Final Fantasy 14 excels at designing fun and unique classes in the astral ojen is no exception.
Astro Level 90 Guide – Astrologian FFXIV – Final Fantasy 14 Endwalker
It is a fast paced actions heavy healer that offers challenging but rewarding gameplay. There’s a lot to cover here, so get comfy and let’s get into it like all healers in game Astro has lots of opportunities to weave in skills in between their GCDs. Most of their healing toolkit exists as OG CDs and their card system is entirely off the global cooldown.
With that in mind, one of the keys to excelling with this class is comfort. So before we jump into talking about our skills, let’s take a moment to talk about our setup. By the way, if terms like OG CD and weaving are confusing, I’ll link a video explaining them in the description as well as in an info box up in the corner.
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Those principles are very important to improving as a healer or any class, so make sure to check that out. We’ll be referencing them quite a bit. So this is my HUD, it looks a little strange, but I have things placed very intentionally across the screen. Now I personally play with mouse and keyboard and use keyboard shortcuts for all of my actions.
Whichever method you use to play is totally viable. Whether it’s controller clicking with the mouse using an MMO mouse or peripherals like the Tortorice however you choose to play is fine as long as it’s comfortable for you. With your chosen option. The first thing we need is visibility. I have my Arcana gauge where you see your cards just to the left of center near my character all around that I have my major cooldowns that I need to keep an eye on.
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Things like earthly star and divination need to be used on cooldown, so I need to be able to see when they are becoming available. I also have resources like neutral sector over there. I don’t necessarily use this as soon as it comes off of cooldown, but I do need to look over at a glance and see if it’s ready, especially in a prog setting. I also have Lightspeed Astra dine essential dignity and Minor Arcana over there.
All of these are tools that I want to be able to see without taking my eye off of the enemy during the fight. There are some notable things missing from the side panel, celestial opposition horoscope and collective unconscious or on my lower hotbars.
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This is more of a personal preference for me, most of my time is spent writing and there are specific points in fights where I am using these abilities and know that they will be off cooldown when I need them. That being said, there’s no reason you can’t have these in a more visible location. Whatever you need to make sure you’re using the resources you have as they are available is going to be the best way to set it up.
Lastly, all of my GCDs are on my lower left hotbar. These are not things that I need to keep an eye on. They are tools that are always available. I also have everything hotkeys, so I’m not searching for them at any point. The next thing we need is ease of access. We mentioned that Astro is a very fast paced class.
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It has lots of single and double weaving opportunities throughout the course of a fight. And you should take advantage of these whenever possible. For instance, combust, which is the Astra logins damage over time spell is an instant cast GCD. This means that as soon as we use it, the global cooldown is active and we can’t use another GCD until it resets. This is a very common double weave window that we can take advantage of every single time as it happens combusts damage over time lasts 30 seconds.
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Coincidentally, our card draw has a 32nd cooldown and is an instant cast Oh GCD ability. So immediately after using combust, we can then draw a card in that window of time, you can in theory, then play that card within the same weave window. This is however very difficult. I personally can’t process that information quite that quickly without delaying my GCD. So let’s look at a different option. celestial intersection is another OGC ability that applies a heel and shield to the target and happens to also have a 32nd cooldown.
Let’s put all this together now. Every 30 seconds we can combust draw a card, and cast celestial intersection on our tank all without delaying our next GCD This is a simple but very important example of the weaving you’ll do on Astro.
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Your cards need to be drawn on cooldown to get the most use out of them throughout a fight and topping off and mitigating damage to the tank every 30 seconds will always help to make things run smoothly. This is why it’s important to have these skills laid out in an easy to access Enter, you should be doing a pattern like this every 30 seconds without fail barring any downtime in the fight, so you want to make it easy on yourself.
My setup for this is as follows. I have combust on the two key, my hands live on WASD. So it’s right there well within reach. card draw for me is shift cue, card play is shift E and celestial intersection is ALT E, it might sound strange, but that is all very comfortable for my hand, going from pressing to to shift Q to ALT E has a smooth rhythm for me, I don’t feel awkward going from one to the next.
And for a pattern that I’ll be repeating 20 or more times in a fight. This is super important. This thought process can be applied to the rest of our skills as well. Most of Astros healing is done using OECD tools, therefore, it is important to be able to weave them comfortably. I have horoscope on ultra tilt and celestial opposition on Alt Q. These are very easy combinations for my hand.
And just as importantly, I’m not taking my hand away from the left side of the keyboard for any of this, I can stay at my home base of WASD the entire time, all while having my important skills within reach. This is the logic we want to apply to however we play. If you’re using a controller, the fewer button presses you need to access a skill repeatedly the better. If you’re going to be clicking your skills, make sure they’re within a short distance of wherever you typically keep your mouse.
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Additionally, take some time to tool around with your sensitivity settings. If you’re going to be clicking a lot, accuracy is very important. I like to run on a very high sensitivity so that I’m moving my mouse as little as possible.
But that doesn’t work for everyone again, and I can’t stress this enough. whatever is most comfortable for you is going to lead to the most efficient setup. There is not one right way to set your skills and your HUD customize it to your needs.
The 123 damage rotation of healing is really a 111 rotation. Yes, everyone memes on white mages for being glare mages but the reality is that all of the healers will live around their single target dps tools and fights and then use their healing tools only as necessary for astral ojen That’s malefic or gravity if you’re in a dungeon on paper.
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This is simple enough your primary source of damage comes from your single target dps spell. The complexity comes from being consistent with this throughout different mechanics and movement. Additionally, you need to make sure that when you’re healing, you’re not interrupting your GCD unless absolutely necessary.
Remember, Final Fantasy 14 is designed around all classes doing damage. One of the best things to work on first is getting consistent with your damage up time while still healing the party. Outside of malefic, astral ojen does come with multiple other very important damage sources. combust, as we mentioned previously, is our damage over time ability. It is an instant cast GCD that lasts 30 seconds on the enemy target.
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This should always be a window for you to at the very least draw a card. This is going to serve as a way mark. Think of it as an additional way to keep an eye on your abilities. If we know that every time we use combust We also draw a card and use the less fuel intersection if you can.
Then we know that when combust falls off an enemy our car drawl is off of cooldown, so by keeping an eye on the combust timer, we’re actually keeping an eye on three different cooldowns we need to be managing all while looking within a single location. Simplifying what we have to manage is key when we are looking to add structure and structure is what we need to improve our gameplay.
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Lightspeed is one of our greatest tools as it allows you to instant cast all of your GCDs for its duration. It’s important to note that this isn’t intended to be used as a panic button for healing. It is instead intended to be used for your busier weave windows around your opener and your uses of Astra dine. Since all of your GCDs will now be instant cast. You can now double weave after every single use.
You’ll see the most use of it during your opener, which while busy is a lot of fun when successfully executed. We’ll go into detail about that opener later. In the middle of the fight, we’ll use it for our Astrodome Windows after we have drawn our last card during our combust we can then use malefic into Lightspeed immediately into malefic.
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Play Astra dine and another malefic without interrupting our GCD at all. Part of the complexity of astral Motion comes with fulfilling your role as a healer and support class, while also staying consistent with your damage. The goal is to never stop rolling your GCD throughout the entire fight.
And Lightspeed is one of our number one skills for doing this. Divination will serve as our main party buff during fights. It sits on a 100 and 22nd cooldown and one of your highest priorities will be using it as soon as it’s available in order to line up with everyone else’s buffer windows.
Final Fantasy 14 operates primarily within 60 and 100 and 22nd cooldown windows in short, every minute, one or more of your party members will be throwing out a strong attack or party buff, with the more powerful versions typically available at two minutes. So with that in mind, it is crucial to make sure we’re giving out that party wide 6% damage buff in line with everything else.
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The opener for Astro is complex, but when you get it down, you’ll feel like a professional esports player. Let’s break this down one skill at a time and then I’ll demonstrate. The first thing is to draw your first card as soon as the instance loads. The goal ultimately is to distribute three cards and use both Astra dine and divination during the opening seconds of the fight.
To accomplish this, we need to draw a card early enough that card draw is ready by the time the encounter begins. The rest of the opener will begin around five seconds back on the countdown. A quick preface before moving forward. This is the general idea for the opener, you can make certain tweaks depending on which encounter you’re going into.
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So at five seconds back, we will place our earthly star in the center of the arena. Ideally, this will go off immediately after the first raid wide or tank buster of the encounter healing it without you using any additional resources. At three seconds back use whatever the current tincture is at one and a half seconds back will begin casting malefic with this timing it will go off right at the beginning of the encounter.
Now things will get very busy, including our pre pool malefic the order is as follows malefic LiteSpeed combust, play draw malefic play draw malefic play divination malefic Minor Arcana Astra dine malefic. There’s a lot going on here you’re talking about 17 actions in about 17 seconds, and that’s assuming the opener goes perfectly.
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Remember the goal with Astra dine is to get at least two unique seals. So if you draw a duplicate, you’ll need to redraw and that will push your actions down the line. If that happens though, it’s all good. Things getting shifted in the opener is no cause for panic or worry. The only thing that will be majorly impacted will be your Astra Dine, which is just a personal buff. No matter how your card draws play out.
Your divination can still land in the same spot every single time and this is the priority. Secondly, don’t sweat getting all three seals for Astra dine if it happens wonderful, but if it doesn’t, the damage boost for all three seals is not going to make or break the encounter. The mana regen and haste are higher priority and for those you only need two out of the three seals.
The best advice I can offer for the opener is to just practice it repeatedly. It’s a lot of information to process, but once you have it down, it just becomes muscle memory. So spend some time with a training dummy to begin getting your hands used to it.
It’ll happen with time. And again, like we talked about before. The key to this opener is your own personal comfort. Take your time to set up your HUD and your key binds in a way that is easy for you to maneuver.
Your biggest assets for healing as an Astra Legion all exist off the global cooldown and half of them become exponentially more effective when planned out properly. Earthly star is on a 62nd cooldown. After placing it it will detonate after 20 seconds unless you choose to detonate early.
This is one of your best tools for dealing with raid wide attacks. Most encounters and Final Fantasy 14 will begin with some kind of raid wide party damage. If you place your star at the beginning of the match at around five seconds back from the countdown like we talked about in the opener, it will detonate and heal the party immediately following the party wide attack. From this point on, you’ll want to just use it on cooldown outside of a few optimizations and fights which you can learn over time.
It’s worth noting that this is also a great source of damage for you throughout the fight. So getting as many stars down as possible is a great goal to strive towards. Essential dignity is a very useful, quick and powerful heal. It is great for healing a tank back up after a big Buster or if the tank uses an invulnerability that reduces their HP to one.
Don’t be afraid to use it on other members of the party to if someone accidentally strays into damage, it’s a great way to get them back to a comfortable space without using a GCD. to top them off. You have two stacks of essential dignity each on a 42nd cooldown, so don’t be afraid to use this liberally.
Next we have horoscope This is a 200 potency heal on its own. That will trigger a second time in 10 seconds unless you prime it with a Helios or aspected Helios. At that point it becomes a 32nd delay and a 400 potency follow up heel. This is a great skill, but it benefits most from a lot of forethought. Something to consider with this skill is when it’s appropriate to prime it and when it’s worth just using an unprimed diversion in conjunction with another skill.
Remember, to prime it you need to use a Helios or aspected Helios costing us a malefic. While it’s tempting to get the extra healing from using a Helios and primed horoscope, it may not be necessary. This is a skill to test out in different scenarios after certain hits. All you may need is a horoscope with a celestial opposition to cover the damage, the less we can use our GCDs for healing the better. Celestial opposition is next. And this one’s pretty straightforward.
This is a 200 potency heal for the party with an additional region of 100 potency over 15 seconds. This should be a pretty standard go to for raid wide damage, especially as people begin to get better and better gear it’s likely that all you’ll need is this and perhaps a horoscope to cover most hits in a fight. Now on to collective unconscious. This skill offers 10% damage mitigation for anyone standing in the bubble as well as a 100 potency region for 15 seconds.
There’s a few things to talk about here. Firstly, the mitigation without getting outside of my depth here. Final Fantasy 14 operates on server tics, you’ll notice that when you use collective unconscious that the mitigation effects stays up for a couple seconds until the next server tick happens. Even if you move right away.
This is very important. It means that we can weave in this ability in between malefics to shield our allies, but we don’t need to delay our next GCD if we time it correctly. Secondly, it’s easy to forget that this skill comes with a region effect as well. It’s tempting to follow up a party wide hit with healing but as long as the damage isn’t too substantial, the region will likely top everyone off in addition to anything your co healer is doing so there won’t always be a need to use additional resources.
We’ll briefly touch on exultation This is an incredible skill and its uses very straightforward is designed for tank busters when the enemy begins casting one use exultation on the tank, it’ll mitigate the damage and restore a portion of their health after eight seconds.
The big advice here is to not panic and cancel your GCD when you see a tank buster being cast, they typically have very long cast times giving you plenty of time to finish your current cast, weave in exultation and then resume your malefics Lastly, we have our capstone skill Macro Cosmos. This is an amazing ability, albeit one that comes with a lengthy cooldown. This is designed to heal massive damage across the entire party without you needing to be at the center of everyone.
Simply use it before the damage comes out. And then you can either wait for the effect to expire at 15 seconds or you can trigger it manually. This is particularly useful and encounters with back to back big hits of damage or in instances where you are forced away from the party.
There’s a lot to unpack when it comes to astral origin and healing in general. We didn’t discuss any of our GCD healing abilities in detail. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t use them particularly in a progression setting. It’s very important to use them if it means keeping the party alive to see the next mechanic skills like synastry are great in niche situations as a last resort to top off the tank.
But always remember that healers are designed in Final Fantasy 14 to do damage unless you have to heal the party. The longer a fight goes on, the more difficult it becomes for everyone involved. your damage output is incredibly important, which is why it’s so crucial to optimize it as best as you can.
Anytime we can use our OECD resources to heal the party up, this is the way to go. The information doesn’t stop here either. This is meant to be a general starter’s guide for astral ojen There are lots of things to learn about when it comes to optimizing your healing and damage as well as working with your co healer. Further, the approach to dungeons will be vastly different than raids or trials. And within each category, there’s unique things for each encounter to consider.
Don’t let it overwhelm you. Think of it as a bunch of different opportunities to learn. Astro can be stressful and a lot to manage, but it will always be rewarding, exciting and exhilarating to play. And a quick reminder, take your time. There’s no pressure to learn this class as quickly as possible. go at a pace that works for you. I hope this guide helps you get started and can be a resource moving forward.
Make sure to like the video and subscribe to the channel for more guides in the future and drop a comment down below if there are still questions. Until next time. I’ll see you out there.
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