FASA Games, Inc.

I'm a bit confuse.

Everything Life Sight does, I thought Astral Sight already did it.

Astral Sight can give you state of the pattern. Life sight can give you state of health. The most important is that with astral sight you need to spot astral, then imprints and then decide to lookup patterns. And you need good result to see through walls. No such thing with lifesight which is awesome for targeting spells

In 4ED you cannot see thru other objects with Astral Sight.

As deseases/poisons mostly do their "work" rather quickly they do not alter someones pattern, so only Physician skill or Lifesight will tell you something is wrong.

Seriously you can't see through objects with AS in 4ed? Whaaaaaaat

<homerule approaching>

Effective X-ray vision at first circle is a little too powerful. Maybe more than a little - a lot too powerful. It was one talent which could do too many things. The general updates to astral space and astral sight fixed this issue and increased the value of another talent which at times struggled for attention, as the OP indicates.

In that case you are right. Maybe with some knack you could be able to use it through solid objects

Of course, Shadowrun had rampant astral projection, which brought its own set of issues.

Not much need to see through a wall when you can astrally project and walk through it to see what's on the other side.

We (playing a heavy mixture of ED1 and ED2) always more or less house ruled, that you COULD do with Astral Sight pretty much what the Divine Aura spell or/and Life Sight could do, it just took way longer and much more effort.
Thematicaly it makes sense to me being able to percieve emotions or sickness/state of health of a person when studying their pattern.

Balancing wise I will probably houserule the oldstyle "View-through-non-true-magic-patterns" anyways since it seldom comes into play in my experience. IIRC you couldn't leer through true patterns. So Kaer walls surely have true patterns, as does natural rock. In fact, it's probably not that unusual when buildings have true patterns, since all it takes afair is naming the building (which in a fantasy setting like ED is much more common than in real life). No peeking inside Loaks Legacy or the Restless Troll for example.