AST Ideas

AST is a weak job. Here's some ideas to hopefully remedy that.

Benefic -> 400 Pot

- Srsly why is this 380 when Physick and Cure are 400?
- Change the 15% mechanic to 15% chance next Benefic II will have 100% critical chance.

Light Speed -> Lets wait and see what SE does.

Spread -> Can use out of Combat, Change to keep the card in spread until shuffled back into deck. The card in the spread shares CD with Spread(40s). Reduce Spread CD to 40s.

- There was no need to make this only in combat. Apparently SE is thinking about reversing this.
- Holding onto the card of your choice until you remove it with shuffle gives you a certain play style with each card and makes the rng feel less punishing

Shuffle -> Shuffle drawn card back into the deck, if no card is drawn then shuffle your spread back into your deck. Reduce CD to 60s.




Side Notes

- Flame away.
- Will add more ideas later
- Fixed wording on Benefic notes.
- After some thought deleted ideas to Light Speed, Aspected Benefic and Ewer/Spire.
- Added rehaul ideas to the card system.

Aspected Benefic is already 250 potency in Nocturnal Sect; if you buff Diurnal Aspected it will just become the Astrologian go-to Sect more than it already is, so if you buffed Diurnal Aspected than Nocturnal Aspected would need a LOT of love too.

The potency on regular Benefic is fine, I think; a guaranteed critical proc would certainly give ASTs more healing/speed run oomph with Benefic II (though overheal on AST would be crazy).

I'd prefer to keep the refreshes away from AST, tbh. Plenty of other jobs have TP restores and don't want to step on BRD/MCH toes any further, imo. Up the reductions on both to make them "feel" more useful, maybe, but keep their basic function the same.

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Originally Posted by loreleidiangelo

Aspected Benefic is already 250 potency in Nocturnal Sect; if you buff Diurnal Aspected it will just become the Astrologian go-to Sect more than it already is, so if you buffed Diurnal Aspected than Nocturnal Aspected would need a LOT of love too.

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I feel like this skill is missing something. Could be because the shield is lacking though.

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Originally Posted by loreleidiangelo

The potency on regular Benefic is fine, I think; a guaranteed critical proc would certainly give ASTs more healing/speed run oomph with Benefic II (though overheal on AST would be crazy).

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The 380 bugs the crap out of me. Such OCD (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

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Originally Posted by loreleidiangelo

I'd prefer to keep the refreshes away from AST, tbh. Plenty of other jobs have TP restores and don't want to step on BRD/MCH toes any further, imo. Up the reductions on both to make them "feel" more useful, maybe, but keep their basic function the same.

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I could see increasing the effect.

All those changes wouldnt do much still. The whole class is quite broken, most abilities need from tiny adjustments to complete rework(=collective consciousness). Also the mana issue is horrendous as soon as someone does some mistakes, due to lag or just not avoiding aoe time by time, im not even talking about ressing someone.
The whole card system is too random and not rewarding even in the best combination. For example 5% dmg buff for 8 people for 15 seconds sounds okay, but in reality with all aoes around and everything that's happening very rarely all those 15 seconds will be used to deal damage, most of the time with people scattered around you wont even be able to put that tiny buff on entire team of 8 people, so if you turn to cleric stance and throw combust + combust II you are basically doing already more damage than your whole level 30-45 skills set combination that you shuffled and saved and waited for, in the right moment to use.

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Aspected Benefic: Nocturnal Stance: Cure potency of 200 [210] with a shield of 150 [157.5] potency + 5% of target's maximum health.
Enhanced Benefic II: Instead of instant cast Diurnal Sect: Adds 12s to Aspected Benefic Regen Timer [+300 Potency total] Nocturnal Sect: Additionally restores 10% of the target's Maximum HP. Still has a 15% proc rate.
Lightspeed: Next 2 spells have no cast time and do not incur the global cooldown, but cost 25% more mana. 120s Recast.
Disable: Reduces target's damage by 10% for the next 10 seconds. 60s Recast.
Collective Unconscious: Diurnal Sect: Gives 20% Haste to all allies within range while channeled Nocturnal Sect: Increases potencies on all allies' skills by 10% while channeled Both Sects: 120s Recast, maximum 10s channel. Extends duration of all buffs placed by the caster while channeled. Shares a recast timer with Celestial Opposition.
Celestial Opposition: Stuns all enemies for 10s and restores 10% of self's mana. Doubles effect of cards on all targets 120s Recast. Shares a recast timer with Collective Unconscious.

Shuffle: Can't draw the same card, 60s Recast.
Royal Road: Burns current card to instantly draw a new card with an additional effect, but cannot draw the same card. 90s Recast. Enhanced Royal Road: Doubles effect of next card used | Expanded Royal Road: Spreads card to all nearby party members with 30% reduced effectiveness | Extended Royal Road: Doubles duration of next card used.
Spread: Can be used out of combat. 30s Recast after card is used.

Spear: Additionally reduces spells currently on recast timer by same amount of their maximum recast.
Spire/Ewer: Refresh/TP Equivalent over next 21s.

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My suggestions from another thread.

IMO, AST needs an AOE before level 50. Ok, everyone who wanted to level AST must've leveled it so s/he has Gravity, but every class has a DOT, an AOE, a support skill, an attack skill before 50. So rearranging skills should not be a bad idea.

Most need to affect the card system. We currently waste so many job quests on new card abilities and they're all underwhelming. Here is a quick idea I had.

1. Lower all card related cooldowns
2. Make draw restore a small amount of mp each time it's used. Not enough to stay full all the time, but just enough to help with our current management.
3. Add secondary healing self buffs to each card. They can be varied per card or some cards can share the same like royal road effects. With well thought out self-buffs on each card it could both address our deficiencies and make some of the more questionable current cards more usable.

I'm not interested in fiddling with potencies, but rather making the class feel more unique. To that end I've heard a few ideas, and come up with some of my own:

For one, Synastry should be a permanent buff you can change target at will to make AST a class oriented around synchronised healing. Collective Unconscious should be a something you can use at any time for free. Give the class a new ability which inverts the current card and lets you inflict a reversed effect on enemies (similar to the reversed arcana from Persona 4; Inverted Bole = damage susceptibility up etc). Stella should be similarly replaced with an aspected buff that increases shield or regen potency. And finally Gravity needs to lose the diminishing returns if it offers no form of mitigation like Holy's stun or Shadowflare's slow, because that is just dumb.

Besides that I think everything is more or less fine. The class needs a major overhaul in terms of both gameplay functionality and novelty.

I feel that they should carve AST a niche in the utility healer spot. Currently, the core healing spells are fine (they are all there and just need a relatively minor tweak to make nocturnal sect be up to par against diurnal). As such it is the utility spells that needs a bit of reworking.

I propose to reduce the RNG by combining card effects and reducing cards. Thus you now have 3 cards.

1. Bole + Balance
2. Arrow + Spear
3. Ewer + Spire: Restore TP/MP at a fixed rate (prehaps total 15%. That would be 150 TP and ~2000 MP)

Spread: 30s CD and Usable out of combat.
Royal Road: Honestly, you are always hoping for an expanded royal road most of the time and while I do not deny that extended or stronger are useful, it is much simpler just to make this Expanded only without dropping the power.
Shuffle: 60s CD and it'll be fine.

So my idea with the cards to help combat RNG is this. So when you have your weapon drawn there is 12 cards that circle your globe. Assuming each card is in your deck twice for 12 cards, when you draw a card you pull it out of the deck. You either use it or spread. After use the card is placed in a discard pile. Once you've drawn through the whole deck all cards are shuffled back in and you start again. This way while you progress through dungeons and what not you can kind of beat the rng system by eliminating cards in the deck allowing more control over what cards you're using as the deck grows smaller. The shuffle ability can be used whenever to shuffle all cards in the discard pile back into the deck. I know its not entirely fleshed out but I'm off to work I can elaborate more when I come home. Make sense though? XD

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Originally Posted by Roxas_Andrade

IMO, AST needs an AOE before level 50. Ok, everyone who wanted to level AST must've leveled it so s/he has Gravity, but every class has a DOT, an AOE, a support skill, an attack skill before 50. So rearranging skills should not be a bad idea.

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I agree. If you want to have an AOE attack as AST before level 54, there is only one option available to you. Crossclassing Blizzard 2 from the Thaumaturge. Whitemages get their Holy 9 levels earlier, and they can cast it without having to target an enemy as well.

I personally feel Benefic should be on par with Cure and Physick and if that were to happen I would be totally fine if they didn't touch other potency's for AST.

The rng for the card system seems to be a major factor for the AST feeling mediocre in the utility department. Sadly there isn't a whole lot that can be done directly to Draw besides a CD reduction. Besides that I think Royal Road is the skill to look at to solve this since it adds more to that chaotic feel for the AST card system and I personally dislike it in its current form.

My idea for Royal Road is to make it have effects for the sects and not burn cards in order to gain subpar boosts to them.

im not gonna go thru a list of things id like changed just 1.

all the potencys are close, benefic is close to cure 1 /physic, aspected helio is close to medica 2 / succor

aspected benefic tho is terrible if u compare it to the single target shield of adlo due to the lack of crit shield, which is probly a big reason nocturnal feels like a waste.

aldo is 300 potency with a crit doubling the ammount shielded
aspect benefic is 250 with no extra benefit from a crit

why not make a crit give 150% ~175% bonus to nocturnal's shield, even if they made the crit bonus equal, since its already 50 potency less it would still b a weaker version of sch's adlo, but i wont b greedy n ask for same buff as sch

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Originally Posted by Starbirth

- Srsly why is this 380 when Physick and Cure are 400?

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I do not get why this is the problem. Because sect will give you that 5% more healing/cast speed thats why your Benefic potency is 5% weaker. I agree astro is weak compared other 2 healers but that is not the main issue.

I've said this before but, I would like Time Dilation to double the effectiveness of Noct shields on the target, or at least 1.5.
It extends the duration of regens, and currently extends the duration of shields, but what is even the point of extending a shield duration? That essentially does nothing.

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Originally Posted by Roxas_Andrade

IMO, AST needs an AOE before level 50. Ok, everyone who wanted to level AST must've leveled it so s/he has Gravity, but every class has a DOT, an AOE, a support skill, an attack skill before 50. So rearranging skills should not be a bad idea.

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It's called Blizzard 2.

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Originally Posted by Starbirth

AST is a weak job. Here's some ideas to hopefully remedy that.

Light Speed -> Lets wait and see what SE does.

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Honestly I don't see how this ability made it through to launch as is. It effectively does nothing execpt reduce heals/dps by 25% since recast times are unaffected. Spells are instant but they are being fired off at the same rate.

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Originally Posted by RiisWolf

It's called Blizzard 2.

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Don't....even....

in Dzemael Darkhold a whm can holy or a sch can dot>bane. we can...dot each target individually? People running this crap are used to pulling large amounts of junk and having EVERYONE, healers included, burn it down. WTF is even the potency on blizz2?

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Originally Posted by Sunako

I do not get why this is the problem. Because sect will give you that 5% more healing/cast speed thats why your Benefic potency is 5% weaker. I agree astro is weak compared other 2 healers but that is not the main issue.

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I agree that the 5% potency deficiency isn't really a big factor in why AST is weaker than the other heals, but it is completely unnecessary.

The problem is that AST is not the only healing class with passive, intrinsic bonuses like that. WHM has Freecure, Overcure, Enhanced Medica, and the Esuna proc, all of which offer huge improvements to the job's MP efficiency. SCH has the Adlo crit bonus, the Succor proc that Sacred Soil can trigger, and Embrace, which is constant, free, passive healing (and can be controlled manually if the SCH chooses). Both the WHM's array of MP-saving procs, and the SCH's Adlo bonus and fairy, are more than competitive with the 5% speed/potency boost that AST gets. But only AST is penalized with a nerf to base potency in exchange for its passive bonuses.

Restoring AST heals to their 'proper' potency while also keeping the Sect bonuses would just put them on an even playing field next to WHM and SCH, instead of lagging behind (albeit by an extremely small margin that isn't really worth agonizing over).

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Originally Posted by Crater

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You are disregarding that ASTs can pair their LA with Spears reducing the CD to 96s. ASTs heal spell costs are a lower than the other two and add in the fact an AST can self buff with Ewer cards further reducing mp costs by another 20%.

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Originally Posted by LycorisSelunis

Don't....even....

in Dzemael Darkhold a whm can holy or a sch can dot>bane. we can...dot each target individually? People running this crap are used to pulling large amounts of junk and having EVERYONE, healers included, burn it down. WTF is even the potency on blizz2?

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50, I think? It's really only useful for the bind.

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Originally Posted by Aurelinaus

You are disregarding that ASTs can pair their LA with Spears reducing the CD to 96s. ASTs heal spell costs are a lower than the other two and add in the fact an AST can self buff with Ewer cards further reducing mp costs by another 20%.

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There's a 1/6 chance of drawing a Spear in the interval of time that lines up with the point at which you plan to use Luminiferous Aether. Assuming (for the sake of simplicity) that you are not going to simply discard that Spear (because you want to Shuffle it in for a better card, because you'd rather have the Expanded Royal Road effect, or because you don't want to waste your existing Royal Road effect on it), and also that you are not going to pay the enormous opportunity cost of wasting a Royal Road effect on Spearing yourself or of putting Spear into your Spread, that works out to one out of every six LA uses having a 96s cooldown, and the other five having a 120s cooldown.

Which averages out to a 116s cooldown on the skill. It's a largely imaginary difference between an AST using LA and a WHM using SoS.


In addition to that, at this point you're talking about the full, expanded skillset of the AST versus the WHM, whereas this discussion is solely about the baseline, passive qualities of each class that happen when you're only considering standard GCD-based heals. When you start to bring in the card effects, you also have to bring in WHM's full suite of cooldowns, at which point AST starts getting tossed around like a rodeo clown.
No amount of Spears and Ewers the AST uses on themself will begin to make up for Assize, let alone the staggering MP efficiency granted to WHM by Divine Seal, or for that matter, Regen. A better use of your Spear card is honestly to give it to the WHM, so they can get a reduced cooldown on not just Shroud of Saints, but Divine Seal, and Assize, and Asylum, and Eye for an Eye.

It's perfectly valid to consider the entire toolset of a class when you talk about balance, but when the class roles and basic abilities are as similar as they are, it's just as valid to consider their baseline abilities separately from their cooldown suite. AST loses out to WHM and SCH a little bit if you ignore the cooldowns and just focus on the baseline, but they get destroyed if you start to consider everything that each class brings to the table. "Forgetting" about the cards (and the WHM/SCH cooldowns) is putting your thumb on the scale in favour of AST, not selling it short.

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Originally Posted by LycorisSelunis

Don't....even....

in Dzemael Darkhold a whm can holy or a sch can dot>bane. we can...dot each target individually? People running this crap are used to pulling large amounts of junk and having EVERYONE, healers included, burn it down. WTF is even the potency on blizz2?

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Gravity and Combust II should be switched in terms of the order in which you get them. Not having it for DD and Northern Thanlan Fates is annoying.

the base healing spells are actually fine
the potency are ~5% less because they have the stances that give a 5% boost making them basically equal

the problems are in the "aspected" spells and the way so many of the astrologian utility skills are tied up in card manipulation which really isn't all that amazing. The easiest example to prove that is look at haste; If an astrologian gets perfect draws they can do 5% aoe haste for 15s per minute, while scholar gets 3% for 30s per minute with no effort or luck involved. The scholar variant is actually the stronger one(this is just an example to compare similar buffs)
and of course the lack of mana management skills and a few just plain bad skills doesn't help either

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Originally Posted by Nihility

the base healing spells are actually fine
the potency are ~5% less because they have the stances that give a 5% boost making them basically equal

the problems are in the "aspected" spells and the way so many of the astrologian utility skills are tied up in card manipulation which really isn't all that amazing. The easiest example to prove that is look at haste; If an astrologian gets perfect draws they can do 5% aoe haste for 15s per minute, while scholar gets 3% for 30s per minute with no effort or luck involved. The scholar variant is actually the stronger one(this is just an example to compare similar buffs)
and of course the lack of mana management skills and a few just plain bad skills doesn't help either

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It's only nocturnal that gives the 5% healing buff. Diurnal's attack speed instead.