I’ve finally leveled Astrologian to 90, and it has been quite a ride. I first picked up the job during my campaign to level all jobs to 50, in order to get rid of all the sub-50 junk in my armoury chest, and I hated it. It was so busy and confusing with all the cards, and I felt like I didn’t quite have enough abilities in my toolkit. I happily set it aside when I got it to 50, then picked it up again a while later as a break from Black Mage.
After I picked it back up, I gradually got more comfortable with AST. It takes a while to get there, but it eventually has a healing ability suite mostly analogous to White Mage, the main difference being that it doesn’t have anything like Lilies and it relies more heavily on regeneration and delayed heals. Coming in off Sage, a very proactive healer, I found this hard to get used to, but I eventually got pretty conversant with it. I do find I have to use a larger fraction of my abilities to keep the party alive on Astrologian than on White Mage or Sage, but it’s manageable. And some of the abilities are just fun — I’d love to steal Earthly Star onto other jobs in particular.
The one place where I still really fall down on this job, though, is the cards. I can handle the randomness and I can mostly handle distributing cards to players, but the problem comes when I’m resolving mechanics or healing someone during a burst window. At that point, I often forget to, or outright cannot, hand out cards on time. I might get more used to it over time, but I think it just makes Astrologian have too many different things to do for my taste. I can at least heal competently with it, and when someone else is on that job I can understand what’s going on when they’re slow off the mark with a heal or seem to be stumbling over their ability suite. But I’ll reluctantly say that while I like AST’s healing abilities and overall theme, the job as a whole is like Dragoon: cool but not for me.