That's what i thought when I tested it. It just feels so busy but the damage is so low. Why should you bother trying to get 3 seals for 5% damage when, after the 90s to even get these cards, you can just wait 30 seconds more for a guaranteed buff that has 1% more dmg and benefits not just you, but everyone around you as well? It just doesn't feel worth it at all.
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. 🙏
i didn't play ast much in ShB but I guess this explains why I felt confused when I tried picking it up in EB. Whenever I get a card I don't need/doesn't work for my team, then redraw just to get another card I don't need, I'm kind of like...uh what now? Is this just rng or am I doing something wrong? I didn't know that they took away a feature that kind of solved this issue. It's the only gripe I have so far while trying to learn AST. I love how busy it is compared to WHM but I feel like a lot of the time I'm going through my skills just to be screwed over by RNG and have no way out but to just wait for cooldowns.
One way i adapted is if possible i'll still play the card than aim to get the 3 of a kind next draw so im always putting out extra DPS buffs even if it seems inefficient because as long as you have 2 of a kind you can still aim for that 3 of a kind while still putting out buffs but this works only about 75% of the time
@@SnthwaveSunset imo the 2 seals suffice. While 3 seals gives the cherry on top for damage boost, once you're in the higher tier the sooner you can use astrodyne (especially for mp regen) the better for your mp economy. If i can get 3 seals (and wouldn't be a hassle to go down that route) that be best especially in casual content. For higher ones like savage, 2 is good for me.
I'm a newbie AST and I'm paralyzed with all the things that I must do in lv90 content. Despite being the 'quickest' healer in terms of mostly having no cast time and lots of ogcd, I'm constantly stuck in place as my brain tries to calculate and comprehend what I must do next and have no time to think of moving.
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.
due to having to redraw into play for the ast opener i wish it always drew a ranged card if you held melee as well, so that you could predict who to give it to without having to both double weave and react at the same time
I had an idea of making the Lord and Lady cards have an "Omni-Seal" to somewhat counter the RNG for Astrodyne. Like say for example you have a Sun and Moon seal loaded, if you play a Lord/Lady card or something, it'll load a seal that would act as a 3rd Unique seal no matter what seals you have loaded up? But I don't play enough AST to make any assumption if that'll fix anything. Thought it might be cool and actually give Minor arcana some meaning.
Honestly, I like the idea of that. Mitigates some of the RNG which I know some people despised of the job before *CoughBalanceFishingCough*. Though I did like the SB cards but I know we’re likely never going back to that... Another change that needs to happen is Minor Arcana’s unique play button being merged with the Minor Arcana Draw Button, changing to ‘Play’ when a card is drawn. Same for the regular cards... There’s just simply way too many bloat buttons with ‘Play’ and ‘Play 2’ that on controller, my Cross Hotbars are leaking onto the 3rd page which no other job does and its stupid. I want to have Astrodyne somewhere on my 1st hotbar but I physically can’t because of Minor Arcana’s Play Button.
@@scottishboy112 You wasn't in HsW-SB, when you had more buttons. Like you had One-two more spells for burn your card for make your next card effect (50%power effect but with AOE, 150% power effect or 200% time for buff.) + You had two windows for Minor arcana, not only one + Arcana. And I want this times back, when AST was like healer for mind game people.
@@EVE-Muutaras Oh trust me, I played AST a bit in SB and I liked that card system. Though if I recall, wasn’t Play and Draw the same button then? I liked the potency Enhanced Bole in dungeons, Crit was also useful and even Ewer had its uses. But nope, everyone only gave a crap about the Balance. Spire I will admit was a bit... Eh... but every other card had their uses. And as much as I liked those cards, I know we’re likely not going back to them at this point.
I think you should do a retrospective video on all the healers in post endwalker since its coming to a close soon i think it'll be really an interesting video esp early sage impressions versus now ect but again not much has change between 6.0 and 6.5
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.
As an AST main, I'm really bummed out about how low our damage is. Part of me thinks that I should just switch to WHM, but I absolutely cannot stand the playstyle of only having like 4 oGCDs and nothing to do in between. I also really dislike minor arcana -- I think that outright removing it would help with the button bloat, but I'd also be happy if it just made you always draw the same card that does a bit of healing and a bit of damage or something. There's just too much RNG and reducing it any way would be nice. The skill ceiling on this job is really high too -- I just have no idea how people keep track of every little thing while keeping up with your two minute burst windows efficiently. So yeah, in general, it absolutely sucks to see how low our rDPS is, even with a team of really good players.
@@FFXIVMomo If AST was top DPS AND provided the top amount of supporting damage, it would be a fair bit overtuned, no? What purpose would you have to pick any other healer from a party-efficiency standpoint, if one does both the most damage AND the most DPS utility. Tack on all of its other utility / flexibility, and suddenly WHM may as well not even exist.
@@ShockTemplar AST OGCD healing isn't even that strong anymore it's really just White Mage's healing is just lower in comparison to every other healer. But anyways there's a way to balance it because right now SCH is top dps in optimization groups but SGE & WHM do more damage in your average pug group. AST can be put in the same shoes. It's really Square Enix's fault for giving a healer that takes 300% more effort to even fully maximize that strong of a toolkit in the first place. WHM, SGE and SCH can all go into an instance and just pretty much play their job at their fullest potential in the first couple of pulls whereas AST needs hours of spreadsheeting and insane RNG to just break barely ahead if not even.
@@FFXIVMomo So what then? Just delete WHM? AST outperforms WHM in literally every other way. WHM is winning on DPS, but on average they don't actually heal as much as all 3 other healers according to the savage stats so far. AST has significantly better ogcd heals, better utility, better recovery, better MP management, and trivializes mechanics in ways no other healer can. As it stands there's very little reason to take a WHM over AST already. Nah, AST can't have everything.
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.
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.
This is EXACTLY how I feel about the job. Thank you for stating it more eloquently than I could. WHM is so simple, and all the cooldowns you have at SGE don't *have* to be used, they are simply available if you need them. AST you need to have the APM of Starcraft player it feels like.
Hey Momo, appreciate the vids. Hopefully you're okay with a bit of feedback, but it's been difficult for me to keep up with the information being laid out in your videos due to how a lot of speech pauses get edited out, as well as the general speed in which you speak vs the complexity of topics being discussed. It sometimes takes me multiple rewinds to understand a point, and even though they are good points, it does feel like I have to scrub the videos over and over to successfully appreciate the content. One example is 5:30 when you list down the use cases of a buffed Lightspeed very rapidly, and even though I do intimately know how Lightspeed works, it's still a challenge to interpret the barrage of words as they come. The enunciation of, "Not only," is not clear and comes immediately after the end of a previous sentence, so I was also unaware that this was an expansion of your point and failed to process the rest of the current sentence in the moment.
As someone who's only played WHM for so long, I feel like the job difficulty difference between WHM and AST is just crazy. Not only do I have to press like 4 times more buttons, but I also need to optimize who to give cards to and learn how to deal with RNG while doing all the usual healer things at the same time. It's very demoralizing when you do all that stuff and WHM still wins out on dps because your party didn't optimize. I hope they buff AST rdps a little bit as a reward of playing such a busy job (or just rework it somehow)
I totally agree, it feels like every ogcd is spent trying to redraw a card or making sure your draw/minor arcana are on cd, while on WHM nothing happens, you simply react to the required healing. The difference in difficulty is pretty crazy
Macrocosmos is amazing! I used it on the first ex trial where your hp goes to 1, activate before it hits, pop it and everyone back up to like 60% health. I was giddy when I tried it and it workes
I play all healers although have always loved SCH and AST the most (now I love Sage, it's so much fun). Honestly I just feel frustrated with AST, rn. There's so much stuff, and it's annoying that a lot of times you have to mess up something in order to do your job and heal people. It is SO MUCH WORK to optimize, sometimes I just need a second and you really can't get a break.
idk if you do Savage content, but I say just take your time, relax, and get ur mind reset during a raid/dungeon. Toss a card on a random player and get it out the way, it's either going to be a 3% or 6% damage buff. That's not a whole lot to me anyway, so whenever my brain freezes i just toss it on someone random instead of not doing something else. On the other side this class has 4 different HoT's. And 3 of them are instacast. No need to cast the groupwide HoT if you dont have room to cast. Honestly for how busy/complicated the class is, I'm surprised it does the least amount of damage. Of course it's going to outheal the shield healers, but from what i've seen with White Mage, it still beats Ast in heals and damage. (But I hear white mage is too simple, and i'm not big of a fan on the shield healers. And i've been an Ast main since Stormblood, this class is still fun for me. I don't care about the numbers. I'm there to HEAL, not be a part of this silly damage meta everyone wants)
I don’t see them reverting the new Minor Arcana but at the very least, I want them to merge the Draw and Play buttons into 1 button. Namely Draw turning into play. The normal cards requiring a specific play button was annoying enough but Minor Arcana was over the top. I play on controller and Minor Arcana’s Play Button is just the epitome of bloat. I want to put the likes of Astrodyne there but I can’t because I have this shoehorned button taking the spot. Not to mention having AST being the only job leaking into my 3rd cross hotbar... There are far too many buttons and there needs to be some condensed together. Again, the cards are the prime candidates because why do we need a separate play button?
You can't have Draw turn into redraw because Draw has a charge cooldown, and it would require you to play a card before your cooldown gets rolling again. This is how AST used to have it and it would be a significant nerf, for the purpose of reducing bloat by one button.
@@Paul-bs5wl I mentioned Minor Arcana at the start as that was what I was referring to. Either way, Dancer’s dances go on cooldown as soon as you start them so that shouldn’t be a problem for Minor Arcana as it doesn’t have a charge system. Besides that, for Minor Arcana, you’re more than likely going to have used that card before the cooldown ends. Unless it’s on the 2 minute raid buff window (if you have crowns) at which point it’s just be coming off CD anyway.
Having separate draw and play is really useful. But having it twice again for minor arcana is a bit rough. I think we could find a way to streamline that there, though I have the button space for it
@@Paul-bs5wl iirc tenchijin doesn't halt the recharge of mudra. So draw and redraw could be same button with current system. Or they could do something better.
@@Rc3651 Even if it was just Minor Arcana’s Play Button being merged into the Minor Arcana Draw Button, I’d be happy. The only thing I’d want to put in its place is Astrodyne. I just find it obnoxious when that space could be better served by... Even the likes of Undraw.
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.
im glad we got to almost exactly same conclusion about lightspeed. i actually thought 90s with a singke charge OR 60s cooldown would be enough on their own.
Rng is now so bad and hard to manage on ast that ive started compiling screenshots of landing on four of the same cards (not just seals, cards too - three played, one in the hand). Some where clarifying draw was used to try and solve it, and others not. Tbh i took redraw off my bar at this point. It's so useless and the bloat is real. Imo if they made the minor arcana play as in shadowbringers, but with the mechanic of endwalker (lord for dps and lady for heal), id be much happier. It plays fine, just no reason to have extra buttons. Also a quick easy fix on redraw, make it guarantee a seal you dont have so long as you have two or more seals already. Then it's basically sleeve draw. It would feel a lot less punishing to have on the bar then and less of a time waster to worry about.
@@Zoeila lmao! Well i already stopped counting the number of times its happened. Nearly every dungeon and trial and raid, at least once, since the expack dropped.
that's just not true lol. Sorry but I can't belive this. The rng is nowhere near that bad. I'm playing since early access and there was only 2 times when I ended up with a 1 seal divination. It's soooo rare that I can remember exactly when it happened because yes, it can be annoying. But I won't fall for this "i already stopped counting the number of times its happened" bs. Minor arcana rng is more annoying tbh, the free Lady heal is crazy good and Lord is kinda shitty on single target.
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.
@josh as a Reptilian brain, i feel that Ast is underwhelming with alot of busy buttons that dont do much and alot of button to push with few meaningful impact on neither dps nor healing potency. Ast is a shadow of its former self. If you want straightforward heal go with whm or sage. You get to heal in your sleep and still wake up with full party at end of raid wides.
That's the best part! After hitting level 70, AST starts feeling so good because of the earthly star. And it only gets better after that, the level 90 actions are the chef's kiss to the job for me. Starts off kinda overwhelming juggling cards, healing, and damage when you are a newer player, but once you get used to juggling them, you have SOOOOO many options for what you want to do. And it feels so good while trying to perfect your play and things go so smoothly that you don't think about it anymore, oh I need to heal? What's available? Oh, earthly star is about to go off, nevermind on healing, it's fine. I'll pop a collective unconscious just to be safe.
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.
Been maining AST since HW and it's always rough on release and sort of reaches its final form by the *.3 patch. I expected the same here and was frustrated that people didn't see the writing on the wall and were too busy making noise around SCH pre-EW, but what can you do? I doubt we'll get more than a pot change for FM and maybe some button bloat paring, but I think the job needs more extensive changes to function as it probably "should." Personally, I think charges should be removed from AST draw, play buttons should be consolidated into their respective draws with the cooldown countdown added to the job gauge, sleeve draw should be brought back and set 60s. This removes some of the 120s traffic jam, holds astrodyn at a clean 60s and controls for some rng. I also think the MP restore on astrodyn should be the last reward, damage should be the second, and sps the first. It controls for a lot of personal DPS rng, and it also makes the MP situation slightly less BS. I'd personally like changes to Lady but that definitely won't happen. We suffered it all of SB and we'll suffer it again. I just wonder why they didn't learn their lesson the first time. My biggest fear is that they'll address the "too much effort for low reward" situation by just making the whole card system short GCDs instead of oGCDs. I like the complexity, and with every expansion release mishap, I fear they're just going to delete it all to appease others that would clearly be happier playing other healer options.
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.
I've leveled and played all healers to 90 at this point in EX trials and AST is the only one that gives me anxiety. As you noted, it has a ridiculous amount of setup to perform at max capacity. Sage and Scholar both feel like they have a powerful toolkit of cooldowns and WHm has the simplicity and raw output, but AST feels like it just needs *so much more* work to play optimally. They also need to give Essential Dignity a bit of a bump, because right now it feels like Tetragrammaton Light.
New Minor Arcana sucks imo. It's boring, RNG-dependent, feels clunky if you ever hold the heal and ability CD isn't rolling from no stacking. Often times I even forget to use it because it feels so underwhelming. But hey, at least AST just never runs out of mana anymore.
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.
You covered all of my own grievances with the job. AST was the job that brought me into the game and I loved the ShB iteration. I think in EW, the healing kit is phenomenal but the cards drag it down now which is why I wanted to play AST in the first place. I hope SE takes a look at the cards cause at the moment, they are what is making AST not that fun to play.
So now that the first Savage tier is out and we can get some really good information about all the jobs and how they interact, I would love to see this same sort of video on all the healers and then maybe a final video that kinda compares and contrasts them again with what we've learned from playing all the content. I've personally been really happy with Sage as it's become my main healer over WHM/AST which was my previous go to. I keep hearing that Scholar is better and it leveled along with my SMN but post-Heavensward it honestly never really jivved with me so aside from using it in a few dungeons to get a feel for it at lvl 90 I haven't even thought about taking it into other content. I leveled WHM as my backup and it feels almost exactly the same from ShB but with worse MP economy (which I was REALLY hoping to see addressed in 6.05) but I haven't even leveled up AST yet because I took at look at it and upon realizing that I'd have to completely redo my bar to fit all these new actions on it I was just like "naw, I'll pass for now."
Others have said this already, but I also think that AST is too busy now with little benefit to it. I feel like I use Astrodyne all the time and its barely noticeable when its activated, like why bother? And it's the whole reason the seal system exists and yet its still too weak to justify the whole system existing just for it. Also, although I do like Lord/Lady healing and damaging now, it's yet another thing to keep track of, and of course it has 2 buttons, so even more button bloat. AST is really close to being great but I do hope the devs give it some changes soon to make it less busy, more rewarding, and consolidate some buttons.
I actually love the changes to Minor Arcana in EW. Back in ShB it was so boring to use, just a small bump in DPS for a party member, zzzzzzzz. Now you actually have an additional heal or attack. I would make it so Minor Arcana and Crown Play were the same button, but change nothing else about it. People complaining about it so much has really shown me that there are two completely different type of healers in FF14, savage/ultimate raiders and everyone else. The problem is most people assume that whatever the savage raider thinks about a job must be the only important opinion since they can complete harder content. But the way you play a healer when doing an expert dungeon vs an Ultimate are completely different. If Yoshi-P made a bunch of changes to abilities to appease the raiders, it could completely ruin the job for the expert dungeon runners. I like most of your points on Astro, which is my main and favorite job, but I'm glad Yoshi-P doesn't only take job balance advice from ultimate raiders.
None really. PvP has Minor Arcana as 1 Button. MA Draw turning into its play button. Even if they just did THAT I’d have a better time as there’s some skills I want to use often that I can’t have on my 1st cross hotbar because the most useless button since Undraw (MA’s Play Button) is there.
The Heavensward jobs all got the chainsaw taken to them in Shadowbringers and they've never quite recovered from a mechanical standpoint. They still do good numbers, but yikes, the play patterns make very little sense anymore. Edit: Feels like Minor Arcana and a few other things only exists because they're beholden to the Job quests and trying to make ANY sense out of them since they changed the cards so much over time.
Minor Arcana was added in Stormblood, and it wasn't the quested skill there, Sleeve Draw was. And with the removal of Nocturnal Sect and the changes to the cards all just being boring damage increases goes against the entire lore reasoning behind them too. They never went back to update the job quests.
@@fatmatt589 I can just imagine a new player doing the first AST quest after getting the Job Stone. “The Bole decreases damage taken, put it on this NPC!” ...Then they get confused as to why it boosted Ranged Damage more than Melee and not reduce damage taken. SB cards were great and nothing will change my mind there.
I get the issues from a competitive/optimized standpoint. I agree with old redraw, better lightspeed, and I wish Lord/Lady wasn't as button hogging. But from a casual perspective, this is the most fun I have had with any healer, let alone astro. Astrodyne being relatively stress free compared to divination is nice. Lord gives me some damage, and I use lady all the time to get a strong Aoe instant heal. Every other Astro heal is delayed, so it is nice to weave it in and get back to work. I want it to be more rewarding for optimization; the seals should be more important than the raw damage. But I don't want to compromise the casual fun of it.
I was a casual SCH for ShB and I was gonna do it again for EW (I mean I still do tbh) but I picked up AST cuz the other healer i've been playing with also went SCH so I figured it'd be a little better to split like that. The cards really are the bane of my existence. I'm still a casual for sure, but just the fact that there's 6 buttons entirely devoted to the card mechanic (1 of them really being useless tbf) they just kinda should have made Draw/Play a combo action for both the Arcana and normal draws (I do agree Minor Arcana just seems like a boring push button and I liked the old system better as well).
I hate that the minor arcana Lord Card is essentially just gravity II with Lightspeed active but a single use long cooldown and the potential to be a Helios (Lady) -_- it's just so unsatisfactory I was so happy with SHB Ast it felt so right and awesome when you finally got good cards and sleeve draw made it less punishing with RNG. I feel like they panicked with Sage and threw a bunch of Bandaids at AST to make up for the fact it's dual healing/shielding was gutted.
After getting sage to 90, I wanted to get a pure healer to 90. My whm was at 80, but honestly, I don't like it anymore. It's boring... Gave astro a shot and it's only lvl 50, but my God is it soooo much fun compared to whm.
Remove minor arcana, Give back sleeve draw. Have redraw guarantee a card of seals you don't already have and guarantee the opposite type than previous (ex. turning the spear into the bole when having a Lunar Sign and no Solar). Astrodyne and Synastry both feel really bad right now (synastry always has for me though)
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 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.
I honestly hope back to HsW or SB. I can imagine how people will cry from tons of buttons for card playing and combos. ShB was a the worst changes for me, because after mind game machine AST with a sorts of buffs we had only stupid DPS buff in two category and we were without Crown cards. Now it more funny for me, cause it back some unique style for AST.
The button bloat as a controller player is kinda annoying MA either remove it or revert it and I don’t mind the way seals are personally 2 seals is pretty powerful. I think I’ll stick with sage till we see the issues addressed
@@alexmaganda5827 yeah I have everything set up just but I had to move around a few skills it’s find but MA feels taking up 2 buttons is kinda annoying when it can be one button
@@inuclearpickle8628 I feel you there. There’s stuff I’d rather have where MA’s ‘Play’ Button is right now but can’t because... One of the most pointless buttons since Undraw is there. I mean... It’s all 1 action in PvP... So why not have it in PvE too? Makes 0 sense.
I live for your healer dungeon guides cuz they change my life LOL. I hope its also ast but I really don't care cuz I can use the education for any of the healer jobs xD
I gave up AST after playing it nearly exclusively since HW release. I thought ShB would kill the class for me but it didnt. However... END truly was the end for me :( At least Sage is super fun! No more depending on others to give me damage too! Can finally purple on my own xD
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.
That's called rDPS(raidWIDE DPS) and it is indeed a stat that is tracked on FFlogs. In fact, that's been the main measure of a job's DPS for years. Any job with party buffs will have them taken into account based on their usage and a few assumptions taken for RNG buffs like crit/dh. As it stands, AST is the lowest for rDPS, even with its buffs. Not to mention that it is entirely dependent on your party's actual performance. Buffing bad players doesn't make them do good damage and that too os a factor that can put ASTs behind in rDPS. You can assume it will be getting some more buffs in the future along with a few other jobs that have fallen a bit behind the curve.
my main wish is that they should just remove draw from the game, instead the guage should just show the card at the "top" of the "deck" and have a 30s cd on play and MA gives a 3rd omniseal or something for bursts. the problem really is ogcd bloat; i don't mind a little bit but having to put such an insane amount of effort for such tiny gains in rdps is absolutely not worth it. too bad my cohealer called dibs on sch :/
Love the card changes actually. Instead of your whole group getting screwed by your bad RNG it’s just you that gets screwed. There’s less pressure now. You’re playing to buff yourself, that’s it. Easier, and less stressful. Give the cards to the right person, and if you don’t get the seal you want it’s fine. I also like having the extra OGCD heal from Lady. Getting Lord is also great. Either way I’m fine. Gravity 2 looks lame, change it back. That’s the real issue.
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 dropped AST because I was a Nocturnal Sect Astrologian, and I genuinely hate how the cards feel now, and it made the job as a whole feel entirely unsatisfying to play. It makes me sad because Astrologian was the class that made me want to play Final Fantasy XIV and I've been missing it as it was the perfect job to me: Amazing animations and visual effects, versatile healing, utility other than healing. Now that I'm open to hearing more opinions about it, it's nice to know I'm not the only one who doesn't like the changes, instead of the usual "Oh the healing is strong and balanced so the changes are ok". I pray they focus on the cards when they do these reworks/changes they talked about. I'm gonna give it a chance again but I'm gonna try to view it as a new job versus the job I used to main.
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.
@@jamieanderson8308 maybe it would thematic to have cards buff the recipients next weaponskill/spell for extra potency instead of doing damage directly
@@LenzTL that could be really awkward to optimise. You’d have to hold it for certain skills/cooldowns. And even then it would be rng. Samurai’s Kaeshi Setsugekka is coming off cooldown so you hold onto a card for 20 seconds to make sure you buff it, delaying playing another card. Or you play your card and just as Setsugekka is coming off cooldown, you draw a ranged card. The rng of the cards would need to be addressed but it’s a good idea in principle!
@@jamieanderson8308 I was thinking it would function like similar to Hypercharge, where their next skill use just gains a flat potency or it could even just be like Kardia where an automatic support attack just comes from the Ast as a side effect from them attacking.
I love how you started with “AST at a very good spot” then spend the first 6min stating the exact issues I stoped playing AST after MSQ this time since HW. As a healer it’s insanely powerful especially recovery but for dps/burst and weaving it just feels bad lol I calculated around e4s~e8s tier, an AST is only worth taking more than a WHM if your group are high Green/Blue on average dps wise. So assume that’s still the case then now AST not only need a group but also need a lot more effort
Well, AST now has basically no mana economy whatsoever. WHM feels fantastic to play until either you or someone else in your group dies. AST is stressful but essentially doesn't have an MP bar as long as you're spamming out your cooldowns, much like Sage.
@@BunnychanFarabee yup. The cost of Ast. Spells are the same when you used to switch to nocturnal, which meant spells were higher than when u are under diurnal.... I switched to WHM. coz I can't be bothered, man.. some say that some of these changes the Ast. Got, Are back like it were before when the game just came out. Idk, man, after playing the Shb one version, I kinda want that back...
@@bbmnb I feel like HW AST was fun. There were floss ofc but doesn’t feel unnecessarily busy. Rn it feels unnecessarily busy for yet very little reward. Not really fun for me personally:(
Outside of raw numbers, cards don't feel fun to play. It was like a dance managing the rng with sleeve draw and minor arcana. Now I just feel trapped and resent my cards half the time.
Personally i like play and draw as separate buttons. However 6-8 buttons for card system is pure insanity. SE doesnt like Ast or people complain Ast isnt busy healer enough. They should combine some of the card buttons. Theres just too many for too few benefits.
Nice. I always like to withhold my personal opinion about classes cuz I’m an idiot. Now I feel I can explain what I don’t like about astro much better. It is strong tho, no doubt
Great video! I have a question though since I'm dumb af. How are you playing cards/applying shields without switching targets? I notice you mouse over them in the party list but from what I see you're target never actually changes.
To double weave cards for your burst you do need Lightspeed. Fall Malefic->Play->Draw every GCD until you Fall Malefic->Divination->Astrodyne in the last GCD before you go back to just spamming Fall Malefic. Oh and Minor Arcana is in there somewhere too. The AST opener is pretty busy.
The card changes really just make me so sad, getting Divinity set up felt so rewarding in Shadowbringers and it made me fall in love with Astro's complexity. Now at best it just feels so bloated, especially the Minor Arcana changes which on paper I can see as heightening the skill ceiling if you can be bothered to be patient enough to double stack it but like... I thought they were trying to decrease the number of buttons on our bars? I had to add a whole new row just to accommodate for something that doesn't even feel as entertaining.
Rather than simply giving more Lightspeed to make the frantic burst windows easier to deal with, I'd rather they just reduce the franticness of the burst windows. Take the extra charge off Draw so you're only going into a burst window with 2 cards instead of 3. Take damage off Lord of Crowns and replace it with a counterpart healing effect like a regen, shield or mit so it's purely a healing action. Naturally these changes are a DPS nerf so deal with it by buffing their other stuff.
i think im one of the few that actually likes the current iteration of minor arcana. free aeo heal or dps, cant lose imo. i hated how it was last expansion. 8 cards that do the same shit is not only stupid but boring af.
I like the added variety, they're cool and useful abilities. The loss of the RNG mitigation hurts though. Play Minor Arcana ended up going where Sleeve Draw used to on my bar due to rubbing it of room and I keep hitting it expecting something different to happen haha
I main WHM and I 90 my WHM AST and SGE so here is my opinion WHM now is too lacking, you quite have nothing to do except slide casting bcuz it has only 3 ogcd heal and of they are 60 90 180s CD!? AST has so many to press, half of my time is drawing cards and sometimes I lose focus on mechanic bcuz of it and double weaving for full potency is making it even more stress. SGE is too broken lol ← most of the healing is from this guy, not regen healer. In this patch, shield is absorb likely most of the damage so just 1 party regen and ogcd heal is quite enough for raid wide.
How are you casting cards on people without clicking on them to target them? thats one of my big issues with AST and I lose damage by forgetting to tab back to the enemy.
@@FFXIVMomo Please say a controller solution as well. :D I'm a filthy PS4 user with controller as a WHM, and there is no way I'm going to play AST with that button-bloat. It's a nightmare.
@@viktoriapocze4412 I made macros to target pt members 5-8 (since generally that's what you'll need) and put them on L2+ R2 shapes. Not optimal but it gets the job done if I have to AST.
nope. Neutral Sect's shield actually stacks with barrier healer's shield. And neutral Sect not only gives you the ability to apply shields, but also increase your healing power by 20%, which is very useful for raidwides
Call me weird, but personally I like the current Minor Arcana more then the old one. It's just more interesting then just "another damage option to ensure a three seal divination". I just find the instant OGCD Helios and another AoE damage skill that makes taking out trash mobs in big pulls more fun a bit more interesting then before. Of course, I'm not a top tier raider as haven't even touched Savage raids yet (I want to, but nobody does the old high end content synced anymore and I'm not even at Shadowbringers yet) so my opinions might be different I just find it more fun personally and prefer it not be removed from the game/reverted... but if it did... eh... wouldn't be the biggest of deals. For the normal cards themselves, it would be cool if they brought back Sleeve Draw to reduce the RNG of of things. I don't know how they would improve Astrodyne, I like the ability but most others don't seem to like it so I hope they improve it to satisfy everyone. For Minor Arcana, making it into one button like most others mentioned would be a good start. It's already like that in the PvP modes so it shouldn't be too difficult to implement. For Lord and Lady of Crowns themselves, maybe add an AoE party damage boost on top of their normal effects to make it more appealing? High end raids in the end seem to be only about damage and max DPS and nothing else so that might help? Or maybe add an AoE party damage resistance on top of the Lord and Lady's normal effects to add a bit of extra utility? Not sure if these suggestions would help in the end, but I'm just trying to spitball ideas to help out as I don't know all of the finer details of high end raids like perfect burst windows and etc and even though I personally have been enjoying the current AST more then before... most others seem to dislke/hate it (as well as the new White Mage) so I'm just trying to offer suggestions.
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.
I love Synastry personally. The reality is that there are times when you'll need to GCD heal, and Synastry opens up more options. You can either get a stronger heal on one person or heal two people, which has situational uses. Like if I'm out of other tools and need to heal Living Dead then Synastry is a godsend. It definitely helps take the sting out needing to GCD heal in the first place, and the cooldown is short enough that you should have it up basically every time you'd need it. If they were going to reduce button bloat I think there are other places I'd rather they look at first
@@Rc3651 I hear this argument a lot - but I've yet to ever encounter a situation where GCD healing has been warranted over OGCD. I'm glad it's helping other people, though.
They say that they want to remove Button bloat: They make Minor Arcana have its own play button in PvE... The second most useless ‘Ability’... While in PvP Draw turns into the Play Button for Minor Arcana making it a 1 Button Skill. That makes absolutely no sense to me.
They definitely gonna nerf astro because of gigachad healing without any problems with mana. I just use my abilities and have double HPS over other heal jobs. Mana problems are non existent you just hit LD+Astrodyne and you have full mana and i dont talk about cards that restore mana too. Personal dps is kinda suck but buffs add a lot to rdps.
I like lady of crowns and don't want it going away. I like actually having cards that do *something* different. Yeah yeah yeah damage bleh I don't care I care more about variety of cards
You’d have loved the cards in HW and SB: Bole reduces damage taken Balance was the damage card (that everyone fished for and inevitably we got this card system from their moaning) Spire regened TP... basically Mana for Melee. Removed after SB. Ewer regened MP Spear boosted Crit Rate Arrow boosted Skill and Spell Speed. I can’t remember what the Minor Arcana’s were then... But I think they were a heal and damage card? Also back then you could hold a card in reserve. So you drew a balance and wanted to use it later? You could spread it and save it. Alternatively you could consume a card to buff your next card. Ewer and Spire made the next card AoE and have a 50% Potency buff. Arrow and Spear doubled the duration of the next card. Balance and Bole gave a 200% potency increase to the next card. In short. That was AST’s golden age... Now it’s just... Damage here, damage there...
I think my answer for AST is really simple. Revert the job to either its ShB variation or its SB variation. Do not try to meet in the middle. You give us one, or you give us the other. Bring it back to |exactly| what it was in either one, no cut corners, no buttons gone, no buttons added (except for the new ones that do not affect the card system.) There is no way that the current state of AST survives, Astrodyne feels bad to use and the card system wants to always focus on boosting other people, no reason why I should be using it to boost someone else. This is the first time I'm legitimately putting down AST after it was my main healer since HW because I abhor how it is in its current state. I loved HW and SB AST and it was my main healer always, but ShB was when I really was with it. I can't stand touching it at all in EW which feels so bad since it's been my baby since it was introduced.
I’d love to have the SB version back, but only with a couple of small, very minor RNG manipulation changes to make sure the people that moaned about Balance Fishing in SB don’t start again and set us on the road to ShB cards once more. I loved when the cards were unique and such, meaning you could be way more creative with what you did instead of just... Card here, card there... Spire would need to change though since TP hasn’t been a thing since SB. Maybe a direct hit buff. Also going back to the SB version would make the Job Quests MAKE SENSE! The first AST Duty apparently still says that the Bole ‘Reduces damage taken’. ShB really retconned the lore for the cards and was what forced me away from the job in anything outside of solo stuff.
Levelling AST now after maining Sage and the card system is very disappointing. I feel they can just take it out for all the variety each card has (or lack of it).
I need to vent. Astro feels so fucking bad this expansion. I can't fucking stand the cards. Not having sleeve draw is complete ass. Minor arcana just makes me feel bad whenever I draw lady, just throw that shit away because the heal is worthless. Astro potency is fucking garbage and the group buffs don't come close to making up for it. I have no clue what they were thinking when making some of these changes for the expansion. I think all 3 of the other healers are way more fun to play and I'm so disappointed that astro feels like garbage
Please no. Either you attach this to normal redraw, in which case you can't differentiate between your Arcana and your normal card when you want to redraw. Or you give it its own button, on a job with an extreme button bloat problem already.
@@Paul-bs5wl unless redraw redraws both. You could draw a major arcana, redraw and not get what you want so you could use minor arcana that refreshes redraw. And it would be good especially if you don't lose the second clarifying draw if you get a good minor arcana instantly. So you could use lord and then fish for a good seal by using the refreshed redraw. Honestly it would be pretty confusing and bad for beginners but I would love that micromanaging. And this would be a bandaid change until they'd rework / revert the whole system btw
@@Paul-bs5wl With so many new skills being merged into 1 button, why couldn't minor arcana redraw be the same as the minor arcana draw button? It's not like you ever hold onto lady/lord for the whole cooldown duration anyway. And yes, this WOULD essentially turn Minor Arcana into "Lord" Arcana, and I don't see a problem with that. They can always buff Lady to where it's more of an appealing card option if they want to see it used more, maybe heals AND shields.
Minor arcana had to be changed otherwise astrodyne would be useless since you would have a constant 12% on every samurai or BLM every time cause who cares about healer self buffs for mp or 5% more dmg and healing. This is also still better than WHM since assize is tied to your damage and holding it hurts you and you got it wrong because it’s a oGCD, and 59 seconds of being able to hold assize for extra burst healing with horoscope or earthly star. Old minor arcana will never come back with current astrodyne. Also you said it was the least mobile healer???? Light speed and the fact it was the OG 1.5 second caster made it the most mobile, scholar now gets to weave aetherflow between broil so it has decent mobility now especially with expedient, and sage has Icarus. WHM is still locked but not as bad as before, sure lilies are instacast but it’s still locked to GCD. Yeah I’m the guy with the college essay you skimmed on stream a few weeks back but you miss a lot of points that show lack of balance between the classes Edit: you did the math on CI wrong, 200% is 3x, it’s not a 400 potency shield, it’s a 600 potency shield AND a 200 potency heal that can crit where DB does not, you even read it on the last vid. CI is = 800 potency which is now after lv85 a Cure 2/benefic 2 potency that can crit vs DB which is a 500 potency shield that = Cure 1/ benefic 1 that cannot crit and has 1/2 the duration per charge.
most of this is wrong lol it's true minor had to be changed, but he said it's less interesting and just plain button bloat compared to old minor arcana. this doesn't necessarily means he think old minor should be reinstated lol and he most certainly did not say it should come back as is he already addressed lightspeed in the video. you can only pray a movement section lines up with your burst windows, you can't use it whenever you want. so ast has no flexible movement tech other than dot, swiftcast and slidecast. every healer has that and more your math on ci is plain wrong lol. a 200% shield is a 200% (2x) shield, otherwise adlo would be a 2.8x shield, which means a 300pot heal + 840pot shield, which is obviously wrong...
I’m sorry but EW Minor Arcana is 100% more fun than ShB’s extended draw. At least we get a fun dps/heal rng mechanism here, and while it isn’t ideal for optimisation, it’s nice for prog. Also, please don’t forget AST has always been an rng based job, so stripping it off the job due to “optimisation” just deeply saddens me. If people are annoyed by its rng nature, they shouldn’t play the job to begin with.
We've actually had this version of Minor Arcana back in Stormblood. Lord and Lady did pretty much the same things as now, except they were single target.
I seems to me that the bigger problem discussed is that AST's burst is so convoluted and reliant on Lightspeed weaving that it's extremely difficult to execute and forces you to sacrifice your healer duty to an extreme degree to do it. It's a similar problem to how GNB can't move bosses properly when it's doing its burst, the design of the job when played properly begins to conflict with its primary function. Also AST previously had RNG, but now they've just taken away most of the tools we had to deal with it in ShB or even SB.
@@Zoeila That is true, but I was referring to the actual effects of Lord and Lady. Now that you mention it, this is the first time Minor Arcana is split from interacting with your drawn cards and just functions on it's own.
You're the macrocosmos in P3S of content creators
Overall, it feels like more weaving for less effect then shb ast somehow.
That's what i thought when I tested it. It just feels so busy but the damage is so low. Why should you bother trying to get 3 seals for 5% damage when, after the 90s to even get these cards, you can just wait 30 seconds more for a guaranteed buff that has 1% more dmg and benefits not just you, but everyone around you as well? It just doesn't feel worth it at all.
@@Darkmirror7 Because it also increases your cast times and lowers recast times? Unless that’s new?
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. 🙏
I dont like that they separated it at all. More buttons.
I'd rather they go back to ShdBn but keep the rng.
i didn't play ast much in ShB but I guess this explains why I felt confused when I tried picking it up in EB. Whenever I get a card I don't need/doesn't work for my team, then redraw just to get another card I don't need, I'm kind of like...uh what now? Is this just rng or am I doing something wrong? I didn't know that they took away a feature that kind of solved this issue. It's the only gripe I have so far while trying to learn AST. I love how busy it is compared to WHM but I feel like a lot of the time I'm going through my skills just to be screwed over by RNG and have no way out but to just wait for cooldowns.
One way i adapted is if possible i'll still play the card than aim to get the 3 of a kind next draw so im always putting out extra DPS buffs even if it seems inefficient because as long as you have 2 of a kind you can still aim for that 3 of a kind while still putting out buffs but this works only about 75% of the time
@@SnthwaveSunset imo the 2 seals suffice. While 3 seals gives the cherry on top for damage boost, once you're in the higher tier the sooner you can use astrodyne (especially for mp regen) the better for your mp economy. If i can get 3 seals (and wouldn't be a hassle to go down that route) that be best especially in casual content. For higher ones like savage, 2 is good for me.
Haven't played in 2 years and reading this makes me feel so for when I get back to HW to play AST but picking it up newly might feel okay.
I'm a newbie AST and I'm paralyzed with all the things that I must do in lv90 content. Despite being the 'quickest' healer in terms of mostly having no cast time and lots of ogcd, I'm constantly stuck in place as my brain tries to calculate and comprehend what I must do next and have no time to think of moving.
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.
due to having to redraw into play for the ast opener i wish it always drew a ranged card if you held melee as well, so that you could predict who to give it to without having to both double weave and react at the same time
Why should there be rng that’s so influential in the first place? “Because that’s the job theme” feels like a bad excuse for poor design.
Woo hoo! Been waiting for this, thank you!
I had an idea of making the Lord and Lady cards have an "Omni-Seal" to somewhat counter the RNG for Astrodyne. Like say for example you have a Sun and Moon seal loaded, if you play a Lord/Lady card or something, it'll load a seal that would act as a 3rd Unique seal no matter what seals you have loaded up?
But I don't play enough AST to make any assumption if that'll fix anything. Thought it might be cool and actually give Minor arcana some meaning.
Honestly, I like the idea of that. Mitigates some of the RNG which I know some people despised of the job before *CoughBalanceFishingCough*. Though I did like the SB cards but I know we’re likely never going back to that...
Another change that needs to happen is Minor Arcana’s unique play button being merged with the Minor Arcana Draw Button, changing to ‘Play’ when a card is drawn. Same for the regular cards... There’s just simply way too many bloat buttons with ‘Play’ and ‘Play 2’ that on controller, my Cross Hotbars are leaking onto the 3rd page which no other job does and its stupid.
I want to have Astrodyne somewhere on my 1st hotbar but I physically can’t because of Minor Arcana’s Play Button.
@@scottishboy112 You wasn't in HsW-SB, when you had more buttons. Like you had One-two more spells for burn your card for make your next card effect (50%power effect but with AOE, 150% power effect or 200% time for buff.) + You had two windows for Minor arcana, not only one + Arcana. And I want this times back, when AST was like healer for mind game people.
Ooo, that'd also fix astrodyne timings to fit 1min timers instead of being 90s. It's a great idea
@@EVE-Muutaras healers had so much more utility back then. Disable, Eye for an Eye, Cleric etc. good times.
@@EVE-Muutaras Oh trust me, I played AST a bit in SB and I liked that card system. Though if I recall, wasn’t Play and Draw the same button then?
I liked the potency Enhanced Bole in dungeons, Crit was also useful and even Ewer had its uses. But nope, everyone only gave a crap about the Balance.
Spire I will admit was a bit... Eh... but every other card had their uses.
And as much as I liked those cards, I know we’re likely not going back to them at this point.
I kinda like minor arcana, the new redraw system is what i feel hurts most.
I think you should do a retrospective video on all the healers in post endwalker since its coming to a close soon i think it'll be really an interesting video esp early sage impressions versus now ect but again not much has change between 6.0 and 6.5
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.
As an AST main, I'm really bummed out about how low our damage is. Part of me thinks that I should just switch to WHM, but I absolutely cannot stand the playstyle of only having like 4 oGCDs and nothing to do in between. I also really dislike minor arcana -- I think that outright removing it would help with the button bloat, but I'd also be happy if it just made you always draw the same card that does a bit of healing and a bit of damage or something. There's just too much RNG and reducing it any way would be nice.
The skill ceiling on this job is really high too -- I just have no idea how people keep track of every little thing while keeping up with your two minute burst windows efficiently. So yeah, in general, it absolutely sucks to see how low our rDPS is, even with a team of really good players.
We'll see how the Savage changes the healer balance but I agree that AST should be top DPS
@@FFXIVMomo If AST was top DPS AND provided the top amount of supporting damage, it would be a fair bit overtuned, no? What purpose would you have to pick any other healer from a party-efficiency standpoint, if one does both the most damage AND the most DPS utility. Tack on all of its other utility / flexibility, and suddenly WHM may as well not even exist.
@@ShockTemplar By top DPS he means top rDPS, meaning providing the most damage overall considering the offensive utilities
@@ShockTemplar AST OGCD healing isn't even that strong anymore it's really just White Mage's healing is just lower in comparison to every other healer. But anyways there's a way to balance it because right now SCH is top dps in optimization groups but SGE & WHM do more damage in your average pug group. AST can be put in the same shoes.
It's really Square Enix's fault for giving a healer that takes 300% more effort to even fully maximize that strong of a toolkit in the first place. WHM, SGE and SCH can all go into an instance and just pretty much play their job at their fullest potential in the first couple of pulls whereas AST needs hours of spreadsheeting and insane RNG to just break barely ahead if not even.
@@FFXIVMomo So what then? Just delete WHM? AST outperforms WHM in literally every other way. WHM is winning on DPS, but on average they don't actually heal as much as all 3 other healers according to the savage stats so far. AST has significantly better ogcd heals, better utility, better recovery, better MP management, and trivializes mechanics in ways no other healer can. As it stands there's very little reason to take a WHM over AST already. Nah, AST can't have everything.
Finally I’ve waiting for this for weeks!!! thx for the video!!!
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 am AST main and my biggest issue with it is the low rdps right now. I think will be OP but I wish lord/lady also give a dmg buff to the whole party
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.
This is EXACTLY how I feel about the job. Thank you for stating it more eloquently than I could. WHM is so simple, and all the cooldowns you have at SGE don't *have* to be used, they are simply available if you need them. AST you need to have the APM of Starcraft player it feels like.
Hey Momo, appreciate the vids. Hopefully you're okay with a bit of feedback, but it's been difficult for me to keep up with the information being laid out in your videos due to how a lot of speech pauses get edited out, as well as the general speed in which you speak vs the complexity of topics being discussed. It sometimes takes me multiple rewinds to understand a point, and even though they are good points, it does feel like I have to scrub the videos over and over to successfully appreciate the content.
One example is 5:30 when you list down the use cases of a buffed Lightspeed very rapidly, and even though I do intimately know how Lightspeed works, it's still a challenge to interpret the barrage of words as they come. The enunciation of, "Not only," is not clear and comes immediately after the end of a previous sentence, so I was also unaware that this was an expansion of your point and failed to process the rest of the current sentence in the moment.
As someone who's only played WHM for so long, I feel like the job difficulty difference between WHM and AST is just crazy. Not only do I have to press like 4 times more buttons, but I also need to optimize who to give cards to and learn how to deal with RNG while doing all the usual healer things at the same time. It's very demoralizing when you do all that stuff and WHM still wins out on dps because your party didn't optimize. I hope they buff AST rdps a little bit as a reward of playing such a busy job (or just rework it somehow)
I totally agree, it feels like every ogcd is spent trying to redraw a card or making sure your draw/minor arcana are on cd, while on WHM nothing happens, you simply react to the required healing. The difference in difficulty is pretty crazy
WHM is healer for new player or for someone who want play relaxing. AST was all time like, mind play class with chemistry of cards.
Macrocosmos is amazing! I used it on the first ex trial where your hp goes to 1, activate before it hits, pop it and everyone back up to like 60% health. I was giddy when I tried it and it workes
I play all healers although have always loved SCH and AST the most (now I love Sage, it's so much fun). Honestly I just feel frustrated with AST, rn. There's so much stuff, and it's annoying that a lot of times you have to mess up something in order to do your job and heal people. It is SO MUCH WORK to optimize, sometimes I just need a second and you really can't get a break.
idk if you do Savage content, but I say just take your time, relax, and get ur mind reset during a raid/dungeon. Toss a card on a random player and get it out the way, it's either going to be a 3% or 6% damage buff. That's not a whole lot to me anyway, so whenever my brain freezes i just toss it on someone random instead of not doing something else. On the other side this class has 4 different HoT's. And 3 of them are instacast. No need to cast the groupwide HoT if you dont have room to cast.
Honestly for how busy/complicated the class is, I'm surprised it does the least amount of damage. Of course it's going to outheal the shield healers, but from what i've seen with White Mage, it still beats Ast in heals and damage.
(But I hear white mage is too simple, and i'm not big of a fan on the shield healers. And i've been an Ast main since Stormblood, this class is still fun for me. I don't care about the numbers. I'm there to HEAL, not be a part of this silly damage meta everyone wants)
I don’t see them reverting the new Minor Arcana but at the very least, I want them to merge the Draw and Play buttons into 1 button.
Namely Draw turning into play.
The normal cards requiring a specific play button was annoying enough but Minor Arcana was over the top. I play on controller and Minor Arcana’s Play Button is just the epitome of bloat. I want to put the likes of Astrodyne there but I can’t because I have this shoehorned button taking the spot.
Not to mention having AST being the only job leaking into my 3rd cross hotbar... There are far too many buttons and there needs to be some condensed together. Again, the cards are the prime candidates because why do we need a separate play button?
You can't have Draw turn into redraw because Draw has a charge cooldown, and it would require you to play a card before your cooldown gets rolling again. This is how AST used to have it and it would be a significant nerf, for the purpose of reducing bloat by one button.
@@Paul-bs5wl I mentioned Minor Arcana at the start as that was what I was referring to.
Either way, Dancer’s dances go on cooldown as soon as you start them so that shouldn’t be a problem for Minor Arcana as it doesn’t have a charge system.
Besides that, for Minor Arcana, you’re more than likely going to have used that card before the cooldown ends. Unless it’s on the 2 minute raid buff window (if you have crowns) at which point it’s just be coming off CD anyway.
Having separate draw and play is really useful. But having it twice again for minor arcana is a bit rough. I think we could find a way to streamline that there, though I have the button space for it
@@Paul-bs5wl iirc tenchijin doesn't halt the recharge of mudra. So draw and redraw could be same button with current system. Or they could do something better.
@@Rc3651 Even if it was just Minor Arcana’s Play Button being merged into the Minor Arcana Draw Button, I’d be happy.
The only thing I’d want to put in its place is Astrodyne. I just find it obnoxious when that space could be better served by... Even the likes of Undraw.
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.
im glad we got to almost exactly same conclusion about lightspeed. i actually thought 90s with a singke charge OR 60s cooldown would be enough on their own.
Rng is now so bad and hard to manage on ast that ive started compiling screenshots of landing on four of the same cards (not just seals, cards too - three played, one in the hand). Some where clarifying draw was used to try and solve it, and others not. Tbh i took redraw off my bar at this point. It's so useless and the bloat is real.
Imo if they made the minor arcana play as in shadowbringers, but with the mechanic of endwalker (lord for dps and lady for heal), id be much happier. It plays fine, just no reason to have extra buttons.
Also a quick easy fix on redraw, make it guarantee a seal you dont have so long as you have two or more seals already. Then it's basically sleeve draw. It would feel a lot less punishing to have on the bar then and less of a time waster to worry about.
I dont understand how anyone has luck that bad? Did you murder someone in a previous life?
@@Zoeila lmao! Well i already stopped counting the number of times its happened. Nearly every dungeon and trial and raid, at least once, since the expack dropped.
@@Lerrae1908 i think its happed to me twice
that's just not true lol. Sorry but I can't belive this. The rng is nowhere near that bad. I'm playing since early access and there was only 2 times when I ended up with a 1 seal divination. It's soooo rare that I can remember exactly when it happened because yes, it can be annoying. But I won't fall for this "i already stopped counting the number of times its happened" bs. Minor arcana rng is more annoying tbh, the free Lady heal is crazy good and Lord is kinda shitty on single target.
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.
As a filthy casual, non-optimized, smooth-brain, dungeon and normal raid player, I love how AST feels. So snappy and quick.
@josh as a Reptilian brain, i feel that Ast is underwhelming with alot of busy buttons that dont do much and alot of button to push with few meaningful impact on neither dps nor healing potency. Ast is a shadow of its former self. If you want straightforward heal go with whm or sage. You get to heal in your sleep and still wake up with full party at end of raid wides.
Yeah i can agree with this lol. Its overwhelming at first but once you know the skill set AST feels like easy mode more than WHM to me.
That's the best part! After hitting level 70, AST starts feeling so good because of the earthly star. And it only gets better after that, the level 90 actions are the chef's kiss to the job for me.
Starts off kinda overwhelming juggling cards, healing, and damage when you are a newer player, but once you get used to juggling them, you have SOOOOO many options for what you want to do. And it feels so good while trying to perfect your play and things go so smoothly that you don't think about it anymore, oh I need to heal? What's available? Oh, earthly star is about to go off, nevermind on healing, it's fine. I'll pop a collective unconscious just to be safe.
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.
That was so much fun. I wish I could just play SB AST one last time.
Been maining AST since HW and it's always rough on release and sort of reaches its final form by the *.3 patch. I expected the same here and was frustrated that people didn't see the writing on the wall and were too busy making noise around SCH pre-EW, but what can you do? I doubt we'll get more than a pot change for FM and maybe some button bloat paring, but I think the job needs more extensive changes to function as it probably "should." Personally, I think charges should be removed from AST draw, play buttons should be consolidated into their respective draws with the cooldown countdown added to the job gauge, sleeve draw should be brought back and set 60s. This removes some of the 120s traffic jam, holds astrodyn at a clean 60s and controls for some rng. I also think the MP restore on astrodyn should be the last reward, damage should be the second, and sps the first. It controls for a lot of personal DPS rng, and it also makes the MP situation slightly less BS. I'd personally like changes to Lady but that definitely won't happen. We suffered it all of SB and we'll suffer it again. I just wonder why they didn't learn their lesson the first time. My biggest fear is that they'll address the "too much effort for low reward" situation by just making the whole card system short GCDs instead of oGCDs. I like the complexity, and with every expansion release mishap, I fear they're just going to delete it all to appease others that would clearly be happier playing other healer options.
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.
I've leveled and played all healers to 90 at this point in EX trials and AST is the only one that gives me anxiety. As you noted, it has a ridiculous amount of setup to perform at max capacity. Sage and Scholar both feel like they have a powerful toolkit of cooldowns and WHm has the simplicity and raw output, but AST feels like it just needs *so much more* work to play optimally. They also need to give Essential Dignity a bit of a bump, because right now it feels like Tetragrammaton Light.
New momo video feelsgoodman
New Minor Arcana sucks imo.
It's boring, RNG-dependent, feels clunky if you ever hold the heal and ability CD isn't rolling from no stacking. Often times I even forget to use it because it feels so underwhelming.
But hey, at least AST just never runs out of mana anymore.
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.
You covered all of my own grievances with the job. AST was the job that brought me into the game and I loved the ShB iteration. I think in EW, the healing kit is phenomenal but the cards drag it down now which is why I wanted to play AST in the first place. I hope SE takes a look at the cards cause at the moment, they are what is making AST not that fun to play.
Great videos man! Thanks for sharing
So now that the first Savage tier is out and we can get some really good information about all the jobs and how they interact, I would love to see this same sort of video on all the healers and then maybe a final video that kinda compares and contrasts them again with what we've learned from playing all the content. I've personally been really happy with Sage as it's become my main healer over WHM/AST which was my previous go to. I keep hearing that Scholar is better and it leveled along with my SMN but post-Heavensward it honestly never really jivved with me so aside from using it in a few dungeons to get a feel for it at lvl 90 I haven't even thought about taking it into other content. I leveled WHM as my backup and it feels almost exactly the same from ShB but with worse MP economy (which I was REALLY hoping to see addressed in 6.05) but I haven't even leveled up AST yet because I took at look at it and upon realizing that I'd have to completely redo my bar to fit all these new actions on it I was just like "naw, I'll pass for now."
been waiting for this!!
I love that in pvp minor arcana is one button but not for pve and also much more useful lol
Others have said this already, but I also think that AST is too busy now with little benefit to it. I feel like I use Astrodyne all the time and its barely noticeable when its activated, like why bother? And it's the whole reason the seal system exists and yet its still too weak to justify the whole system existing just for it. Also, although I do like Lord/Lady healing and damaging now, it's yet another thing to keep track of, and of course it has 2 buttons, so even more button bloat. AST is really close to being great but I do hope the devs give it some changes soon to make it less busy, more rewarding, and consolidate some buttons.
I actually love the changes to Minor Arcana in EW. Back in ShB it was so boring to use, just a small bump in DPS for a party member, zzzzzzzz. Now you actually have an additional heal or attack. I would make it so Minor Arcana and Crown Play were the same button, but change nothing else about it. People complaining about it so much has really shown me that there are two completely different type of healers in FF14, savage/ultimate raiders and everyone else. The problem is most people assume that whatever the savage raider thinks about a job must be the only important opinion since they can complete harder content. But the way you play a healer when doing an expert dungeon vs an Ultimate are completely different. If Yoshi-P made a bunch of changes to abilities to appease the raiders, it could completely ruin the job for the expert dungeon runners. I like most of your points on Astro, which is my main and favorite job, but I'm glad Yoshi-P doesn't only take job balance advice from ultimate raiders.
What benefit is there to having Minor arcana draw and use be two different buttons?
Also, new astro is kinda ass. All that busywork for little result.
None really. PvP has Minor Arcana as 1 Button. MA Draw turning into its play button.
Even if they just did THAT I’d have a better time as there’s some skills I want to use often that I can’t have on my 1st cross hotbar because the most useless button since Undraw (MA’s Play Button) is there.
The Heavensward jobs all got the chainsaw taken to them in Shadowbringers and they've never quite recovered from a mechanical standpoint. They still do good numbers, but yikes, the play patterns make very little sense anymore.
Edit: Feels like Minor Arcana and a few other things only exists because they're beholden to the Job quests and trying to make ANY sense out of them since they changed the cards so much over time.
Minor Arcana was added in Stormblood, and it wasn't the quested skill there, Sleeve Draw was. And with the removal of Nocturnal Sect and the changes to the cards all just being boring damage increases goes against the entire lore reasoning behind them too. They never went back to update the job quests.
@@fatmatt589 I can just imagine a new player doing the first AST quest after getting the Job Stone.
“The Bole decreases damage taken, put it on this NPC!”
...Then they get confused as to why it boosted Ranged Damage more than Melee and not reduce damage taken.
SB cards were great and nothing will change my mind there.
I get the issues from a competitive/optimized standpoint. I agree with old redraw, better lightspeed, and I wish Lord/Lady wasn't as button hogging. But from a casual perspective, this is the most fun I have had with any healer, let alone astro. Astrodyne being relatively stress free compared to divination is nice. Lord gives me some damage, and I use lady all the time to get a strong Aoe instant heal. Every other Astro heal is delayed, so it is nice to weave it in and get back to work. I want it to be more rewarding for optimization; the seals should be more important than the raw damage. But I don't want to compromise the casual fun of it.
agreed, in dungeons during bosses I really hope to get that lady sometimes. the heal is just really good to clean up after an aoe
AST feels way more fun to play than current WHM imo.
I was a casual SCH for ShB and I was gonna do it again for EW (I mean I still do tbh) but I picked up AST cuz the other healer i've been playing with also went SCH so I figured it'd be a little better to split like that. The cards really are the bane of my existence. I'm still a casual for sure, but just the fact that there's 6 buttons entirely devoted to the card mechanic (1 of them really being useless tbf) they just kinda should have made Draw/Play a combo action for both the Arcana and normal draws (I do agree Minor Arcana just seems like a boring push button and I liked the old system better as well).
I need to watch all your healer videos! :)
I hate that the minor arcana Lord Card is essentially just gravity II with Lightspeed active but a single use long cooldown and the potential to be a Helios (Lady) -_- it's just so unsatisfactory I was so happy with SHB Ast it felt so right and awesome when you finally got good cards and sleeve draw made it less punishing with RNG. I feel like they panicked with Sage and threw a bunch of Bandaids at AST to make up for the fact it's dual healing/shielding was gutted.
After getting sage to 90, I wanted to get a pure healer to 90. My whm was at 80, but honestly, I don't like it anymore. It's boring...
Gave astro a shot and it's only lvl 50, but my God is it soooo much fun compared to whm.
I'm pretty shit at healing but I feel like ShB Astro felt a little better for me. Also WHM has more twirly moves so I prefer it now lol
Didn't SHB neutral sect have effects on almost every ability, not just aspected benefic/helios? Like CI applied a regen alongside the barrier.
you remembered it wrongly
Remove minor arcana, Give back sleeve draw. Have redraw guarantee a card of seals you don't already have and guarantee the opposite type than previous (ex. turning the spear into the bole when having a Lunar Sign and no Solar). Astrodyne and Synastry both feel really bad right now (synastry always has for me though)
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.
The opener and burst window is blrgh for me. Minor Arcana is also blrgh.
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.
I honestly hope back to HsW or SB. I can imagine how people will cry from tons of buttons for card playing and combos. ShB was a the worst changes for me, because after mind game machine AST with a sorts of buffs we had only stupid DPS buff in two category and we were without Crown cards. Now it more funny for me, cause it back some unique style for AST.
The button bloat as a controller player is kinda annoying MA either remove it or revert it and I don’t mind the way seals are personally 2 seals is pretty powerful. I think I’ll stick with sage till we see the issues addressed
i play with controller as well its managable if you use the proper settings
@@alexmaganda5827 yeah I have everything set up just but I had to move around a few skills it’s find but MA feels taking up 2 buttons is kinda annoying when it can be one button
@@inuclearpickle8628 I feel you there. There’s stuff I’d rather have where MA’s ‘Play’ Button is right now but can’t because... One of the most pointless buttons since Undraw is there.
I mean... It’s all 1 action in PvP... So why not have it in PvE too? Makes 0 sense.
I live for your healer dungeon guides cuz they change my life LOL. I hope its also ast but I really don't care cuz I can use the education for any of the healer jobs xD
I gave up AST after playing it nearly exclusively since HW release. I thought ShB would kill the class for me but it didnt.
However...
END truly was the end for me :( At least Sage is super fun! No more depending on others to give me damage too! Can finally purple on my own xD
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.
That's called rDPS(raidWIDE DPS) and it is indeed a stat that is tracked on FFlogs. In fact, that's been the main measure of a job's DPS for years. Any job with party buffs will have them taken into account based on their usage and a few assumptions taken for RNG buffs like crit/dh.
As it stands, AST is the lowest for rDPS, even with its buffs. Not to mention that it is entirely dependent on your party's actual performance. Buffing bad players doesn't make them do good damage and that too os a factor that can put ASTs behind in rDPS.
You can assume it will be getting some more buffs in the future along with a few other jobs that have fallen a bit behind the curve.
Final installment on the healers? No video on Warrior ? *shock*
my main wish is that they should just remove draw from the game, instead the guage should just show the card at the "top" of the "deck" and have a 30s cd on play and MA gives a 3rd omniseal or something for bursts.
the problem really is ogcd bloat; i don't mind a little bit but having to put such an insane amount of effort for such tiny gains in rdps is absolutely not worth it. too bad my cohealer called dibs on sch :/
Love the card changes actually. Instead of your whole group getting screwed by your bad RNG it’s just you that gets screwed. There’s less pressure now. You’re playing to buff yourself, that’s it. Easier, and less stressful.
Give the cards to the right person, and if you don’t get the seal you want it’s fine.
I also like having the extra OGCD heal from Lady. Getting Lord is also great. Either way I’m fine.
Gravity 2 looks lame, change it back. That’s the real issue.
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 dropped AST because I was a Nocturnal Sect Astrologian, and I genuinely hate how the cards feel now, and it made the job as a whole feel entirely unsatisfying to play. It makes me sad because Astrologian was the class that made me want to play Final Fantasy XIV and I've been missing it as it was the perfect job to me: Amazing animations and visual effects, versatile healing, utility other than healing. Now that I'm open to hearing more opinions about it, it's nice to know I'm not the only one who doesn't like the changes, instead of the usual "Oh the healing is strong and balanced so the changes are ok". I pray they focus on the cards when they do these reworks/changes they talked about. I'm gonna give it a chance again but I'm gonna try to view it as a new job versus the job I used to main.
Minor Arcana feels so bad, the button bloat is absolutely real.
What do you think is the optional healer comp for savage/prog? AST pulls lower dps than WHM but its actual healing seems MUCH stronger
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.
Yeah, making cards on the GCD like Mudras could be a solution.
@@LenzTL then they would definitely need to do damage too. Otherwise you’re losing an attacking gcd to use them which would really suck.
@@jamieanderson8308 maybe it would thematic to have cards buff the recipients next weaponskill/spell for extra potency instead of doing damage directly
@@LenzTL that could be really awkward to optimise. You’d have to hold it for certain skills/cooldowns. And even then it would be rng. Samurai’s Kaeshi Setsugekka is coming off cooldown so you hold onto a card for 20 seconds to make sure you buff it, delaying playing another card. Or you play your card and just as Setsugekka is coming off cooldown, you draw a ranged card. The rng of the cards would need to be addressed but it’s a good idea in principle!
@@jamieanderson8308 I was thinking it would function like similar to Hypercharge, where their next skill use just gains a flat potency
or it could even just be like Kardia where an automatic support attack just comes from the Ast as a side effect from them attacking.
I love how you started with “AST at a very good spot” then spend the first 6min stating the exact issues I stoped playing AST after MSQ this time since HW. As a healer it’s insanely powerful especially recovery but for dps/burst and weaving it just feels bad lol
I calculated around e4s~e8s tier, an AST is only worth taking more than a WHM if your group are high Green/Blue on average dps wise. So assume that’s still the case then now AST not only need a group but also need a lot more effort
Well, AST now has basically no mana economy whatsoever. WHM feels fantastic to play until either you or someone else in your group dies. AST is stressful but essentially doesn't have an MP bar as long as you're spamming out your cooldowns, much like Sage.
@@BunnychanFarabee yup. The cost of Ast. Spells are the same when you used to switch to nocturnal, which meant spells were higher than when u are under diurnal.... I switched to WHM. coz I can't be bothered, man.. some say that some of these changes the Ast. Got, Are back like it were before when the game just came out. Idk, man, after playing the Shb one version, I kinda want that back...
@@bbmnb I feel like HW AST was fun. There were floss ofc but doesn’t feel unnecessarily busy. Rn it feels unnecessarily busy for yet very little reward. Not really fun for me personally:(
help, does anyone know what body glamour is being used during a4?
Will there be a dungeon heling guide for AST in the future?
Outside of raw numbers, cards don't feel fun to play. It was like a dance managing the rng with sleeve draw and minor arcana. Now I just feel trapped and resent my cards half the time.
I can't describe how much I hate draw and play being two separate buttons, on both standard cards AND minor arcana.
Personally i like play and draw as separate buttons. However 6-8 buttons for card system is pure insanity. SE doesnt like Ast or people complain Ast isnt busy healer enough. They should combine some of the card buttons. Theres just too many for too few benefits.
The card changes ever since 5.0 make me wonder if devs even play their own game. Oh wait, too soon?
Nice. I always like to withhold my personal opinion about classes cuz I’m an idiot. Now I feel I can explain what I don’t like about astro much better. It is strong tho, no doubt
Great video! I have a question though since I'm dumb af. How are you playing cards/applying shields without switching targets? I notice you mouse over them in the party list but from what I see you're target never actually changes.
its a mouse over target macro for the "play" skill pretty sure its something like /ac "play" , might want to look it up tho
I haven't needed Lightspeed for my burst... could you go into the buttons involved in that or something?
To double weave cards for your burst you do need Lightspeed. Fall Malefic->Play->Draw every GCD until you Fall Malefic->Divination->Astrodyne in the last GCD before you go back to just spamming Fall Malefic. Oh and Minor Arcana is in there somewhere too. The AST opener is pretty busy.
The card changes really just make me so sad, getting Divinity set up felt so rewarding in Shadowbringers and it made me fall in love with Astro's complexity. Now at best it just feels so bloated, especially the Minor Arcana changes which on paper I can see as heightening the skill ceiling if you can be bothered to be patient enough to double stack it but like... I thought they were trying to decrease the number of buttons on our bars? I had to add a whole new row just to accommodate for something that doesn't even feel as entertaining.
Rather than simply giving more Lightspeed to make the frantic burst windows easier to deal with, I'd rather they just reduce the franticness of the burst windows. Take the extra charge off Draw so you're only going into a burst window with 2 cards instead of 3. Take damage off Lord of Crowns and replace it with a counterpart healing effect like a regen, shield or mit so it's purely a healing action. Naturally these changes are a DPS nerf so deal with it by buffing their other stuff.
i think im one of the few that actually likes the current iteration of minor arcana. free aeo heal or dps, cant lose imo. i hated how it was last expansion. 8 cards that do the same shit is not only stupid but boring af.
I like the added variety, they're cool and useful abilities. The loss of the RNG mitigation hurts though. Play Minor Arcana ended up going where Sleeve Draw used to on my bar due to rubbing it of room and I keep hitting it expecting something different to happen haha
I main WHM and I 90 my WHM AST and SGE so here is my opinion
WHM now is too lacking, you quite have nothing to do except slide casting bcuz it has only 3 ogcd heal and of they are 60 90 180s CD!?
AST has so many to press, half of my time is drawing cards and sometimes I lose focus on mechanic bcuz of it and double weaving for full potency is making it even more stress.
SGE is too broken lol ← most of the healing is from this guy, not regen healer. In this patch, shield is absorb likely most of the damage so just 1 party regen and ogcd heal is quite enough for raid wide.
I just they made they reduced the cooldown on draw like give me more cards I wanna draw cards faster
Been waiting for this one, nice!
Imo the Cards were fine in Shadowbringers. Square had to go and try to reinvent the wheel 🤦♂️
How are you casting cards on people without clicking on them to target them? thats one of my big issues with AST and I lose damage by forgetting to tab back to the enemy.
Mouseover macros :D
@@FFXIVMomo Please say a controller solution as well. :D I'm a filthy PS4 user with controller as a WHM, and there is no way I'm going to play AST with that button-bloat. It's a nightmare.
@@viktoriapocze4412 You can soft target on controller to heal/give cards. You simply use the D pad to scroll to a character and hit your heal/card.
@@amelialoyselle2123 I know that and using it, but sometimes it's still a pain in the ass.
@@viktoriapocze4412 I made macros to target pt members 5-8 (since generally that's what you'll need) and put them on L2+ R2 shapes. Not optimal but it gets the job done if I have to AST.
What's the glamour in the thumbnail?
me as a whm main watching this... well at least yall got more ogcd so be happy :P
So as a novice Astro healer, should I generally avoid using Neutral Sect if I'm with a barrier healer?
Nope! They stack :D
nope. Neutral Sect's shield actually stacks with barrier healer's shield. And neutral Sect not only gives you the ability to apply shields, but also increase your healing power by 20%, which is very useful for raidwides
@@FFXIVMomo yep and its beautiful if a sch just spread a critlo
@@Zoeila And a PLD’s Divine Veil!
@@FFXIVMomo Thanks, good to know! That will really change how I use Neutral Sect from now on!
Sadly, I stopped playing when it became a regen healer instead of shields. How is it in reality though?
Call me weird, but personally I like the current Minor Arcana more then the old one. It's just more interesting then just "another damage option to ensure a three seal divination". I just find the instant OGCD Helios and another AoE damage skill that makes taking out trash mobs in big pulls more fun a bit more interesting then before.
Of course, I'm not a top tier raider as haven't even touched Savage raids yet (I want to, but nobody does the old high end content synced anymore and I'm not even at Shadowbringers yet) so my opinions might be different I just find it more fun personally and prefer it not be removed from the game/reverted... but if it did... eh... wouldn't be the biggest of deals.
For the normal cards themselves, it would be cool if they brought back Sleeve Draw to reduce the RNG of of things. I don't know how they would improve Astrodyne, I like the ability but most others don't seem to like it so I hope they improve it to satisfy everyone.
For Minor Arcana, making it into one button like most others mentioned would be a good start. It's already like that in the PvP modes so it shouldn't be too difficult to implement. For Lord and Lady of Crowns themselves, maybe add an AoE party damage boost on top of their normal effects to make it more appealing? High end raids in the end seem to be only about damage and max DPS and nothing else so that might help?
Or maybe add an AoE party damage resistance on top of the Lord and Lady's normal effects to add a bit of extra utility?
Not sure if these suggestions would help in the end, but I'm just trying to spitball ideas to help out as I don't know all of the finer details of high end raids like perfect burst windows and etc and even though I personally have been enjoying the current AST more then before... most others seem to dislke/hate it (as well as the new White Mage) so I'm just trying to offer suggestions.
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.
I love Synastry personally. The reality is that there are times when you'll need to GCD heal, and Synastry opens up more options. You can either get a stronger heal on one person or heal two people, which has situational uses. Like if I'm out of other tools and need to heal Living Dead then Synastry is a godsend. It definitely helps take the sting out needing to GCD heal in the first place, and the cooldown is short enough that you should have it up basically every time you'd need it. If they were going to reduce button bloat I think there are other places I'd rather they look at first
@@Rc3651 I hear this argument a lot - but I've yet to ever encounter a situation where GCD healing has been warranted over OGCD. I'm glad it's helping other people, though.
Go do Savage and ultimate and you will see the benefits of synestry
@@Sean-m6p I've done both.
They say that they want to remove Button bloat:
They make Minor Arcana have its own play button in PvE... The second most useless ‘Ability’...
While in PvP Draw turns into the Play Button for Minor Arcana making it a 1 Button Skill.
That makes absolutely no sense to me.
They definitely gonna nerf astro because of gigachad healing without any problems with mana. I just use my abilities and have double HPS over other heal jobs. Mana problems are non existent you just hit LD+Astrodyne and you have full mana and i dont talk about cards that restore mana too. Personal dps is kinda suck but buffs add a lot to rdps.
Been an ast main and this is my favorite iteration of the job. Of course im generally lucky so rng doesnt bother me as much
It's pretty fun when you get lucky yeah lol
I like lady of crowns and don't want it going away. I like actually having cards that do *something* different. Yeah yeah yeah damage bleh I don't care I care more about variety of cards
You’d have loved the cards in HW and SB:
Bole reduces damage taken
Balance was the damage card (that everyone fished for and inevitably we got this card system from their moaning)
Spire regened TP... basically Mana for Melee. Removed after SB.
Ewer regened MP
Spear boosted Crit Rate
Arrow boosted Skill and Spell Speed.
I can’t remember what the Minor Arcana’s were then... But I think they were a heal and damage card?
Also back then you could hold a card in reserve. So you drew a balance and wanted to use it later? You could spread it and save it.
Alternatively you could consume a card to buff your next card.
Ewer and Spire made the next card AoE and have a 50% Potency buff.
Arrow and Spear doubled the duration of the next card.
Balance and Bole gave a 200% potency increase to the next card.
In short. That was AST’s golden age... Now it’s just... Damage here, damage there...
Video out 11 minutes ago => intant like !
Am I the only one who is annoyed by the new sound effect of Malefic? It sounds like ice repeatedly shattering.
Ast is too damn complex and you dont even get rewarded much for it. They need to simplify the class imo.
I think my answer for AST is really simple.
Revert the job to either its ShB variation or its SB variation. Do not try to meet in the middle. You give us one, or you give us the other. Bring it back to |exactly| what it was in either one, no cut corners, no buttons gone, no buttons added (except for the new ones that do not affect the card system.) There is no way that the current state of AST survives, Astrodyne feels bad to use and the card system wants to always focus on boosting other people, no reason why I should be using it to boost someone else.
This is the first time I'm legitimately putting down AST after it was my main healer since HW because I abhor how it is in its current state. I loved HW and SB AST and it was my main healer always, but ShB was when I really was with it. I can't stand touching it at all in EW which feels so bad since it's been my baby since it was introduced.
I’d love to have the SB version back, but only with a couple of small, very minor RNG manipulation changes to make sure the people that moaned about Balance Fishing in SB don’t start again and set us on the road to ShB cards once more.
I loved when the cards were unique and such, meaning you could be way more creative with what you did instead of just... Card here, card there...
Spire would need to change though since TP hasn’t been a thing since SB. Maybe a direct hit buff.
Also going back to the SB version would make the Job Quests MAKE SENSE! The first AST Duty apparently still says that the Bole ‘Reduces damage taken’.
ShB really retconned the lore for the cards and was what forced me away from the job in anything outside of solo stuff.
Levelling AST now after maining Sage and the card system is very disappointing. I feel they can just take it out for all the variety each card has (or lack of it).
I need to vent. Astro feels so fucking bad this expansion. I can't fucking stand the cards. Not having sleeve draw is complete ass. Minor arcana just makes me feel bad whenever I draw lady, just throw that shit away because the heal is worthless. Astro potency is fucking garbage and the group buffs don't come close to making up for it. I have no clue what they were thinking when making some of these changes for the expansion. I think all 3 of the other healers are way more fun to play and I'm so disappointed that astro feels like garbage
Gravity is better on two at all levels
I do think Minor Arcana should give a chance for redraw too, which would automatically change it from lady to lord and vice versa
Please no. Either you attach this to normal redraw, in which case you can't differentiate between your Arcana and your normal card when you want to redraw. Or you give it its own button, on a job with an extreme button bloat problem already.
@@Paul-bs5wl unless redraw redraws both. You could draw a major arcana, redraw and not get what you want so you could use minor arcana that refreshes redraw. And it would be good especially if you don't lose the second clarifying draw if you get a good minor arcana instantly. So you could use lord and then fish for a good seal by using the refreshed redraw. Honestly it would be pretty confusing and bad for beginners but I would love that micromanaging. And this would be a bandaid change until they'd rework / revert the whole system btw
@@Paul-bs5wl
With so many new skills being merged into 1 button, why couldn't minor arcana redraw be the same as the minor arcana draw button? It's not like you ever hold onto lady/lord for the whole cooldown duration anyway.
And yes, this WOULD essentially turn Minor Arcana into "Lord" Arcana, and I don't see a problem with that. They can always buff Lady to where it's more of an appealing card option if they want to see it used more, maybe heals AND shields.
Minor arcana had to be changed otherwise astrodyne would be useless since you would have a constant 12% on every samurai or BLM every time cause who cares about healer self buffs for mp or 5% more dmg and healing.
This is also still better than WHM since assize is tied to your damage and holding it hurts you and you got it wrong because it’s a oGCD, and 59 seconds of being able to hold assize for extra burst healing with horoscope or earthly star. Old minor arcana will never come back with current astrodyne.
Also you said it was the least mobile healer???? Light speed and the fact it was the OG 1.5 second caster made it the most mobile, scholar now gets to weave aetherflow between broil so it has decent mobility now especially with expedient, and sage has Icarus. WHM is still locked but not as bad as before, sure lilies are instacast but it’s still locked to GCD.
Yeah I’m the guy with the college essay you skimmed on stream a few weeks back but you miss a lot of points that show lack of balance between the classes
Edit: you did the math on CI wrong, 200% is 3x, it’s not a 400 potency shield, it’s a 600 potency shield AND a 200 potency heal that can crit where DB does not, you even read it on the last vid. CI is = 800 potency which is now after lv85 a Cure 2/benefic 2 potency that can crit vs DB which is a 500 potency shield that = Cure 1/ benefic 1 that cannot crit and has 1/2 the duration per charge.
most of this is wrong lol
it's true minor had to be changed, but he said it's less interesting and just plain button bloat compared to old minor arcana. this doesn't necessarily means he think old minor should be reinstated lol and he most certainly did not say it should come back as is
he already addressed lightspeed in the video. you can only pray a movement section lines up with your burst windows, you can't use it whenever you want. so ast has no flexible movement tech other than dot, swiftcast and slidecast. every healer has that and more
your math on ci is plain wrong lol. a 200% shield is a 200% (2x) shield, otherwise adlo would be a 2.8x shield, which means a 300pot heal + 840pot shield, which is obviously wrong...
I’m sorry but EW Minor Arcana is 100% more fun than ShB’s extended draw. At least we get a fun dps/heal rng mechanism here, and while it isn’t ideal for optimisation, it’s nice for prog. Also, please don’t forget AST has always been an rng based job, so stripping it off the job due to “optimisation” just deeply saddens me. If people are annoyed by its rng nature, they shouldn’t play the job to begin with.
We've actually had this version of Minor Arcana back in Stormblood. Lord and Lady did pretty much the same things as now, except they were single target.
I agree
@@slainmaster1997 that was slightly different since you had to sac a card
I seems to me that the bigger problem discussed is that AST's burst is so convoluted and reliant on Lightspeed weaving that it's extremely difficult to execute and forces you to sacrifice your healer duty to an extreme degree to do it. It's a similar problem to how GNB can't move bosses properly when it's doing its burst, the design of the job when played properly begins to conflict with its primary function. Also AST previously had RNG, but now they've just taken away most of the tools we had to deal with it in ShB or even SB.
@@Zoeila That is true, but I was referring to the actual effects of Lord and Lady. Now that you mention it, this is the first time Minor Arcana is split from interacting with your drawn cards and just functions on it's own.
EW AST = SB SMN
Too much bloat for few benefits.