Dungeon and raid spoilers used in the clips used in the video! if you have not finished the Endwalker story do not watch the video! You can still listen though :D!
Here are my first impressions for Astrologian (AST) at level 90!
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Intro 0:00
Fey’s Temperance – 0:42
Card Playing – 1:10
Burst Windows- 3:31
Potential Changes? – 5:20
Astrodyne – 6:33
Macrocosmos – 7:41
Exaltation – 9:49
Earthly Star – 10:37
Celestial Intersection – 11:30
Minor Arcana – 12:20
Neutral Sect – 12:47
Astrologian Overview – 13:07
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It sucks that the story of this game is really good only to be held back by a really old battle system. I feel like it just hinders any type of creativity they could have because they're constantly in fear of making something broken or useless in a raid tier.
The card changes ever since 5.0 make me wonder if devs even play their own game. Oh wait, too soon?
Here’s a suggestion; every time you play a card, you do damage to the boss. Maybe equivalent to Malefic. That way you are not penalised for plying cards and it stops your damage from falling through the floor. It could just be like the macro where you target your targets target. So in a raid/extreme, it will only attack the boss.
I just they made they reduced the cooldown on draw like give me more cards I wanna draw cards faster
A lot of good points made and yet I do still like love ASTs play style, it still feels so unique to the other healers and I like giving buffs. I hope it gets some QoL! Also love Sage and Scholar this go around , barrier healers feel great.
Didn't SHB neutral sect have effects on almost every ability, not just aspected benefic/helios? Like CI applied a regen alongside the barrier.
I agree with most of your points! Yes if I have to perform a fricking Mozart piece on my keyboard as an AST, I wanna have better dps
I don't think astrodyne is that bad with the seals, I just fish for the 2 seal one which is quite achievable.
Ast main here. I wholeheartedly agree with the disadvantages of ast. Before when you didnt get a good card from draw and redraw, it was always a good option to give it to minor arcana. Now they separated it and even removed sleeve draw which was our ace out of the rng. Much sad.
Still love the good changes and new skills tbh, just hope they can rework the cards, or if not someway to decrease the rng involved, then we good.
RNG problem nd button bloat aside, Minor Arcana feels to me like a very convoluted and weaker Assize : Lord does 250 against Assize's 400 while Lady and Assize share the same healing potency without the MP gain in between. I'm not asking them to make them similar but Minor Arcana is just too convoluted for my tastes and I'm starting to want the ShB iteration back more and more.
I'm still trying to figure out why on earth they haven't removed Synastry – or at the very least, reworked it so that it applies to OGCD heals as well, since in reality – any healer who's using GCD heals (aside from, in this case, aspected helios), isn't playing the job properly. With all of their talk of removing button bloat… this, to me, seems like the very first skill that could have been removed or changed in favour of something more useful.
Overall, it feels like more weaving for less effect then shb ast somehow.
I was deadset on using Sage but my cohealer is a Scholar so I've gone back to AST. It takes a little bit of getting used to from Shadowbringers but it's probably even stronger than before. Healing wise at least, the damage can be buffed later. It honestly feels a little overkill sometimes, but I'm not at P4S yet. Though by the time I am I'll probably have a decent amount of gear so it's hard to judge haha.
So far the hardest part of AST has been relearning when to use cooldowns in big dungeon pulls. Preplacing Earthly Star during the run of a pull makes sense, but I also want to Macrocosmos while all of the enemies are alive, so I want to use it early. If I preplace ES then it has basically the same duration as Macrocosmos, and having two heavy hitting timed heals go off around the same time is rough. I feel like I should space then out more but I don't have a feel for it yet haha.
Minor arcana can remain the same with one obvious change. Make it one button. They could make it a button that updates or autodraw the minor arcana for you. So you only need play.
Though doing that means not changing it fundementally which Id rather see too.
I still wish they would move the cards in the direction of a deck where each card would be drawn once and then be reshuffled so could each do something cool, powerful and unique; and you wouldn't have to worry about RNG or mass card pulling ruining your burst windows because you could just have the one big damage card topdeck while having the deck cycle every 2 minutes (6 cards, 20 second Draw CD). I'm just going to avoid AST for now because it's just frustrating at this point. Hopefully the direction changes in the future instead of simply throwing RNG in there for "because drawing cards is about being completely random right?" sake all while smoothing that RNG to a bland and pointless paste to keep everything in line.
Having mained AST pretty much all of ShB, with the addition of Crown Play, Astrodyne and a second charge of Draw allowing you to hold your cards for even longer to better line them up with other buffs in 6.0 this job just has… too much to keep track of for me, it lowkey overheats my brain when I try to stay on top of my cooldowns while also trying to play my cards at the optimal timings, fit (preferably double, if RNG permits) lord of crowns under raid buffs, it's all too much for me in prog + I hate the rng aspect of Crown Play. So this tier I'm progging on WHM. Kinda ironic considering AST is busted right now and I found WHM to be just bland, boring and clunky back in ShB.
I genuinely hope they do something about Crown Play and at the very least nerf AST's mp economy, while also giving WHM some love, obviously. Still probably gonna revisit AST for reclears some week to try and get comfy with it again.
They should've make Minor Arcana heal and deal damage, just make Lord deal higher damage and lower heal while Lady dealing lower damage but higher healing. That way the RNG will hurt less.
And maybe redraw become drawing another card with different seal of the current card, not exactly like sleeve draw in ShB but close in concept.
Maybe give us the old redraw with 3 charges back and also give us a buff with 2 insta-casts after each card drawn, that would solve a bit the movility issue and give us a bit more time to breathe.
I just don't understand why they felt the need to overhaul the card system AGAIN.
Instead of trying to fix it, I honestly hope they just revert the entire card system back to ShB.
This job is fantastic, but i never want to play it.
Its just obnoxious.
I love that in pvp minor arcana is one button but not for pve and also much more useful lol
White mage and astro seem straight up worse than sage and scholar with launch of endwalker so far, hopefully both get some nice changes in 6.1 to address some of their issues.
Wouldn't our lower damage come out to as good if not better than other healers, when factoring in the damage output gained by other players when we buff them? Is there a way to determine the math behind this theory? That's what I'm assuming they (the FFXIV balance/job design peeps) would point to for justification of current numbers.
I enjoy busy jobs and there are not many left in this game, so I'm happy to play AST, but in reality I just cope on Royal Road and old card system coming back… hopefully one day.
Ast is too damn complex and you dont even get rewarded much for it. They need to simplify the class imo.