What do you want to see on Astrologian?

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Originally Posted by Nadirah

I dont like stance dancing either.

Probably try astro, if only because I prefer active buff/heal role. If I wanted to heal/DPS I'll go play my Discipline priest.

If I'm not doing anything, pull more.

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Seems like the astrologian stances are kind of a pick one and stick with it the whole battle thing and they will still be using cleric stance the same as every other healer on top of that

Already feel like i know a ton about astrologian but something i would like to see is the stances changing effects of attack spells too

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Originally Posted by Blueyes

I'm at the other end of the spectrum. I play Scholar and absolutely love their capability to deal damage while keeping the group alive. Personally I hope Astrologian won't have comparably weak damage capabilities with the only thing to make up for the difference being an RNG dependent buff. When Scholar can do everything it does while keeping a consistent 30% skill or spell speed buff on the whole party while Astologian applies a 25% speed buff to a single party member once in a blue moon, I just have to wonder. I'm mostly just concerned about how they plan to keep the job balanced around the randomness of their buffs.

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I am hoping that the haste from astrologian is going to work differently than just a flat % increase in skill/spell speed like selenes buffs. However, i am not sur ehow this could be implimented without a game balance issue O.o

And back to the OP. I am hoping we get a genuine contender for a raid healer from ast. I have been using sch since 2.0, and would like to see ast being able to take the place on a raid team comfortably. So what i want to see is the card buffs being able to contribute to the teams performance enough to warrent an ast in the party, as well as the buffs not being held completely hostage to rng. If the ast dps is insignificant compared to the other healers (not to sure if this is the case or not, remember reading that the people who had hands on at france with ast mained dps classes and not healers, so this low dps comparision may need to be taken with a grain of salt), then the buffs and dubuffs the ast brings to a raid need to be fairly significant to compensate. And finally, we need to see potencies etc for the healing spells in both sects. We also need to see if shield sect (cant remember the proper name) has access to any healing abilities or not, or if it just can create shields. We also need to see if the shields are akin to sch, where there is a shield + healing component, or just shield.

But more than anything, i want to see ast being a very strong buffer/healer class.

According to some lucky fella from Reddit who went to the Nantes Event, AST's Haste is fundamentally different from Skill/Spell speed increase.

It's the buff that actually reduces your Cooldown on skills by 20% (300 Sec Cooldown *0.8 = 240 Sec Cooldown), but the benefit is not retroactive, meaning if your skill is already on cooldown and you receive the buff, that particular skill will not benefit from it.

I'm personally not looking forward in a raid scenario for the entire group waiting on the AST to draw this particular card before starting the fight :(.

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Originally Posted by Cynfael

What people usually expect is for healers not to stand around doing nothing, which is often what happens when they don't help DPS. Most content in the game has a very low healing requirement.

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Not in my experience. You don't get to decide if there is a low healing requirement. Your tank and DPS configuration decides that. The powercreep from stronger gear makes the goalposts move over time.

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Originally Posted by Cynfael

If what the devs said earlier on holds true, Aero III and Stone III will be WHM Job skills (supposedly no class skills were going to be added).

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The base-class is where the skills come from at level-up. The Job has very specific changes to stats that are available at specific levels, and with that comes the Job-skills at the expense of most of the cross-class capability. You can cross-class 5 skills in a Job, but only specific class skills, not Job skills (otherwise everyone would have Holy.)

So whatever we get at level 51-60 would have to be added to the base class, and whatever is job-specific would be added via whatever convoluted quest that is only unlocked at that level. If they aren't class skills, then they won't be cross-class able either.

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Originally Posted by Cynfael

Whenever players start talking about how they don't like the idea of healers DPSing, WHMs in particular, it's funny to me since the CNJ storyline was very clear on how the kind of magic they use has the potential for both healing and destruction and that mastery of all aspects was necessary to be successful. Then we have the ancient WHMs in this same setting who waged a War of the Magi with their brand of white magic.

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Go back to V1.0 before they took away half the skills. The old version of the lore the Conjurer was a master over all 6 elements. The current version... well 3(Wind, Earth, and Water.) THM got the other three (Thunder, Fire, and Ice)

The Conjurer's magic and the White Mage's magic come from two different sources. The fact that the Job only gives us the destructive Holy as a DPS, and then gives us Benediction as it's opposite. The Black mage has Freeze and Flare (which by all accounts are the long casts like Holy.)

If you go look at the skill list, what SE really did was they split Conjurer in half and the other half wound up in Thaumaturge. The skills that Thaumaturge had wound up in Arcanist/Summoner. So I'm expecting Astrologian to pick up the skills that didn't end up on Arcanist.

If we were still playing the V1.0 game, the Conjurer had cure I, II, III and Raise/Reraise. If we were still playing the Version 1.0 game, there was an elemental strength/weakness consideration... which all but doesn't exist in the current game. So for all intents all the magic that both the CNJ/WHM and THM/BLM have behave like unaspected damage. Arcanist's DPS (and thus SMN and SCH) are all DoT's save for Ruin.

This is where things go in completely different directions. Other than Psysick/Resurrect, the Arcanist can only cross-class CNJ skills... of which half the skills that overlap with it's own. All their SCH Job skills are healing skills, so you end up cross-classing CNJ's DPS skills if you need more DoT's.

So when we are using the Lore as an excuse to say what a class/job is or isn't supposed to do, we completely overlook that the developers kept a lot of the lore intact, but originally had different intents for our caster classes. The War of the Magi = WHM, elemental magic... which in V1 we never even got to, save for the fact that the CNJ had all the elemental magic. The Lore in the current version talks about the CNJ and the WHM as two different kinds of magic.

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Originally Posted by Cynfael

And finally, Cleric Stance doesn't make anyone a crappy healer unless you don't turn it off. It actually makes for great healers and strong supporting DPS. Power creep isn't necessary for this to happen; sufficient player skill is enough.

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Fixed.

The point I make in most threads about healers shouldn't be DPS'ing is because they see CS and go "hey look I can holy spam and not heal the party" when that just makes them a crappy player after 5 seconds. The developers intent (yes I know YOU are tired of hearing this) has defined roles. If you step outside those roles, you are taking ownership of a situation. When everyone steps outside their roles, you get Tanks that don't tank, healers that don't heal, and DPS that are healing themselves. Basically the crappy state that every MMORPG devolves into where everyone wants to DPS and nobody wants to do the mechanics because they take too long.

If someone is comfortable DPS'ing because the have static parties that they work well with, voice chat and all that, then there is no reason to even argue for that side. It works for you.

But every PUG is unique. They generally range from super-crappy-stumbles-through-content to parties that work-just-barely-enough-together. I can find a gold mine to complain about, but I don't... I just pick the worst stuff that I keep seeing over and over and go "This is stupid, quit being stupid."

The two nitpicks I find the most are when healers forgo healing so they can DPS... like their DPS is going to matter when they let the DPS die. And Healers who spam heals when no heals are needed. I expect PUG's to make a lot of mistakes, and I'm not going to expect a perfect run every time, but these two points tell me the player either doesn't want to be a healer, or does't care/doesn't know.

Like it really does feel like sometimes we are reading from the same page, but we're arguing over semantics because our experiences do not align.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

I don't care much for the healer DPS. Going by FF lore, the only DPS spell the WHM/Healer is supposed to have is Holy which is supposed to be the equivalent of casting "long cast" Ultima, Flood, Quake(Stone III,) Tornado (Aero 3), Meteor, or Gravity 3. If you note, both Stone and Aero are also part of the Conjurer spell list, while Holy is WHM-exclusive. So it may seem strange if CNJ gets Stone III and Aero III and they do the same damage as Holy.

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Dia is a damaging skill and is part of WHM's spells as well :p
Not in FFxiv though

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

So whatever we get at level 51-60 would have to be added to the base class, and whatever is job-specific would be added via whatever convoluted quest that is only unlocked at that level. If they aren't class skills, then they won't be cross-class able either.

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It has been said that all of the new skills would be from quest, and job only. No new class skills should come in this expansion, due to SE's will to reduce classes' importance over time.

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Originally Posted by DreamWeaver

According to some lucky fella from Reddit who went to the Nantes Event, AST's Haste is fundamentally different from Skill/Spell speed increase.

It's the buff that actually reduces your Cooldown on skills by 20% (300 Sec Cooldown *0.8 = 240 Sec Cooldown), but the benefit is not retroactive, meaning if your skill is already on cooldown and you receive the buff, that particular skill will not benefit from it.

I'm personally not looking forward in a raid scenario for the entire group waiting on the AST to draw this particular card before starting the fight :(.

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Wow i missed this info on reddit, thanks for sharing. This is good news (for me at least), but i can see what you mean about everyone wanting this up befor ethe fight starts in raids to push progression. Imagine standing there waiting for the ast to Royal Road this.

Not much input for a DPSing healer but if they can do it, good. If they can't and let me die, I'll punish them by pulling a lot less.

What I want to see from an AST is a glamour for the cards. Some kind of frame to add to them, like maybe a Golden Frame or Silver Frame or those blue glowing weapon thingies as frames. Hey, maybe new artworks as more patches come in?

Or.... you know... Maybe an art competition to get some player arts to be featured in cards glamour?

In terms of combat, I'll wait and see for another 3 weeks.

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Originally Posted by DreamWeaver

According to some lucky fella from Reddit who went to the Nantes Event, AST's Haste is fundamentally different from Skill/Spell speed increase.

It's the buff that actually reduces your Cooldown on skills by 20% (300 Sec Cooldown *0.8 = 240 Sec Cooldown), but the benefit is not retroactive, meaning if your skill is already on cooldown and you receive the buff, that particular skill will not benefit from it.

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There are actually two different cards, one which does as you describe, but then there is another with a 10%(25%) speed buff. (Can read more here and here.) I do have to wonder if the buffs from Selene will have their percentages adjusted in light of how skill and spell speed will work in 3.0, but in the meantime I'll assume they will be left unchanged.

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Originally Posted by Blueyes

There are actually two different cards, one which does as you describe, but then there is another with a 10%(25%) speed buff. (Can read more here and here.) I do have to wonder if the buffs from Selene will have their percentages adjusted in light of how skill and spell speed will work in 3.0, but in the meantime I'll assume they will be left unchanged.

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I have the same suspicions about selenes buffs being changed. I imagine its going to happen one of 2 ways: the change in skill/spell speed is going to be significant enough to alter the damage output of classes that stack these stats as to warrant selens buffs being nerfed OR the changes to skill/spell speed is going to be insignifiant in the grand scheme of things and selene will stay the same. Magic christmas land wants buffs to skill/spell speed to be significant and selene unchanged.

>< I just am dying to know some nitty mechanical questions around how AST will work, and I don't see myself getting that info until I can test it myself. At the moment my curiosity revolves around the functionality of Synastry.

My first thought was 'oh, bacon of light' but then I saw it only lasts 20 seconds, and is not a static buff (which I like). And then I found myself wondering.... If I cast Synastry on someone and then move out of normal healing range, do they still receive healing from the buff? Secondly is the interaction of hot/shield mechanics from AST spells. Does the Synastry target receive the buff component of these spells? If not, then when in Diurnal sect, will someone's regen effects still heal the Synastry target for half of every tick but not appear as a separate regen buff? If so then Synastry is potentially less useful in Nocturnal Sect, since the shield might not carry over but the hots might.

I most want AST to be completely viable in general, and super amazing in the right hands. I like an 'easy to learn hard to master' type of thing. I like variety in my healers. I played every healer in wow and loved how each one FELT completely different, and had it's own rules for functioning at the highest level of play but they all were able to do their job. Even when one was bemoaned as being underpowered or overpowered, a good player in the 'worse' class could outperform a bad player in the 'better' class (though late expac power creep and disc priest still ugh...just ugh)

Also I really want to know about AST MP management, and how often we will be wanting to use the Ewer card on ourselves. It sounds like AST will be able to pump out crazy heals in a short period of time but at the cost of a lot of MP (more instant cast spamming but no mp cost reduction) Also agro management.... Man I dislike that WHM's agro dump and mp regen are the same spell but I digress.

Example- WHM's Shroud isn't as potent as SCH's aetherflow for on-demand mp but WHM has freecure and overcure to help. SCH has fairy 'free' heals, and even sacred soil has a chance of making succor cost less mana. Aetherflow, when desperate can also be used on energy drain for some clutch MP. WHM can reduce agro with shroud, and SCH splits agro with fairy (though they can't dump agro on their own). What will AST end up with?