The Feast (4v4 Solo) Season 3 Patch 3.45 Tier List

For the most part since noct sect got nerfed I would recommend not adding the stance options as a versatility bonus toward assessing AST.

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Originally Posted by meastoso

For the most part since noct sect got nerfed I would recommend not adding the stance options as a versatility bonus toward assessing AST.

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Noct got nerfed awhile ago, and is still the better choice of the two against certain comps.

Which comps? I find even when matched against a bursty CC lineup like whm/pld/drg/mch the raw healing throughput of diurnal outshines noct advantages in all instances. I was a huge noct advocate since 3.0 who has been left unimpressed since the nerf.

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Originally Posted by meastoso

Which comps?

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Burst comps with low CC. Hots will tick while you're CCd so in your example with PLD/whm it would be better, yes. However, noct is good against:

Bard, warrior, dark knight, dragoon, ninja, machinist, scholar, astrologian

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Originally Posted by FreeKingStefan

Bard, warrior, dark knight, dragoon, ninja, machinist, scholar, astrologian

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Why is Noct better against these jobs?

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Originally Posted by meastoso

Why is Noct better against these jobs?

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The aspected benefic shield and higher healing potency. These jobs don't have large amounts of hard CC so you can do more active healing, and the shield is invaluable when healing through burst.

Doing some quick math with base potencies:

Noct Benefic II >> 650 + (650 * 0.1) = 715 potency
Noct Aspected Benefic >> 250 + (250 * 0.65) = 412.5 potency

Diurnal Benefic II >> 650 (5% faster)
Diurnal Aspected Benefic >> 140 potency ticks over 18s
Diurnal Aspected Helios >> 40 potency ticks over 30s

The 5% spell speed is ENORMOUS and very noticeable especially when dealing with interrupts. Additionally, if you are spam-curing someone through burst with no cooldowns available and you have one or both regens on the person, the potency is significantly higher throughput than Noct. If you need pure throughput you would never cast a 412.5 potency bubble on someone getting bursted when you could be casting benefic II for 715.

continuing (character restrictions)...


The only benefit to this scenario is being able to run while doing 412.5 potency heals but with improved spell speed I can let a warrior sit on me all game and still heal through full DPS burst with no cooldowns without issue and found this scenario very difficult to achieve in Noct. Not to mention very harsh on a very sensitive MP pool.

Is there something I'm missing?

Shields increase the effective hp pool of your party members, making melee LB far easier to mitigate and casts more difficult to interrupt.

Total healing throughput from an 18 second hot isnt really relevant to countering a hard burst that occurs in the course of 1 or 2 gcds. On top of that, the hot wont stack with itself, meaning repeat casts become less meaningful than the initial one.

I wouldnt really call an ast's mp pool "sensitive," between manadraw, lumi aether, ewers and if applicable manasong/report

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Originally Posted by Enlial

Total healing throughput from an 18 second hot isnt really relevant to countering a hard burst that occurs in the course of 1 or 2 gcds. On top of that, the hot wont stack with itself, meaning repeat casts become less meaningful than the initial one.

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How is it not relevent? The ticks occur at least 2 times through the 3-5 seconds of burst. With both regens on that's 360 free healing potency in 3-5 seconds. Each piece of damage is applied to the target in sequence, at the same time as all of these heals.

Repeat casts are irrelevant, if you repeat cast noct your overall potency is drastically lower than benefic II + regens. At higher levels of play every single potency matters when keeping your entire team alive and if you are spamming noct aspected benefic you will eventually fall behind in about 10 seconds and someone is going to die.

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Originally Posted by meastoso

How is it not relevent? The ticks occur at least 2 times through the 3-5 seconds of burst. With both regens on that's 360 free healing potency in 3-5 seconds. Each piece of damage is applied to the target in sequence, at the same time as all of these heals.

Repeat casts are irrelevant, if you repeat cast noct your overall potency is drastically lower than benefic II + regens. At higher levels of play every single potency matters when keeping your entire team alive and if you are spamming noct aspected benefic you will eventually fall behind in about 10 seconds and someone is going to die.

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There are a few faults in the point you are trying to make.


HOTs tick once every 3 seconds. That is more than 1 GCD per tick. Burst damage typically comes in very fast, all at once, and typically does not even bleed into a 3rd GCD. So, we are looking at -possibly- two ticks of a HOT, depending on where you are at on the server tick. Secondly on this specific point, you are assuming you had ample time to throw up both aspected spells to get the stacking HOT, which is not always possible, especially at times of high pressure.

While I won’t claim to know the exact intricacies of how the server applies damage and healing, I can say with certainty that damage and healing are not applied in successive order. Countless times, heals go off before damage and you die anyway. While I have no concrete insight as to why this is, I think most would agree that this game favors the attacker due to the nature of how numbers are applied.

Repeat casts of Noct AB is -not- irrelevant -at all-. Being able to spam a potent shield on yourself with an instant cast spell is extremely powerful and one of the core strengths of the Astrologian. In your given example, you are assuming that you are able to freely cast Benefic 2...which is not the cast in which Noct stance shines. Nobody here is suggesting that you should be spamming Noct AB while you are able to cast Benefic 2. What is being suggested is that the Noct AB is extremely potent for snap healing while you are under pressure and otherwise unable to cast Benefic 2 freely. Obviously you can use Lightspeed and Swiftcast to make it instant, but you don’t always have those tools available.

You disregard another core strength of Noct AST (and shields in general) in that they raise your effective maximum HP. I cannot stress enough how powerful this is in The Feast when most jobs can kill someone 100-0. HOTs are not going to save you from a melee LB or Between the Eyes, but a shield might.


I’d also like to state something for clarity: I am not saying, nor have I ever said, that Noct AST is more powerful than Diurnal. Diurnal is, in fact, more useful in more situations. However, Noct AST still has very potent core strengths that are extremely powerful in certain situations against certain compositions.

I understand the message and very much respect the effective HP boost the shield provides, but I must disagree that Noct has a place in current meta based on experience.

I pose a scenario: given a burst comp on other team and you are left alone to freecast while tank, melee and ranged all pounding away at one person without defense buff after your CDs are gone how do you keep that person alive in Noct stance? Unless the 3 mentioned players are terrible or there is severe disruption from your team you cannot outheal this in Noct (or at least I have never been able to, even trying very hard to make this work in the beginning of season 3).

Between equilibrium, surecast, swiftcast, bliz2 and regen in Diurnal I can still manage healing with a melee and tank on me (countering the need for noct bubbles), but I cannot heal through the scenario above in Noct. I can work around not having the bubble, I cannot work around not having raw healing throughput from Noct

I think you are confusing a preference in play style with viability.

You can heal a single target just as well as the other healers in Noct. You are assuming the best case scenario for your defending points as well. What about when your CDs are down? When you can't afford the GCD to blizz 2? I say this from experience as well, in addition to the observations of other ASTs this season.

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Originally Posted by FreeKingStefan

I think you are confusing a preference in play style with viability.

You can heal a single target just as well as the other healers in Noct. You are assuming the best case scenario for your defending points as well. What about when your CDs are down? When you can't afford the GCD to blizz 2? I say this from experience as well, in addition to the observations of other ASTs this season.

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I guess i'll go back and give Noct another try this season against certain team comps and see if I'm missing something. For my own reference since I'm not familiar with Aether players out of your 275 games this season how many were on Noct AST would you say? (roughly)

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Originally Posted by meastoso

I pose a scenario: given a burst comp on other team and you are left alone to freecast while tank, melee and ranged all pounding away at one person without defense buff after your CDs are gone how do you keep that person alive in Noct stance?

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That person is dead. You don't keep them alive as either type of AST healer, or any other type of healer for that matter.

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Originally Posted by meastoso

I guess i'll go back and give Noct another try this season against certain team comps and see if I'm missing something. For my own reference since I'm not familiar with Aether players out of your 275 games this season how many were on Noct AST would you say? (roughly)

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I haven't played AST this season, but out of my 1200 or so matches over season 1 and 2 I'd say at least 15% of them were played in noct stance.

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Originally Posted by FreeKingStefan

I haven't played AST this season, but out of my 1200 or so matches over season 1 and 2 I'd say at least 15% of them were played in noct stance.

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According to patch notes the Noct PVP nerf happened at Patch 3.4 as seen here. This means the nerf occurred half way through Season 2. I wasn't able to find how many total games you played in Solo Queue for season 2 but add that to 68 games for Party queue, apply 15% and that's not a whole lot of games post-nerf.

I highly urge you to spend some time trying to heal against the appropriate team comps as Noct AST because it continuously falls short and produces more shortcomings than benefits.

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Originally Posted by meastoso

According to patch notes the Noct PVP nerf happened at Patch 3.4 as seen here. This means the nerf occurred half way through Season 2. I wasn't able to find how many total games you played in Solo Queue for season 2 but add that to 68 games for Party queue, apply 15% and that's not a whole lot of games post-nerf.

I highly urge you to spend some time trying to heal against the appropriate team comps as Noct AST because it continuously falls short and produces more shortcomings than benefits.

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This is not the character that I played in season 1 and 90% of season 2.

Hopefully someone who has played a substantial amount of games as AST in season 3 can chime in about the usage of Noct stance in the current meta.

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Originally Posted by meastoso

Hopefully someone who has played a substantial amount of games as AST in season 3 can chime in about the usage of Noct stance in the current meta.

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I can't tell if you're trolling or not TBH. Especially considering noct actually got buffs in 3.4...

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Originally Posted by meastoso

According to patch notes the Noct PVP nerf happened at Patch 3.4 as seen here. This means the nerf occurred half way through Season 2.

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I don't like touching the healer balance discussion, but I'll be a fact check bot here. I'm pretty sure the shield stayed the same and just the wording on the ability changed. It used to be half of 130 (65%), now it is just a 65% shield. They did get the extra 5% on noct though, so it was an overall noct buff.

After 1000+ matches in my experience:

Ranged: MCH>>BRD>>>>>SMN>> BLM (BLMs are potentally the best job but they are focused so much they don't have time to cast).

Melee: MNK>>>>DRG>>>>>>NIN (10 second silence spam destroys any healer)

Tank: WAR>>>PLD>>>>>>>>>>>DRK (generally, second melee is better than damage mitigator who can kill nothing)

Healer: it's actually difficult to determine, because the best datacenter healers are SCHs, but other SCH are much worse than average WHMs and ASTs. Still, I'd say WHM>Diu AST and SCH>Not AST.