Astrologian is, unfortunately, full of restrictions. I still cannot fathom why two Diurnal ASTs can't stack regens the same way two WHMs can...
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I was starting to wonder this, myself. I didn't jump into the AST train on day one after playing around with it for a bit, but I was almost certain their stances were always mutually exclusive once you were in combat. Heard him saying this a lot around the forums as being the "answer" for AST's issues. Guess it really was just more non-sense. I remember people speculating that you could Sect-Dance, as that was the impression many people had, but it was never an actuality, as far as I recall.
It's to discourage same sect AST/AST combinations, because it is their control to make the best healing synergy. When a WHM/WHM or SCH/SCH gets paired together in a duty finder they don't have a choice, and the only synergy is regen. For Scholar there is synergy in using both the same fairy for stacking Eos's Whispering Dawn (not even that is normally ideal) or Selene's Fey Wind uptime or opposite fairies.
AST/AST has control to make the regen/shield combination that the others don't. Why anyone would prefer to do this differently is the bigger question.
I can't find it ATM but one of the initial interviews with Yoshi-P mentioned that AST would be able to "change their stance with a long cooldown" or something to that effect . This is probably where most of the information regarding "stance change would be cool!" comes from. Whether it's a last minute decision or not to change it, we'll never know.
Here are a couple of tidbits from random sources here or there.
Famitsu PAXEast translated interview (source 1)
Famitsu PAXEast translated interview (source 2)Quote:
Astrologists can switch between a heal stance or a barrier stance. It's actually a bit too strong so there'll be restrictions on how often you can switch stances, a delay of some kind. Spells remain the same, their affects just change dependong on stance so it's not like you'll need to juggle 2x more skills than other classes.
Official Translated Live Letter XXIQuote:
Tell us a bit more about the two styles of astrologian.
Y: The best way to put it simply is that you'll be able to switch between stances of a pure healer type and a barrier type. One way to think of it is that the healer type would be kind of like white mage, while the shield type would be closer to scholar. However, it would be too strong if you could switch frequently during combat, so there will be restrictions on how often you can change.
So, there was a lot of implied comments about being able to Sect dance.
I wonder if that's why they implied that CO might change to include a way to switch between sects? Maybe that was the "long cool down" he mentioned originally. I still don't see that changing the much in terms of how the class performs in healing, since you still wouldn't really swap with a SCH in the group (shield stacking), or be able to do it often enough to really matter.