraw and then you're stuck with it, potentially screwing yourself out of a better Astrodyne.
What I'd really like to see is a return to how AST was in Shadowbringers but with some tweaks. Give us back the old Redraw instead of limiting us to once per card, and give us the old Minor Arcana to dump cards if we don't want the seal. Minor Arcana now (and in Dawntrail) feels so bad right now because you often draw Lady of Crowns and you really don't need the heal. Astrodyne was great in that it decoupled the raid buff and the seals, so I really like that. I'd also love to see Sleeve Draw brought back because it felt so satisfying to just rapid fire cards.
I'll reserve full judgement for when the expansion actually releases, but I'm not very hopeful for AST based on what we've seen from the media tour, and it sucks that I may be losing my favorite healer 🙁
As comfortable as I am with AST as it is, I'm okay with this. But lets be real, you drip-feed me another AoE dps button and I'm always happy.
5% regen per minute without LD is unacceptable. You will run out of mana in 2mins by just spamming malefic, and no free GCD.
compare them to the others: WHM 5% per 40s + thin air/min + lily gauge aka 4 free GCD / ~min. SCH: solid 20% regen/min and SGE 21%/min
2. loss potency from Macrocosms since increasing potency to malefic.
3. dps loss in comparison with current AST because modifications of card system. No compensation from spells.
4. Enhancing defensive toolkit is questionable (not only issued in Ast, the other healers as well). 4 more single survival buffs in 2mins, with existing 3 stacks bene, 2 stacks Celestial intersection, exaltation, etc. What is more, they buff tanks in the same defensive toolkit at the same time. Over 60% of game contents you will never be asked to utilize these abilities.
5. mobility is still the worst amongst healers.
Honestly what they need to do for healers is cut the free OGCD healing skills down. Like…a lot. Force healers to have to spend more GCDs healing, to force them to have to manage mana economy. This would also give them breathing space to try out new dps moves on healers, something like how RDM or DNC work, where you doin't have to break combo or something, but it would give them something to work toward. Imagine AST having something kind of like what MNK does, where each move in sequence of your two combos gives a different form…what if you had "star seals" attached to that, and you had different combinations to create "constellations" that would be like the blitzes, and give different effects? Like, with Spread, Enhance, Extend, etc… and the other three being DMG, Crit, or DH and make it so you couldn't just always go after the DMG one, you'd have to utilize enhance and perhaps crit, or extend and DH or all sorts of combos. Of course, you would be able to disengage from this "combo" as it wouldn't be a true combo, rather, buttons you'd press to get different seals.
I dunno, I'm just spitballing here but like good lord these AST changes are atrociously bad lol. It's literally just "more pretty WHM" at this point.
Well… at least AST still looks pretty
Imagine trying to be a competitive TCG player with the shitty decks AST plays lmao, 50% of the time you top deck 50% good cards (and 50% trash), and the other 50% of the time you top deck ONE playable card in a hand of FOUR. Even Yami Yugi couldn't pull that shit off.
It is utterly hilarious to me that even with the rework that removes card RNG I can still only draw a card that I actually want precisely 37.5% of the time. My odds just keep getting lower with each new expac…I guess AST has secretly been the gambling job all along. Feels bad dude.
6 cards, 4 of them are going to be used almost always on the tank and they're basically just carbon copies of actions we already have lol
Really wish they would break tradition and make The Spear melee dps up and The Arrow ranged dps up. I'd make The Balance increase healing potency, since that applies to both heals and shields, you could consider it "balanced" where the others give either heals OR shields.
as someone who hasn't been able to get into ast but wants to – I actually like these changes. it makes me excited to try it now
Do we still need to select enemy target to cast AOE damage spell?
the eyes on the character are sooo pretty
can SE please stop removing the fun from my job, i play it because of the complex shit, they keep making it simpler
The changes actually look really good to me. I worry for my ability bar though, it's already pretty stacked, lol
Thanks for the vid, AST seems to be a hard pass for me now if I were to main a healer. Time to pick up SCH again maybe, my main now are AST SGE WM and have been abandoning SCH since Endwalker.
So four of the cards will always go to the tanks, maybe sometimes to a dps that doesn't avoid a mechanic in time. Hell, the tanks don't even need those card buffs because they already have busted self sustain. So really those four cards are completely useless.
So 4 cards for the tank and 2 for the dps lol
This just sucks. We have too many heals, and losing anything interesting about cards is.. bad. This feels so bad. Like, "wow making me consider unsub for the first time in like 6 years" bad.