#all time sound effects gaaaaaaame

[witchblade]

is that the best you’ve goueu🤮eruurughg🤮hhghhhhh🤮🤮🤮

[elizabethrobertajones]

#i have so many thoughts about how I'd conceptually redesign AST from the ground up and think it's such a wasted storytelling space#but this one thing did tickle me because it sort of looped around and answered itself#........ kinda like someone casting a timey wimey spell

Actually, I may as well just type stuff out and try and get this coherent while I'm thinking about it...

So I think the biggest missed opportunity, after literally just reblogging a post about how WHM changes in ShB, is all the stuff we don't get with AST, and most of it is just aesthetic and spell name based stuff that could easily cover existing abilities with a less one-note job (as much as the aesthetic does, of course, fuck severely).

So FIRST of all, even though we learn everything from a Sharlayan, we spend a lot more time IN Ishgard, including unavoidable MSQ interactions with Ishgardian astrologians in ARR. And we don't have a single ability we're allowed to pick up about using the Dragonstar to guide us in an unholy hybrid of the 2 arts that would SUPER get us murdered by Sharlayan assassins?? The potential to have some sort of foretelling based on that and then upgrade the spell at points by which in the MSQ we'd now have VERY different feelings about it including up to EW to get a final for now upgrade in the ability... oooughhhhh...... It could end up using Middy from Omega raid effects just as starters you know?

And then in SB we continue dogmatically learning ONLY Sharlayan astrology, STILL, while spending time learning about geomancy? It would be so fun to use THIS star, Etheirys, in our readings, and have a funny 4 ways elemental spell with idk Swallow's Compass geomancers bell sound effect to annoy a raid with >:)

And again once we're in the First or travelling beyond the bounds of the planet in EW, a spell based on the cosmological location of our home world would absolutely FUCk. Imagine the upgrade when you're assumed to be in the First, where like WHM maybe it becomes light-poisoned.

Or levelling up AST on the Moon and getting a secondary effect to a geomantic ability which adds a rotation of the moon into the spell effect because now you've added that to it and given it a little boost to potency as a result of having planted your feet on the moon and added a geomantic understanding of it to your repertoire XD

The comfort of having something based on home would also be such a The Blackest Night type emotional kick in the feels every time you use an ability named and visually based on Etheirys once you're as far as Elpis or Ultima Thule.

Thinking of which, my final rage is that the Endsinger literally throws planets at us, demonstrating the exact skillset ASTs use of tapping the aetherical signature of distant planets and stars, but amped up to 9000. The fact we can't learn something similar, or get a level 90 ability called like Endsong (again, see: Shadowbringer... *shakes fist at DRK even though once I swap jobs to it from AST it becomes a favourite :P) where we can draw a spell from Ultima Thule itself. It could even be a Dynamis spell - it's not like we don't use it in DRK and DNC pretty blatantly as at least a secondary power source to our usual aether-based spells. Imagine how cool it would be to smite people with a blast of entropy or heal your friends with raw hope? Like we even have the mysterious sunrise in the lying dying with Zenos scene vs the haggard planetary system and melting stars everywhere in UT to draw on.

*rattles the bars of my cage* Let me plaaaaaay with the life experiences we accumulate over the gaaaaaaame

[I am escorted from Sharlayan and my entry papers torn up]

Not a familiar constellation or star in sight. Frog stared at the strange spattering of stars and couldn't feel a whisper of the connection her years of training as an Astrologian had gifted her.

Then she focussed and spoke the familiar words of spells that called out to the patrons of the stars who weren't present, whose associated stars were not even in the sky. And the warmth of the celestial blessing flooded her; the gaze she felt as she drew intercession down to heal answered in the very sigils of gods who weren't even born yet.

"Maybe it's the distant connection through the Crystal Tower," she mused, still dissatisfied and confused, but with no clue where to look next.

(A malm away in  Anagnorisis, Charmion shivered and blinked, and looked around at her coworkers, seeing they'd startled too. "Did you just feel Azem channel a tiny bit of aether from you too? I wonder what that was for! Maybe the familiar is still here and she needed some more?"

They shrugged about it as Weird Azem Things, the least of which had happened that afternoon, and went back to their work)

...

Frog still trying to understand how Astrologian worked out in Elpis before Myths of the Realm answered some very pressing questions and took the mystic woo out of AST's prayer-based spells.

"Job" for FFXIV Vanilla Gpose Challenge... My favourite thing you can do in just vanilla gpose is playing with all the spells and abilities, watching them frame by frame and appreciating details that whoosh by in combat.

.... yeah that's her current AST glam; if we're not using mods I'm not buying a half dozen pots of the expensive dark blue dye to recreate her levelling gear, we're errrrrrrrrr doing a meta commentary on the limitations of vanilla gpose for storytelling. Or time is fake in Elpis. :P