Astro/Astro the new raid paradigm?

From all the duty finder runs since returning to the game a week or two ago every dungeon run has been an astrologian with a splash of scholar/white once in a while and all the duty finder raids I join has been for the most part astro/astro. If what the devs hinted at possible incoming nerfs to scholar since they have been in a staple raid slot for nearly two years I am getting a feeling double astro will knock both the other healers out of being the goto healer for progression/farming. Its actually funny my white mage friend queued with me gets told he should reroll astro for dungeons since he is weakening the party in a daily dungeon roulette heh.

Most of the arguing over Scholar nerfs admittedly happened before the Astrologian buffs, and that's mainly because Nocturnal Stance was utterly terrible and none of the healers had any answer to shields + fairy + great MP upkeep. White Mage and Astrologian still don't have an answer to the fairy, but...

Now? Most agree that Astrologian is now a far bigger long term problem, and it's not even because Astrologian managed to chip into Scholar's niche, it's because the devs for some reason decided to make Balance ridiculously broken while the rest of the cards are underutilized in comparison. So the situation now isn't even a question about which healer can keep the party alive better, it's which one can allow the party to end fights faster while having the minimum amount of required healing, knowing that higher DPS in the first place minimizes the amount of healing needed, which is nothing short of ass backwards.

Nocturnal Astrologian will never be as efficient as Scholar as the migation healer.
Only because they don't have the same gameplay. Scholar will always have aetherflow stack and the fairy, the deployed eye for eye and adloquium, so many free heals...

Noct aspected buffs were pretty overpowered, but ast/sch is still the optimal pair. There's likely to be potency adjustments for healers in sb, specifically between whm and ast, but wanting to take ast over whm in a dungeon because it's "weakening the party" otherwise is pretty mistaken. Whm has assize, aero 3 and an on demand aoe stun with holy. Basically they can keep large packs of mobs stunned while doing extremely high damage, while an ast just has gravity and one stun with celestial that has a very long cd. Drawing for balance and spread royal road is rng so it's not going to be available enough to dismiss a skilled whm's high dps and crowd control.

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Originally Posted by Ashua

From all the duty finder runs since returning to the game a week or two ago every dungeon run has been an astrologian with a splash of scholar/white once in a while and all the duty finder raids I join has been for the most part astro/astro. If what the devs hinted at possible incoming nerfs to scholar since they have been in a staple raid slot for nearly two years I am getting a feeling double astro will knock both the other healers out of being the goto healer for progression/farming. Its actually funny my white mage friend queued with me gets told he should reroll astro for dungeons since he is weakening the party in a daily dungeon roulette heh.

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Maybe people just like Astrologian? Maybe people who never bothered to play it while it sucked are giving it a whirl now that it's better accepted in the meta? I mean, are you seriously basing Savage raid compositional meta off of who you meet in DF???

Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not opposed to AST nerfs/adjustments/re-tooling, but the basis for your reasoning is pretty flawed.

I have never seen someone tell any healer job they should "re-roll", and I mained AST from 3.0 onward when re-rolling actually would have been justified. Daily dungeon roulette is so stupid easy that if a group needs Extended Balance to limp through the content than they're the problem, not WHM or AST.

As things stand, I'm pretty comfortable in saying that AST/SCH is the go to for progression content. I'm also inclined to suggest that AST/SCH is still the strongest overall combination in terms of maximising 8 man DPS as a whole.

Whilst yes, AST/AST is the gold standard for padding those rankings, you lose a significant stream of both tank and group healing from Eos meaning at least one of your healers is going to be spending considerably more time out of cleric stance.

It really depends on the content tho TBH. If we see another turn requiring very specific and substantial bursts of DPS in the same vein as A4S then yes, double AST may quickly become the norm. At this point it's hard to say really.

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Originally Posted by loreleidiangelo

Maybe people just like Astrologian? Maybe people who never bothered to play it while it sucked are giving it a whirl now that it's better accepted in the meta? I mean, are you seriously basing Savage raid compositional meta off of who you meet in DF???

Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not opposed to AST nerfs/adjustments/re-tooling, but the basis for your reasoning is pretty flawed.

I have never seen someone tell any healer job they should "re-roll", and I mained AST from 3.0 onward when re-rolling actually would have been justified. Daily dungeon roulette is so stupid easy that if a group needs Extended Balance to limp through the content than they're the problem, not WHM or AST.

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I do not think my reasoning is flawed when I made it as an observation and yes I will admit it is silly that a person gets commented on for which healer they play in a 20 minute dungeon.

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

As things stand, I'm pretty comfortable in saying that AST/SCH is the go to for progression content. I'm also inclined to suggest that AST/SCH is still the strongest overall combination in terms of maximising 8 man DPS as a whole.

Whilst yes, AST/AST is the gold standard for padding those rankings, you lose a significant stream of both tank and group healing from Eos meaning at least one of your healers is going to be spending considerably more time out of cleric stance.

It really depends on the content tho TBH. If we see another turn requiring very specific and substantial bursts of DPS in the same vein as A4S then yes, double AST may quickly become the norm. At this point it's hard to say really.

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When i see a White Mage cast spells it feels a bit generic compared to the Astrologian. If anything SE should also redo some of the White Mage spells aesthetically as well. Maybe the White mage should get an enhanced white mage only version of cleric stance that allows a % of damage done to end up as a heal on a certain target with a buff like discipline priest in wow or Lifebender in Rift.

Kind of agreed on WHM being generic yeah, in a way that's simply because it is the bread and butter healer of Final Fantasy. Don't forget that WHM did get some great abilities out of HW, running pre 60 stuff without Tetra/Assize/Asylum and Aero 3 really grates. Unless the raid content suits the use of Cure 3, I do think WHM could use spicing up a bit tho for sure.

I'm quietly hopeful that SE will drop the need for Accuracy which by itself would be a huge boon to WHM in particular.

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Originally Posted by loreleidiangelo

I mean, are you seriously basing Savage raid compositional meta off of who you meet in DF???

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It's more than just DF. AST+AST is the optimal composition for most parser runs (just so long as you can get LB3 where mandatory). It could become the optimal composition for progression, depending on how much people think they really need a limit break that charges as fast as possible.

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

It's more than just DF. AST+AST is the optimal composition for most parser runs (just so long as you can get LB3 where mandatory). It could become the optimal composition for progression, depending on how much people think they really need a limit break that charges as fast as possible.

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My point was that the OP wasn't formulated with any actual points of discussion in mind other than "I see more ASTs in DF so they must be taking over", not necessarily that their prediction is incorrect. There have already been well thought-out discussions on future meta comps and where all three healers fit in right here in this subforum, so I'm not really sure what the point of this post is, to be quite frank.

Did not know a person had to have a formulated and developed thesis to post something miniscule as an observation on the topic this forum is made for.

I made my point and I guess I do not understand the hostile response.

Disagreeing != Hostile FYI =(

*edit* just to add some clarification and data to this, pre echo, the fastest double AST log in A12s is over a minute slower than the fastest AST/SCH clear and is even pipped by WHM/AST.

Simply put, yes double the chance for balance cards is very nice, but it doesn't outweigh the raw and consistent throughput that SCH brings to the table.

AST/AST is very viable as is any other healer combo currently. But it's certainly not 'meta' =(

Like everyone has said, the reason why ast/ast/ isn't the "meta" is because the noct AST, despite the majors buffs to noct to where its shields are consistently stronger than sch, doesn't have the flexibility of the SCH. It doesn't have the fairy, which is a free regen every 3 seconds, also the fairy has abilities to complement this, Rouse which increases the strength of the fairy by 40 percent, fey illumination which all the healers if in its range when used, fey covenant, and its best spell whispering dawn, which trumps collective unconscious and asylum because its cooldown is only 60 compared to the other two at 90 seconds. There's even the ability of the SCH, deploy tactics which is a larger shield at the cost of 3 minutes for BIG hits, indomitably, strong ogcd every 30 seconds for one aetherflow stack. Remember, astro doesn't have a ogcd aoe heal.

Like others have said, it isn't that double balance isn't nice, because it is, it's just that AST/SCH is a far better combination.

AST/AST is not optimal. At least not yet. If they did one smart thing with healer balance in 3.0, it was not letting cards stack. That would have been a mess.

Unfortunately that's the only smart thing I can say they did. 3.0 was a flood of bad balancing decisions, honestly.

As long as there is a free regen fairy flying around a Scholar, the other healers by-themselves will never be meta. Those healers have to "manually" heal and that costs GCDs. Which is also damage potential lost, hence the slower clears. Double decks of cards won't make up for that.