AST: What it means to be a "hybrid"...

All other skills are fine maybe slight increase range on our AoE heals but other then that the class is fine we just lack cooldowns to boost our healing or ways to mitigate damage ... problem with AST is that when everything goes really bad it effect us in 2 ways...... 1 we turn into spam healers and burn through mp if there is ALOT of damage going out due to lack of cooldowns to help with healing.......... 2 whilst spam healing we dont have time to use our cards due being on global CD ... i have killed players b4 due to trying to draw a card whilst trying to rapidly heal everyone up due to high damage

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Originally Posted by RichardButte

And I KNOW people cannot understand just how underpowered AST is compared to the other two healers.

As I said, I'm not suggesting they apply ALL of the suggestions, but they could probably double or triple AST's card buffs and it still wouldn't be worth bringing an AST on progression content.

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Many of your suggestions are overbearing, even if one of them were to be implemented. The only ones I can somewhat agree on is 5 or 6. Enhanced, for what your trading off, is lack luster. Extended is fine as it is imo. Expanded is one of your best RR.

Dropping the cooldown of draw to 15s~20s (with Draw counting down when you first draw the card) would be a significant buff in itself. I'd argue that 20s base (CD starts after card is cast) would be sufficient if the card's potencies and durations were to be left the same.

Also to add, the reason why SCH does what it does is because they have really, really good mana sustain. I hardly have to worry about my mana on SCH unless I have to start raising people. I'm not sure where the misconception came from that AST was really far behind in personal DPS. While they are lower, it's not by that much (WHM beats them both). The problem is, the AST is done after 3min (if i get ewers) and the SCH can go 5min+ and still be at half mana.

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Originally Posted by MidnightTundra

On our best days, our party buff should beat Selene but what we have now is ASTs DPS buffs just breaking even. If we double or triple the potency of the cards, we absolutely wipe the floor with Selene mathematically and statistically. I don't agree with that.

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But it SHOULD.

The AST trades reliable emergency healing and general healing throughput for card buffs, aka the ability to end an encounter more quickly.

If the stars align (pun intended), the best thing an AST can do is give a DPS 50 seconds of 10% damage increase. Is that worth giving up lustrates? Divine Seal? Amazing AoE coverage?

As I said, take ANY card buff and divide it by 6 and then you have the ACTUAL benefit of the card with RNG factored in, and those numbers suck.

I'm not sure why people cannot wrap their heads around the concept of "risk vs. reward" and, in order to justify the risk of an AST drawing 30 spires in a row, the reward for a Balance cannot be a piddly 10% damage increase for 15 seconds.

Even assuming you draw a balance every time (which you won't), that's 10% more damage for 15 seconds, or 2.5% more damage per minute, for ONE player. Compare that to Selene's 1.5% DPS/healing per minute for the whole party, 12% total benefit (assuming a full raid party).

And if you want to be honest about it, divide that 2.5% by 6 for the REAL number: an average of .42% per minute DPS increase.

We shouldn't just be BEATING Selene, we should be stomping her into the ground because we have to contend with the RNG while she doesn't.

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Originally Posted by MidnightTundra

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I'm not necessarily on board with the changes in the OP, either. They're probably all too much, even individually. I don't think numerically doubling the cards would even really address the majority of issues anyway. The better solution, in my opinion, is to make all the cards worthwhile. Two of them are useful in nearly all situations, and this should be the case for all six of them.

Spire and Ewer are too limited in use. Unlike Balance and Arrow, they don't actually provide an increase in output for the target in most situations. No one is going to change their skill rotation because they are using less TP or MP now--they're already using their abilities in the most optimal way (or at least, they should be, in progression content). Ewer has some utility for healer mana conservation, but SCH and WHM have plenty of mana control. That leaves only AST that can really make use of Ewer for healing efficiency (but that's more of a problem of AST relative to the other two healers than it is a problem with Ewer).

Spear is only significantly impactful in coordinated burst situations for progression/static groups, when you can work out in advance when people will be using a large number of off-global cooldowns. Given that it requires planning to have a noticeable impact, it is thereby usually very difficult to use, since you can't often plan to have a Spear (unless you save it with Spread, anyway--but it's probably more efficient in most cases to save a Balance or Arrow for a burst phase).

Bole is middle-of-the-road. By itself, it does allow for more healer DPS, theoretically, since it should result in less healing needed on the tank. For ASTs, at least, though, I've never managed to get more than another cast or two out of it.

Of course, all four of the less useful cards can be used for Royal Road, though this runs the risk of actually reducing the impact your cards have over time even further, since you don't know if you'll get a Balance or Arrow on your next draw, and the only Royal Road option that actually makes cutting yourself from 2 cards a minute to 1 card a minute is Extended (since it doubles the effect). Expanded can double the effect in 8 man situations as well, if you can manage to catch all four DPS with it (which isn't easy given the 15y radius of the effect).

Given that you only have a 1/3 chance of drawing a card to use that Royal Road benefit on on your next card, though, tossing a card to Royal Road is generally only going to reduce your efficiency even further.

If every card draw had impact the way that say, SCH's 3 Aetherflow charges do (roughly one charge per 20 seconds, not incomparable), things would be a different story. That's not even including something like Fey Wind, which although weaker than individual card buffs, has the incredibly valuable strength of consistency on its side, something that's of great value especially in progression settings.

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Originally Posted by RichardButte

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So you want us to replace SCH is every single fight that does not require their mitigation? Tripling the potency of the cards will do just that. I'm not sure why you can't grip the fact that there are 3 healers in this game where the standard is 2 healers in an 8-man. For the SCH to have out Selene. he is straight up giving up Eos' Regens, mitigation and healing buff. If he wants to switch pets, he has to blow Swiftcast on top of blowing 1600 mana. The pets also share cooldowns (Fey Illumination and Fey Wind share them for example.)

From my own activity with both SCH and AST, my AST beats out my SCH in HPS unless I am utilizing Eos. If I choose to utilize Selene, I lose a major chunk of my HPS in exchange for party DPS buffs. Stop acting like SCH doesn't have a trade off.

The cards don't need the absurd values you're trying to get across. They should be buffed by 1.5 at most.

I'm a scholar currently training ast simply because I am sick of being left out of farm parties if they already have a sch >.> I have played both whm and sch, and I think ast would be fun to play as it's like I'm using both at the same time, plus buffing peps! (I like healing/synergist classes >.>) But yeah, when ever I am playing as sch with an ast in the party, I AM getting annoyed as it feels like I am doing all the healing, and the fight seems to be taking just as long as it usually does. I just end up running out of mana faster, instead of the fight ending faster. Asts need buffs! Although I do like it when an ast chooses to give me more mana, it's like they care :D

I dunno about you guys, but even as sch, healing at lvl 60 seems really mana expensive.

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Originally Posted by MidnightTundra

From my own activity with both SCH and AST, my AST beats out my SCH in HPS unless I am utilizing Eos. If I choose to utilize Selene, I lose a major chunk of my HPS in exchange for party DPS buffs. Stop acting like SCH doesn't have a trade off.

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The healing throughput for SCH isn't the issue. It's the fact that SCH has reliable and versatile emergency buttons while AST doesn't.

When the shit hits the fan, the AST has no answer while the SCH has several (I have a 60 SCH as well).

The tradeoff has to be equal, or to put it numerically (even though it's difficult to measure), if the AST's poor emergency options leave the party with a 10% higher chance of wiping, then the AST's contribution has to end the encounter 10% faster to compensate, otherwise the AST is just an inferior healer.

And again, risk vs. reward dictates that the risk of an AST NOT being able to end the encounter more quickly due to RNG means that there has to also be a chance of the AST being able to end the encounter MUCH more quickly.

If SE were to remove the RNG element and allow ASTs to pick the card they wanted every time or cycle through all 6 in a set order, sure, the class would need minor buffs at most.

But with a 17% chance of getting the card you want, that card had better REALLY do some work when you actually manage to draw it...

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Originally Posted by Alahra

The better solution, in my opinion, is to make all the cards worthwhile. Two of them are useful in nearly all situations, and this should be the case for all six of them.

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I would honestly prefer this as well, as Ewer (which we use on ourselves most of the time anyway) and Spire are just awful, Bole only helps to make up for our weaker emergency options and Spear is stupidly situational.

But I doubt SE would be willing to go through and revamp all of the cards, hence why I suggest simple tweaks instead.

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Originally Posted by Alahra

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If you throw one or two spires on the Ninja during the raid, it circumvents the odd 30s that he's out of TP waiting for an Invig (assuming 100% uptime on boss/adds). He saves around ~120 TP in the base duration of spire. Spire is also useful for DRK and PLD because they run out of TP much quicker than Melee DPS and warrior. Spire aids the tank's tp issues until the bard or mch has to play tp song or tp promote.

Ewer is useful for SMNs and AST (again poor mana sustain).

Spear is useful for Bard/MCH/NIN. They have many oGCD abilities on relatively short cooldowns.

SCHs aetherflow charges do not directly affect party DPS. ED (and bane) bumps your personal DPS which indirectly bumps up party DPS.

Expanded RR is effectively Quadrupling the card's effect in an 8man group. It's why I think Enhanced should be 250% potency bump (similar to what the op stated). Giving up Balance for something effectively weaker is bad.

You have a 10.8% chance of landing your Expanded Balance/Arrow combo in a minute's time and as of now, it is currently weaker than Fey Wind (unless you Celestial Opposition). If the cards were buffed by 1.5x or had duration increases, it would fix this "issue" we're having.

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Originally Posted by RichardButte

The healing throughput for SCH isn't the issue. It's the fact that SCH has reliable and versatile emergency buttons while AST doesn't.

When the shit hits the fan, the AST has no answer while the SCH has several (I have a 60 SCH as well).

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And LightSpeed should be the CD that dramatically increases our HPS. If it just reduced the GCD to 1.5, we'd have something to work with. I agree with you here.

I also would agree with your cards being game-changing if we had the original concept of us having a bad card (We assumed Bole was the 10% increased damage taken from news sources pre-expac). None of our cards are "bad" but in this game, everyone just values "DPS boost" over everything. In the eyes of many players, all the cards aside from Balance and Arrow are bad. The only one I truly feel is iffy is Bole and even then, I find uses for it.

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Originally Posted by MidnightTundra

SCHs aetherflow charges do not directly affect party DPS. ED (and bane) bumps your personal DPS which indirectly bumps up party DPS.

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Oh, I know. The cards don't all have to have impact in terms of DPS, though. I didn't mean to imply that.

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Expanded RR is effectively Quadrupling the card's effect in an 8man group. It's why I think Enhanced should be 250% potency bump (similar to what the op stated). Giving up Balance for something effectively weaker is bad.

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It's not quite quadrupling the card's effect in all cases, though it can be. If everyone is DPSing and you hit everyone with Expanded Balance, you end up with 8x the 5% damage increase. But you frequently won't hit everyone with it, and tank/healer DPS being lower means you don't get the same value of Balance on them as you do out of Balance on a DPS.

Regarding running out of resources, in a well-managed static group, whether Spire and Ewer will have any use probably depends on the fight itself. We've not seen Savage yet, but judging from playing NIN on all four floors, Spire would be somewhat useful on A2, at least, but the others haven't provided significant TP issues because of phase shifts and the like. The same would likely hold true for SMNs (though I'll definitely agree that Ewer works well enough for AST--that just doesn't feel like it's really helping the group much when it does).

NIN doesn't get any more benefit out of Spear than MNK or DRG, really, without planning, which is the main reason Spear is troublesome. NIN in particular doesn't generally hold its main short oGCD (Ninjutsu), ever, as they use it rotationally. The same is probably true for BRD/MCH though I was never much of a serious BRD in 2.0.