Thanks for llamatodd for letting me use some of their footage! You can check them out in the links below 😀
This video is my thoughts on the Astrologian job going into Dawntrail, these changes are tentative and are subject to change, especially potencies so keep that in mind. We’ll have an updated video after the release of Dawntrail when we have more hands on with the job.
Llamatodd’s Twitch – https://www.twitch.tv/llamatodd
Llamatodd’s Youtube – https://www.youtube.com/@llamatoddtv
Intro: 0:00
Card System: 0:23
Raid DPS Value: 3:18
Oracle: 4:00
Potency Changes: 4:30
Helios Conjunction: 4:50
Essential Dignity: 5:11
Sun Sign: 5:38
MP Economy: 6:40
Overview & Outro: 7:12
Twitch – https://www.twitch.tv/ffxivmomo
Twitter – https://twitter.com/FFXIVMomo
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Ah yes another video detailing why SE should never ever ever listen to anyone that talks about Astro as the people that play and have played the job flip flop on what they want and quit/ unquit every expac.
Shoot, I haven't had undraw bound since we got it. Guess I need to find a spot for it so it can get replaced with the new play thing.
astro being reworked in every exp since heavensward, the dev team just dont know what to do with astro and thats the true
I was expecting a rework for synastry 🤷🏻♂️
The word is "draw" not "drawl"
I was intrigued by them changing draw to pull 4 cards, one of each overarching type.
But then I was baffled to see that they made 2 complementary deterministic draw skills, instead of retaining some RNG by simply allowing draw to pull one of 16 combinations.
I am honestly worried about AST's MP economy for both prog and optimization, seeing shades of 5.0 AST where the MP economy was changed and the shortfall was not adequately addressed.
Y'all got all this single target heal shit but still no propperly working mousover, lol.
The disparity in the MP management in Endwalker was massive, so I wouldn't be surprised if they were trying to restrict the unlimited mana feel astro had. They just may have over-corrected
whine whine whine
OMG…. I have no words…. I think it would be nice having shb ast back with some changes…. Did you guys like the new card system?? and give me noct set back rn!!!
Pretty distraught by the prospect of that rework.
The RNG aspect paired with busy bursts made the job shine to me.
It was a challenge both mechanically (kinda) to just pull off the sequence but also to make the micro adjustments needed to play cards on the good targets, redraw etc… (I also liked astrodyne and was surprised to see a lot of people didn't lol)
I know dooming can get old but AST was the one healer I agreed on playing outside of prog and now I don't really know if I'll still have that avenue with any of the healers.
Man, I was hoping the rework would simplify the job but they made it even MORE confusing. What a mess.
I'm just gonna say it. Astro wasn't hard. People seem to enjoy having the label of playing the hard job more than playing a hard job. You wouldn't play ff if "difficult class" was what interested you.
I don't think it hasn't felt like a deck of cards from shadowbringers on. This AST may be good from a gameplay and visual point of view but i find the concept of the job to be dead and ruined. They took out every interesting mechanic bit by bit, starting from tile dilation/old celestial opposition literally being time magic and replaced it with boring and simple prepared healing. They took out a deck made of copies of 6 DIFFERENT cards and replaced with a deck made of 1 card and then with no deck, just 3 cards. They might just rework every ast weapon at this point and make them have just 3 floating cards :D, maybe people will like that too!
Edit: forgot to mention that to this day i still dont find a single reasonable point for them to remove the stances, i feel like they just do these kind of things to make it easier to keep the game balanced which is a really narrow minded and lazy way of handling changes. Lots of people literally started playing ffxiv because of the uniqueness of this job and there were a lot of articles about how interesting and unique ast was as an healer. Did you ever read any article like that after Stormblood?
Thank you for the video Mr. Momo!
Amazing vid for showing the changes.
I really am so bummed about the changes to the card system, I really, really enjoyed the busy-ness with Cards and that level of depth and challenge I could get with it. And it’s like you said, I don’t really know where to go for it, at least for a Healer.
At the very least, it’s a fun system for the leveling experience/lower levels.
Just from the changes I've seen across the healers, I'm hoping that healing is going to be more demanding or interesting in regular content to justify these massive increases in healing potential. The swiftcast CD being reduced, pure healers getting more shields/mits, barrier healers getting more burst, they're either making healers OPAF or they're planning on making casual content more demanding for healers. As a healer main, I desperately hope it's the latter.
I think making umbral and astral draw into 2 separate buttons that shares CD and give MP on draw would be a good start
The other take I was anticipating, and its been accurate to the community. Lets hope there's some adjustments coming DT
Couldn't agree more with this video. You can really tell when people don't play a job or they don't understand what makes a job enjoyable by the way they discuss about it and I think you nailed pretty well what made AST great. There's no denying that the job will still have the most skill expressive and enjoyable healing toolkit in the game, but FF14 isn't a game with a lot of healing to begin with. Lord and Crown cards didn't feel good to use in EW and I don't think DT will change that; The utility effects of these cards is still, all around, very minor, and I don't see it coming ever useful unless we get something like p8s p2 hard hitting autos again. Bole and Arrow are also very strange cards for this very reason; maybe this changes in criterion dungeons, as I've not done those, but for 8-man, difficult content, most of the healing you'll find yourself doing is AoE, and in that case, just because you made one guy take less damage, it won't magically make you consume less resources to heal the party. Again, these cards will only be useful on tanks, tanks which are already pretty op, and only if it ever takes any real resource to heal them, which honestly, with all the charges of ED we have already, that'd be an hard thing to imagine.
#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE
I can feel for the players that really want to have Astro be this play a card with what you got situation but are we going to pretend that the card system was worth "on the fly decisions"?
Astromains and astrocritics have been complaining about how the card system is boring for years and now we're finally at a spot where Astro heals like no one else and has a card system that has more choice but doesn't have the issue of the randomization that made it unreliable in a team-focused RPG.
I'm going to be honest having the class switch from random to choice of play and order I think is going to make the cards feel more important even if we're not playing as many as we used to and people will find an optimization that makes the game function well with a card system. That's more intriguing than just damage up.
I will agree the MP costs definitely concerned me, but I feel like it's such an oversight or such a weakness to the class that it has to get patched or be in a different state when the game launches. I've not liked how easy it is for Astro to get their MP back. Makes it feel like MPS not even a problem or a concern for this class, but this is definitely going too far in the other direction
Real talk, as an AST main, I'm glad to see someone actually showing concern for our MP economy. Since we're losing Astrodyne and our card draws are halved, all we got is 500 MP a minute alongside Lucid Dreaming. People may point to WHM as a counterargument, given they only have Assize (500 MP every 40 seconds plus a free OGCD heal/damage). However, this doesn't account for the 2 charges of Thin Air, recoverable once a minute which can have a variable value from 400 to 2400 MP saved depending on spell used (more often than not this is being used on Raise or Cure III). They also get Lillies every 30 seconds for more free toys and the upgrades to Presence of Mind granting 3 Free Glare IVs, easily making up for the limited direct MP recovery.
One suggestion I'd have to help Astros since we have no access to freebie GCDs in our arsenal would be to upgrade Lightspeed. Keep the 15s duration, drop the cooldown to 60s, and give it back it's old benefit of halving the cost of spells used during that time. If ASTs keep their current build style, this could end up being 7 GCDs getting this cost reduction, saving anywhere from 1400-3600 MP (max implying AST has to focus on dropping 3 Ascends in a Lightspeed window with a sub 5 second cast time) a minute.
what a vapid vid. every expansion this happens, people look at job changes in a vaccuum, from the lens of a top 0.5% nolifer or based on content from 2 years ago (almost always all three simultaneously), then reality comes knocking. outrage for outrage's sakes just so a bunch of purple parsers (generously) in the comments can pretend this will affect them even remotely
"leaves players who liked that high skill ceiling nowhere to go now" honestly there is somewhere you can go. you can go to another game. we're all a bit tired of hearing this nonsense anyway lol
I dread the incoming encounters due to rotating draws alone. Like the sheer fact that it's always the same order rings the bell that It will be a damn buster/raidwide at the start all over again
The biggest issue I see with the card system rework is that cards no longer come up randomly.
The new cards look cool, but I would’ve rather they pop up randomly.
A better rework could’ve been having redraw on a lower cd, or giving redraw something that made not using a card useful in someway, like regenerating more mp, etc.
i do believe we'll spawn into encounters with our first set of cards already drawn (mentioned by Happy), which resolves 1 issue. plenty of others but at least that's something.
Im honestly in favor of these changes. I like casting all cards in one setting
I really wanted more timed heals, but I guess sun sign can kinda fill that role. The cards went from encumbersome,… to strange/funky
I've been watching all the Astro rework vids I can find, and you're the only person to bring up the issue of having even MORE single target heals and the MP problem. I have no idea what they want this class to be and it feels like they don't either.
Meh I still like it
I'm not a healer, nor an AST Main, but I said it before and I'll say it again. Heavenward AST was the most fun and powerful iteration of the job ever.
genuinely the ryze of ffxiv
GUYS IF YOU COULDN'T TELL THE THUMBNAIL IS CLICKBAIT WTF DID YOU GUYS EVEN LISTEN TO THE VIDEO AST ISN'T ACTUALLY GOING TO BE BAD