How could you do this to AST?

I don't know. SCH/WHM combo feels horrible currently. SCH/AST and WHM/AST definitely feel superior.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

. Your off-GCD heals are what make or break your class most of the time, not the size of your bubbles. Scholar is a better healer than Noct AST because it\\'s better at supporting and enabling its cohealer to squeeze more out of their kit.

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This, a lot of time, AST feels permalocked because it enables WHM/SCH to not drop a dps spell for a GCD heal. Nearly every oGCD that AST has can cover everything that WHM and SCH.

Clipping and weaving on WHM and SCH are much bigger deals than people make it out to be. Every clipped spell is a loss and quite punishing. It\\'s clunky and horrible design, I really wish they would move away from this. SCH would be a great cohealer had they not have to clip in order to heal. This wasn\\'t an issue when the fairy independently casted their skills and they had Miasma to weave. And SE messed that up so bad. The fairy is unresponsive as hell and SCH has lost its uniqueness.

I\\'ve said this before but SE should really consider giving healers unique DPS gameplay styles to allow them to weave. Let\\'s not kid ourselves, everything revolves around DPS, it\\'s how the game is designed, everything else is human error and secondary. Just look at the tanks, defensive CDs are almost 1 to 1 and the only true differences are the invulns and DPS combos.

Ofc we shouldn\\'t get full-blown rotations but 1 spam, 1 nuke, 1 dot is not cutting it and really insulting. Not even an AoE dot option.

WHM should have a dot and perhaps a 1-2 combo with an instacast proc for a say Fluid Aura doing damage or a new water spell (or holy spell since nature WHM is dead). WHM is a hard hitter and powerful in lore so they should be able to have a full combo.

SCH should be rotating dots (3-4 maybe) with Bane as spread and Fester (something this) to reward them for using their Aetherflow stacks. Possibly bring back Shadow Flare or a SCH visual for it. SCH is a military tactican/doctor so poisons should be their thing as they fight and the fairy heal the party.

AST could stay the same with their cards being the main focus but I would say that them could have a dot and an AoE dot could be increased in duration and potency with a GCD Time Dilation (but with a CD stacks up to 3 times). AST should have some of its time magic back since they aren\\'t bringing Time Mage anytime soon or at all. They should rewarded for predicting and planning ahead with their heals and dps being increased to max potential over time. Maybe even give them an ability to either Extend their regens or Accelerate them on as an oGCD. That being said, I think AST has a lot of potential aesthetically when you factor in time magic elements and their fortune teller lore.

I'll greatly miss noct, having instant shields on demand felt really satisfying whenever I had to cover raid damage or when a non-tank player is targeted for an ability, which is something I can't really do on SCH (well I can, but it's clunky af). Yeah I know, I know - it's a niche thing to do, specially in high end content, but there's just a greater sense of satisfaction seeing the barrier taking damage for the player rather than reactively healing their boo-boo. I hope Sage gets its own " [noct] aspected benefic"

Everyone seems to be hopeful that SE will rework AST skills with this change but I have the strong feeling they aren't going to change much of anything. They are just going to put AST in Diurnal the entire time and remove Nocturnal. I really doubt they are going to go back and rework or add new skills prior to level 90. AST will just get the new set of skills from 80 to 90 like the rest of the jobs.

They'll have to rework something though. For once AST and WHM are in direct competition with each other for the one pure heal spot and Diurnal AST is currently miles ahead of WHM. Mobile, no weave tax, utility, raid buffs and a better toolkit in many ways. It'll be interesting to see how they handle things like Neutral Sect or if CU will keep its 5 seconds of mitigation on use. Knowing SE, they'll rip AST's toolkit apart, then buff it like crazy all expansion ...again.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

They'll have to rework something though. For once AST and WHM are in direct competition with each other for the one pure heal spot and Diurnal AST is currently miles ahead of WHM. Mobile, no weave tax, utility, raid buffs and a better toolkit in many ways. It'll be interesting to see how they handle things like Neutral Sect or if CU will keep its 5 seconds of mitigation on use. Knowing SE, they'll rip AST's toolkit apart, then buff it like crazy all expansion ...again.

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SGE and SCH will also be in competition with each other. I can see them changing some potencies around and pruning some things to make AST more even with WHM, but I really doubt they will do any significant kind of rework of the job. In fact if the cards are proving too much of a problem with WHM, they might just remove them all together.

Oh yes, SCH's in a lot of danger of becoming the next Bard vs Dancer, where Dancer has massively overtaken Bard in popularity for the phys ranged spot at all levels of play because it's just functionally smoother, comfier, with better utility.

SCH has some rough downsides with the pet straight up being a hinderance and tied to their oGCD kit and paying a high weave tax despite having a lot of abilities to weave. If Sage gets a strong oGCD kit and better free weave, it already has a huge advantage over SCH and will feel much better to play. SCH's minion really needs looking at, it should be the strength of the class not a handicap to its oGCD's.

For WHM and AST it's not really about potencies or even the cards. WHM has strong heal potency and it's personal dps can come close to AST rdps. But unlike AST, WHM can't do strong healing and high dps. Doing either will crash the other. Strong WHM healing kills its dps and high dps means far less healing and letting the co-heal take a bigger share. AST can do both simultaneously. This has worked ok for WHM up to now because AST can carry the healing, but now it's competing with AST for a spot instead of working with it.

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Originally Posted by EaMett

I don't know. SCH/WHM combo feels horrible currently. SCH/AST and WHM/AST definitely feel superior.

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WHM/WHM? Playable. Regens stacking for days!

AST/AST? Playable. Regens and Shields. Best of both worlds. But now with more with buffs!

SCH/SCH? Playable, but extremely inefficient.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

Oh yes, SCH's in a lot of danger of becoming the next Bard vs Dancer, where Dancer has massively overtaken Bard in popularity for the phys ranged spot at all levels of play because it's just functionally smoother, comfier, with better utility.

SCH has some rough downsides with the pet straight up being a hinderance and tied to their oGCD kit and paying a high weave tax despite having a lot of abilities to weave. If Sage gets a strong oGCD kit and better free weave, it already has a huge advantage over SCH and will feel much better to play. SCH's minion really needs looking at, it should be the strength of the class not a handicap to its oGCD's.

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Agreed. The worst thing about the SCH is the "Pet Tax" on the fairies healing abilities which IIRC is something like 33% or so. So their heals SAY they're going to do

150 pot (Embrace)
120 pot (Whispering Dawn)
400 pot (Fey Union)
350 pot (Fey Blessing)
200 pot (Seraphic Veil)
300 pot (Consolation)

But in all actuality they do (respectively)

100 potency
80 potency
268 potency
234 potency
134 potency
200 potency

The biggest problem is other than embrace, those skills require a GCD now and your other stuff is a lot stronger. THAT is the biggest issue with the fairies using the GCD. Not to mention the fact that ZERO of those abilities are modified by the fairy ability Fey Illumination (10% increase in healing potency) because they're classified as Abilities and not spells.

When they DIDN"T use the GCD 100% potency was overpowered, but the 33% tax was manageable because you're giving up strength to be able to weave other things.

If they're going to use a GCD, the fairy skills need to be at 100% strength.

I'd say put fairy skills separate from the GCD again, so you can use them independently during your own heals rather being than SCH oGCD's. Having fairy heals that you can use even during GCD casts would become a SCH strength, a reason for having a minion and feed into that class identity.

I also agree on the potency. Even if they cut the potency, there's no reason why the tooltip can't reflect that. Especially when AST Star is also counted as a minion yet it has similar potency to the tooltip.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

I also agree on the potency. Even if they cut the potency, there's no reason why the tooltip can't reflect that. Especially when AST Star is also counted as a minion yet it has similar potency to the tooltip.

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On top of being misleading for new player who think Fey blessing is a medica equivalent while its not.
I don't know what so hard about displaying the exact potency or adjust fairy healing to the owner

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Originally Posted by KDSilver

On top of being misleading for new player who think Fey blessing is a medica equivalent while its not.
I don't know what so hard about displaying the exact potency or adjust fairy healing to the owner

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From playing SCH the worst part of the fairy skills is by far the fact that they must finish their embrace cooldown to activate any skill you use if they have just cast it. You can be sitting there for almost a whole GCD after hitting any of your fairy skills waiting for it to actually go off.

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Originally Posted by SieyaM

From playing SCH the worst part of the fairy skills is by far the fact that they must finish their embrace cooldown to activate any skill you use if they have just cast it. You can be sitting there for almost a whole GCD after hitting any of your fairy skills waiting for it to actually go off.

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They fixed that in late patch in StB. Fairy would cancel anything she does when you wanted her to execute a fairy skill.

Why did they reverted this change back? I don't know, but that was a stupid choice.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

I'd say put fairy skills separate from the GCD again, so you can use them independently during your own heals rather being than SCH oGCD's. Having fairy heals that you can use even during GCD casts would become a SCH strength, a reason for having a minion and feed into that class identity.

I also agree on the potency. Even if they cut the potency, there's no reason why the tooltip can't reflect that. Especially when AST Star is also counted as a minion yet it has similar potency to the tooltip.

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The GCD aspect doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the pet potency, and only for accuracy’s sake, really. SCH’s most broken aspect was the independent pet GCD so I don’t see that going away. Fey Blessing and Consolation being weak doesn’t change that SCH leaks damage whenever they weave any of their oGCDs either, Aetherflow or otherwise. I think it’s more pertinent to focus on giving SCH some DPS oGCD to make up for this loss while removing hard clipping. Ideally by making it key off the spending of their healing resources. Energy Drain usage doesn’t need to be tied to it per say, but Fey Gauge definitely should be.

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Originally Posted by KDSilver

They fixed that in late patch in StB. Fairy would cancel anything she does when you wanted her to execute a fairy skill.

Why did they reverted this change back? I don't know, but that was a stupid choice.

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Because their "fix" for fairies in ShB was basically to undo every improvement they had done over the course of Stormblood.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

Because their "fix" for fairies in ShB was basically to undo every improvement they had done over the course of Stormblood.

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It’s funny because it actually was a fix, just not for the players with good ping and variable latency. I’m the opposite with high ping but a stable connection so the StB version forced me to mash for multiple GCDs but this version undid those issues entirely. The only problems I have ever encountered were with Seraph and they were expected. The fairy cooldowns function perfectly, albeit with an obvious delay, but I don’t have to mash them to get them to function anymore.

The only pet issue that I’ve encountered that is highly specific is Down from the Count and knock backs interrupting Phoenix’s Everlasting Flight cast. And those are due to those fight mechanics either resummoning or affecting the pet and poor timing. To me those issues are solved by reworking Aetherflow back into Summoner’s kit so you can hold Trances through those periods and either wait to heal after or apply Whispering Dawn earlier on Scholar if it’s useful.

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Originally Posted by Grimoire-M

The GCD aspect doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the pet potency, and only for accuracy’s sake, really. SCH’s most broken aspect was the independent pet GCD so I don’t see that going away. Fey Blessing and Consolation being weak doesn’t change that SCH leaks damage whenever they weave any of their oGCDs either, Aetherflow or otherwise. I think it’s more pertinent to focus on giving SCH some DPS oGCD to make up for this loss while removing hard clipping. Ideally by making it key off the spending of their healing resources. Energy Drain usage doesn’t need to be tied to it per say, but Fey Gauge definitely should be.

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Echoing this. I'm almost positive the reason they put the fairy skills on the Scholar's oGCD is because the fairy being an independent extra set of actions was one of the many factors making Scholar overpowered; neither of the other two healers could just toss out a Medica 2 instantly without even needing to create a weave window. Problem is, they fixed the clunk with the OP pet dynamic, then changed to a clunky oGCD model and nerfed the potencies. Three wrenches thrown in the mix when one would have done. Nerf the potencies. Or make them work on the Scholar's oGCD. Doing both and reintroducing clunk is where they went wrong.

What I have seen echoed across these threads is that AST is both op and lobotomized now. Would an AST main be willing to be weaker in order to have a more satisfying class to play? Wouldn't the threads erupt with "AST is dead-last in heals & DPS!"?

In regard to SCH, I have had party members die because my Fairy was like "Chill" when I press the button for an AOE heal/shield.

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Originally Posted by NYCLouisGamer

What I have seen echoed across these threads is that AST is both op and lobotomized now.

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Those aren't opposed concepts. You can have simple and uninteresting design being the strongest option. The problem with AST was RNG inconsistency with cards as contributing DPS mechanic. In terms of healing potency, it had to deal with trying to reconcile Shield Healing and Regen Healing, which often lead to either being overpowered or underpowered.

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Originally Posted by NYCLouisGamer

What I have seen echoed across these threads is that AST is both op and lobotomized now. Would an AST main be willing to be weaker in order to have a more satisfying class to play? Wouldn't the threads erupt with "AST is dead-last in heals & DPS!"?

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That's not even a guess. AST and SCH mains raise Caine whenever they aren't in a dead lock for first place. Because they're "more complex" than WHM, and therefore "deserve" to be more powerful. That's a tale as old as Heavensward.