Why so much complain on AST?

I returned after a year, and from scholar, switched to AST.

I read the forum just to get a feeling on what is going on on healers role (always been a healer, scholar, and decided to switch to AST to have a new experience)

I tried both (still have the SCH at 62), and while I was surprised now fairy are the same (it took me a while to notice that), I was also surprised on how AST has changed. Now is more "easier" and just give a dps buff, but all in all, you have always something to do with this class, and is versatile (diurnal / nocturnal )

Healing is not that bad, I could say is even better then my scholar, the only "lack" is the fast lustrate (3 charges) that AST doesn't have.

Can't compare to WHM, never played one, but If I have to choose between AST and SCH, AST win.

So why lot of ppl are complaining? (still need to ding 80, so I have no clue on late game)

For a endgame play, should I prefer AST or scholar?

People aren't complaining about any of the healers' healing output, but moreso how boring all of the changes in Shadowbringers have been.

Every skill added outside of Afflatus Misery has only made healing easier and downtime longer, the only healing skills in the game that require any forethought (Afflatus Solace/Rapture and Earthly Star) are a drop in the bucket of the +???HP tedium, and is way too little too late.
All this while our damaging kits have been reduced and dumbed down to the benefit of absolutely nobody (optimisers are more bored, anti-dps ignore as before, newbies aren't taught that they're supposed to dps).

The only healer which needs to think about their damage contribution is AST, but that requires learning every other classes' burst phases and being able to identify them at a glance, as well as getting the melee/ranged card on them. You'd better not be using 3rd party tools to track their cooldowns as that's breaking the game's ToS.

The healer specific stat is basically Accuracy, in that you require a specific amount for each fight (depending on the amount of healing GCDs required - always lower than you think) and it rewards nothing on top of that, compared to DHit and TEN which contribute damage.
Tank Stances being 'reworked' has removed the punishment for overhealing, further promoting bad practices in newbies.

I may have gotten off track a little bit...
People are complaining because we're bored. We want our class fantasy back (The Strong, The Strategic, and The Stargazer), and we want to contribute more than just 'spam nuke lmao'.
I'd recommend AST, personally, as it has more things to master than SCH.

All healers are a bit too fine when it comes to healing because they're even more overpowered compared to incoming damage than ever but at the same they have also less to do during downtime than before.
People aren't complaining about the lack of healing but about the lack of things to do during downtime. You have one 30sec dot and one nuke. That's it. You have your dps kit at level 4. Knowing that from level 4 onward your gameplay will not change one bit during downtime is pretty sobering.
It was likely done to achieve better balance and get more people to play healer but in the end it had the opposite effect for the latter: many veterans quit healing and only very few new players joined the ranks.

Compared to before, when you had to watch aggro, watch and carefully manage your mp, fight harder for your downtime and had more things to do during downtime it feels unrewarding to improve your gameplay. Overhealing was punished (double because of aggro and MP), chosing the wrong time to dps was punished (cleric stance lock anyone?) and you had multiple dots with shorter and different durations to manage.
But now you are basically fighting to push the same button even more. This is escpecially demotivating in endgame where you map out a whole fight as best as you can with your co healer only to get a couple more Glare/ Broil/ Malefic casts out. Improving your gameplay just leads to less engagement and more boredom when it should be the opposite.

I just read in the forum AST is not good as scholar or WHM, is this true (I care only about healing output in general, not dps)

I believe the people who are complaining are healers in the top tier of gameplay. For the rest of us - by which I mean healers who play to have fun, enjoy the game, run dungeons with friends (I am not suggesting that top tier healers don't do those things as well btw) but are on a lower rung skillwise - healing is still engaging. I ran Gubal Library on my lvl 79 AST last night, it was a struggle to keep the tank up through the big pulls (she died twice) and even more of a struggle to get cards on people. Also ran a Ravana trial, my co-healer fell off half way through, solo healed the rest. Weeping City raid, alliance almost wiped on Forgal. This was all the the space of a couple of hours last night. So the concept of downtime for your average healer is not the same as it is for the bunch of top tier healers who complain on the forums. Which is pretty much why SE made the changes they did, I guess.
I hated AST pre ShB, now I quite enjoy it. Should have all three healers at 80 by tonight. I don't do any content that would be considered 'demanding' (I play to relax and have fun, not be stressed by some random who thinks I suck because I don't have any FFlogs or I don't immediately know fight mechanics off by heart on the day it gets released) and I quite often only run dungeons with Trusts these days unless friends are online. But I'm very happy with the state of healers currently

The game has been suspiciously getting easier to the point of giving Gamefreak’s Pokemon a run for its money. Easy difficulty is conveniently easier to devolve for. Tanks no longer worry about Aggro, DPS/Healer no longer need To worry about stealing eminity under regular circumstances. I’m getting way off topic AST main draw were cards but turning every card into balance undermines the lore and the jobs main appeal, though I still enjoy AST I still miss the era of Royal Road and Cards being unique

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Originally Posted by lucioe

I just read in the forum AST is not good as scholar or WHM, is this true (I care only about healing output in general, not dps)

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For healing output:
Diurnal AST > WHM = SCH > Nocturnal AST

WHM has better emergency tools (Cure 3, nigh-infinite MP), but AST's healing skills are stronger.

AST-specific complaints that I've seen are almost all about the cards being simplified from before. I.e. most people who complain about it either don't like that they are all the same effect now and/or lost the royal road mechanic.

The only other complaints I really see are how AST isn't as good at healing as the other two, but those have mostly gone away as people figured out that AST is effectively guaranteed a spot in the meta with SCH and WHM splitting the other spot.

They simplified everything. Made healing skills much stronger across the board. All healers are overpowered when it comes to the healing aspect, it's irrelevant to really look into who heals better unless you're really struggling with healing in general. They made the dps skills two button wonders. Dot then nuke. It used to be that WHM was your beginner go to and once you got a little better you had other options. Right now AST is essentially the only healer that requires half a brain, all the while SCH got huge dps gameplay nerfs (half the amount of timers to keep track of, no more melee gameplay, only one fairy, etc.. list goes on).
So all healers currently heal better, and DPS super easy. These changes will affect different players in two ways:

- You're either a good healer (in terms of tiers of skill, so career healers and/or raiders) and this made healing so effin easy that once you've dabbled a tad in content you're bored out of your mind playing healer right now. Some may push for parsing but 90% of the time a bad parse run is the fault of other people so that can sap the fun out of you real fast.
- You're a beginner to casual healer and these changes made your life easier (keeping tanks/party alive is much easier), less anxiety, meeting dps requirements isn't as tedious as it was etc. etc.

Part of the issue people have with the AST's current state has to do with cards and the card mechanics (sleeve draw for example) + the loss of the lore. Having every card be a balance basically removes a lot of options ASTs had before. It's psychological but options = fun and that one run you used ewer properly during prog on someone who died, or that bole that pulled you through some mechanic (or dungeons) 100% made up for the balance fetching. Honestly, they could have kept the old system and rebalanced spear/arrow+ made spire Direct hit and everyone would've been satisfied.

All in all it boils down to something called cognitive flow in game design. Which is a fancy way of saying that gameplay has to offer both an accessible skill floor and a high skill ceiling to make sure players getting better at their class have a challenge as they go but are never overrun with anxiety from it being too hard. Right now it's really, really, easy to cap out the skill ceiling for the healers. Which is a travesty considering this is a game with high player retention so most of your base is going to get pretty damn good at it given enough time.

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Originally Posted by lucioe

For a endgame play, should I prefer AST or scholar?

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AST is the basically guaranteed spot at the moment. Really you can play any healer and easily get a group, but if you like AST anyways, that doesn't hurt - AST is strong enough even to solo heal ultimates (the only healer that can do so).

AST also has the highest APM of any healer, if you like to be kept busy. But for some this is not a positive, especially given card targeting.

The downsides mostly come down to people not liking the card system, and that you might have to meld piety.

Have to ask when were the complaints about Ast healing made? If before 5.05 yea they were undertuned compared to both sch and whm on healing and rDps but the 5.05 buffs sorted Ast's healing out.

If they are complaining about Noct Ast then yea Noct Ast is inferior to Diurnal Ast in every possible way, healing output/mp conservation/freedom to dps more all better on Diurnal and atm there are very few fights in the game where Noct shields are needed over Diurnal cd shields. People still enjoy Noct Ast due to the extra work or the shielding/preventive playstyle but most still understand it is inferior to Diurnal and needs working out (going on 6 years so I don't hold my breath anymore )

If it's about the card system then yea the card system is a hot topic always will be now (Thx SE no matter what you do now constant complaints will be a thing) due to them reworking it, taking away all the buff manipulation which helped Ast standout more, outright say not going to touch it(back in 5.05 no word since) due to those who like it now which opens up the can of worms that is the people who liked it before they changed it (very stupid move to say this), and generally having major controller issues at high end play.

If it's healer complaints in general then yea

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Originally Posted by Crushnight

Have to ask when were the complaints about Ast healing made? If before 5.05 yea they were undertuned compared to both sch and whm on healing and rDps but the 5.05 buffs sorted Ast's healing out.

If they are complaining about Noct Ast then yea Noct Ast is inferior to Diurnal Ast in every possible way, healing output/mp conservation/freedom to dps more all better on Diurnal and atm there are very few fights in the game where Noct shields are needed over Diurnal cd shields. People still enjoy Noct Ast due to the extra work or the shielding/preventive playstyle but most still understand it is inferior to Diurnal and needs working out (going on 6 years so I don't hold my breath anymore )

If it's about the card system then yea the card system is a hot topic always will be now (Thx SE no matter what you do now constant complaints will be a thing) due to them reworking it, taking away all the buff manipulation which helped Ast standout more, outright say not going to touch it(back in 5.05 no word since) due to those who like it now which opens up the can of worms that is the people who liked it before they changed it (very stupid move to say this), and generally having major controller issues at high end play.

If it's healer complaints in general then yea

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People are bored that their downtime has been reduced to 1,1,1,1,1,1,2,1,1,1,1,1 etc, on top of the downtime having been increased due to the highly unneeded new ogcds we got given, combined with the tank changes and the fight design that will never stop being scripted, starts to make healer gcd skills redundant ala benefic/cure which is a big problem.

All this on top of the devs actively avoiding as much talk about healers as possible just makes things worse as the negativity is just piled on and on as no way of knowing if they actively care about such feedback, it doesn't even need to anything other than acknowledgedment that they see our feedback, that alone would placate some people.

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Originally Posted by lucioe

For a endgame play, should I prefer AST or scholar?

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If it's regarding harder endgame content like the Savages and Ultimates, it really depends on the encounter. A White Mage and Scholar pair generally can make progression significantly smoother because of the strength of their kits paired together. Beyond that specific type of content, it shouldn't really matter for general endgame. Just play what you are most comfortable with and/or have the most fun with.

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Originally Posted by lucioe

I just read in the forum AST is not good as scholar or WHM, is this true (I care only about healing output in general, not dps)

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Yes. It's a watered down, inferior version of the system they changed it from. Though, that can be said for all healing jobs right how. Their dps rotations are dreadfully dull, uninspired, and overly homogenized. Of the 3, the AST is in the worst shape followed by the once great SCH. WHM isn't as bad as the others, but it's pretty darn boring too.

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Originally Posted by Crushnight

People are bored that their downtime has been reduced to 1,1,1,1,1,1,2,1,1,1,1,1 etc, on top of the downtime having been increased due to the highly unneeded new ogcds we got given, combined with the tank changes and the fight design that will never stop being scripted, starts to make healer gcd skills redundant ala benefic/cure which is a big problem.

All this on top of the devs actively avoiding as much talk about healers as possible just makes things worse as the negativity is just piled on and on as no way of knowing if they actively care about such feedback, it doesn't even need to anything other than acknowledgedment that they see our feedback, that alone would placate some people.

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Exactly. +1
This summarizes everything perfectly.

AST now is fine (not perfect, but fine) but I still want nothing to do with it despite maining the job for like 3 years. I had a main role identity crisis between 5.0 and 5.2 but eventually settled on tank. The fact it needed a page long list of buffs when savage dropped is pretty telling on how much attention healers were given.

I drew a line with AST with new sleeve draw + loss of stun for celestial opposition (which wasn't even spammable). I mostly just play SCH for healer in Shadowbringers despite the dysfunctional kit at 60, 70 and 80.

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Originally Posted by Mesarthim

AST now is fine (not perfect, but fine) but I still want nothing to do with it despite maining the job for like 3 years. I had a main role identity crisis between 5.0 and 5.2 but eventually settled on tank... I mostly just play SCH for healer in Shadowbringers despite the dysfunctional kit at 60, 70 and 80.

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Yeah I can't handle the SCH kit, kuddos for you for having the patience to deal with the clunky play. And, I can relate to what you said about 5.0 - 5.2. As a prior Scholar main, I quit the game for months after 5.0 release and only recently came back after buying the expansion on discount for my wife, son, and I after all this time.

I was shocked they still haven't reverted the changes they made to healers. It's one of the worst set of nerfs/redesigns I've ever seen in an MMORPG.

Sub-80 end-game play has devolved to"Broil, Broil, Broil, Broil, Bio, Broil, Heal, Broil, Broil, Bio, Heal, Broil, Broil, Broil, Broil..." <facepalm>

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Originally Posted by Jirah

The game has been suspiciously getting easier to the point of giving Gamefreak’s Pokemon a run for its money. Easy difficulty is conveniently easier to devolve for. Tanks no longer worry about Aggro, DPS/Healer no longer need To worry about stealing eminity under regular circumstances.

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Facilitating the function of a job's primary role makes the job easier to play; this doesn't necessarily translate to the game being easier. There's a big distinction there.

In order for the game (encounters) to be easier, things like DPS checks have to become more lenient, hard enrages removed, longer cast times for boss abilities, more telegraphs, less out going damage, etc. In this regard, the game hasn't got any easier at all. In fact, just the opposite as the devs are stacking more and more mechanics in normal mode encounters because the playerbase is consistently getting better at handling them. Which you can add to the reasons on how a game gets easier over time. But I digress.

As to the topic, AST is just fine as simply a healer, but this is easily accomplished with the game's healing requirements. It suffers a bit with MP regeneration and still lacks a solid skill to restore MP quickly, but other than that the majority of the complaints all gravitate towards its card mechanic. Which is a mess. Has always been a mess. And will continue to be a mess because a mechanic that heavily utilizes RNG isn't going to work. Even after stripping most those layers away with ShB, the little RNG that is left is still creating a lot of grief with this job. Not necessarily because the RNG makes getting a desired (seal) difficult, but because the RNG aspect of this mechanic has forced all of its cards into a single buff.

This job has an incredibly high APM, and a incredulously low feeling of reward even if doing it all optimally. They are what I call the catapult loaders. They do the brunt of the work, but the person launching the catapult gets to have all the fun. I hope that makes sense.

In summary: 5.0 releases a very weak, carpal-tunnel inducing, High APM with equally conflicting pressure (cards versus healing), a completely foreign card system that threw away the lore of the cards and capacity and utility to save the party in a pinch for high raid performace and leader board numbers (the random fate aspect was like one of the main hooks of the job), and the buffs took way too long to be implemented.

Added to the overall extreme simplifications, and the role is literally only active when players are new or just phoning it in and going through the motions because of the stark difference in just encounter & job designs, add in like two new jobs and trusts, and that's resulted in a hlr exodus to roles that literally feel like way better designed to keep players interested in playing them. And, TBH, every tank but PLD feels like that as well, IMO.

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Originally Posted by Gemina

Facilitating the function of a job's primary role makes the job easier to play; this doesn't necessarily translate to the game being easier. There's a big distinction there.

In order for the game (encounters) to be easier, things like DPS checks have to become more lenient, hard enrages removed, longer cast times for boss abilities, more telegraphs, less out going damage, etc. In this regard, the game hasn't got any easier at all. In fact, just the opposite as the devs are stacking more and more mechanics in normal mode encounters because the playerbase is consistently getting better at handling them. Which you can add to the reasons on how a game gets easier over time. But I digress.

As to the topic, AST is just fine as simply a healer, but this is easily accomplished with the game's healing requirements. It suffers a bit with MP regeneration and still lacks a solid skill to restore MP quickly, but other than that the majority of the complaints all gravitate towards its card mechanic. Which is a mess. Has always been a mess. And will continue to be a mess because a mechanic that heavily utilizes RNG isn't going to work. Even after stripping most those layers away with ShB, the little RNG that is left is still creating a lot of grief with this job. Not necessarily because the RNG makes getting a desired (seal) difficult, but because the RNG aspect of this mechanic has forced all of its cards into a single buff.

This job has an incredibly high APM, and a incredulously low feeling of reward even if doing it all optimally. They are what I call the catapult loaders. They do the brunt of the work, but the person launching the catapult gets to have all the fun. I hope that makes sense.

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TBH, optimizing things in general can just strip a ton of enjoyment out of games. Especially, if it's an aspect that's like totally forced and hen-pecky

When it comes to this game, I realize I can't get too attached. I play with others who enjoy the story, and so do I. But, really I've lost faith developers care what the population thinks about the direction they're taking jobs in this game. Going on almost a year they've been mum on the dissent from the healing community; largely, we and our concerns don't exist.

And, I actually fear it's going to get worse in patches to come b/c this game works to cater to a fairly large crowd of gamers who use a controller. I wholeheartedly expect they're going to continue gutting classes, simplifying character/skill designs, and work to homogenize game-play so everything is basically the same across jobs, minus cosmetic differences of course.

While Jobs might look different and have varying animations, functionally they'll increasingly be more of the same.

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Originally Posted by Truen

When it comes to this game, I realize I can't get too attached. I play with others who enjoy the story, and so do I. But, really I've lost faith developers care what the population thinks about the direction they're taking jobs in this game. Going on almost a year they've been mum on the dissent from the healing community; largely, we and our concerns don't exist.

And, I actually fear it's going to get worse in patches to come b/c this game works to cater to a fairly large crowd of gamers who use a controller. I wholeheartedly expect they're going to continue gutting classes, simplifying character/skill designs, and work to homogenize game-play so everything is basically the same across jobs, minus cosmetic differences of course.

While Jobs might look different and have varying animations, functionally they'll increasingly be more of the same.

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Don't blame controller players they are not an issue Ast and Sch never were issues on controller prior to 5.0, I mained sch during ARR/early HW (the time where they had their largest toolkit) where I became Ast from Midas onwards they were very manageable and they added things like the cross hotbar which made it even easier to have access to all skills.

The changes done to healers were to do 2 things
1.Force a more healing focus gameplay (prior to ShB Yoshi P said he felt it was unfair that sch made other healers do the healing more so they could dps, which was especially bad as sch was the one healing the most at the time)
2.Make it easier for new healers to get into the role without feeling overwhelmed

1 Backfired spectacularly when their encounter design team didn't compliment the changes and in fact caused a greater emphasis on Dps as we have more downtime than ever before this expansion, Whoops.

2 worked made a lot of people try out the new versions of healers but it created another 2 problems a lot of the veterans only play out of obligations then just set them aside when not needed if they didn't outright drop them and there is barely any hook for the healer jobs, I cannot in good conscience say Cnj(whm) will get better at 80 to a lv 20 sprout who is bored of it after 3 dungeons nor could I recommend Ast or Sch as the gameplay while slightly different with how they handle healing their downtime/dps is the exact same tedium Cnj has and that is for 78 levels (dagnabit this is so bad why were the healers alone designed around group play only).

And if they truly dumbed things down for controller players pray please explain why current Ast who has the worst controller issues this game has seen not been dealt with at all to ease said issues.

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Originally Posted by MPNZ

TBH, optimizing things in general can just strip a ton of enjoyment out of games. Especially, if it's an aspect that's like totally forced and hen-pecky

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The way I see things, is that if doesn't feel rewarding or fun to try and play your job optimally then something's not right. That doesn't necessarily mean the job is designed poorly as sometimes how a job plays is in contrast to a player's playstyle, but I don't feel this is the case with AST. The card mechanic is atrocious and literally strips all enjoyment out of this job.

Ignoring the boring dps rotation that all healers share for this, but the reason why I like WHM and SCH much more than AST is Sleeve Draw. Healing-wise I'm fine with it. I can also live with the fact that all cards are the same, even though I prefer the variety of the old card system. But Sleeve Draw is such an annoying ability, making the already annoying need to constantly target the DPS even more annoying. I just hate it and it makes me not play AST very often anymore.

Though many others in this thread have offered various replies, it can be boiled down to a handful of fundamental problems

1. Cards and lore got stripped away, the new cards are loved by raiders, but detested by everybody else. The average player can't see the difference to dps without a parser (ps4 users can't even do that and not everyone on pc wants to break the ToS) and even then there's little thought going into the card as the colour tells you which party members its used for. The changes instead of removing fishing, encourage it with redraw stacks and divination given the seal mechanic.
2. All time magic and most unique spells/abilities scrapped leaving it bland further stripping its identity, complexity and playstyle. It was supposed to be the high skill healer with lower potencies but more flexible
3. The introduction of the play button screwed controller players incredibly badly. What takes a pc player 3 mouse clicks (draw, target, play) takes a controller player several due to how navigation in the party works. Pc players can even knock it down to 2 clicks due to how macros can be put on screen.
4. There is no feeling of reward from the Astrologian now for getting cards lined up with buffs and time magic nor does levelling result in awesome new skills, much of the reworked skills and new skills are either instant ogcds of regular gcds, clunky or not needed because the encounter damage still doesnt keep up with outgoing healing.
5. At launch, it was a horribly weak mess and the devs are still buffing it to try and bring it up to par for raiding.
6. A single death cripples it. Small bit of lag knock you off into a pit? Once you're revived I hope you like doing nothing but throw a single card for the next 30 seconds while you get mp back.
Noct ast in particular is awful as its functonally inferior to diurnal in addition to having higher mp costs so its likely you have lucid on cd a lot. At least SCH has the fairy and WHM has infinite mp played with any degree of competency

In addition all healers and tanks have suffered this expansion due to excessive homogenisation, unneeded gutting of dps skills (thereby ruining solo play and levelling) and subsequent stripping of downtime abilities.

Yeah healers and Tanks kinda got tuned down /(ugh) and some dps did too, I don't think this type of redesigning was necessary as balance wasn't in a bad spot to begin with it encouraged people to work as a team.

Pretty simple:

They have the most actions per minute for equal or lesser results.

https://i.imgur.com/aGpuMVn.png

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

They have the most actions per minute for lesser results.

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Actually, they put out more or less the same potential results as WHM and SCH, but have to work twice as hard to match them. Also to add to this, targeting party members for cards feels horrible particularly on controller. Having to put in like 5 extra inputs within 1 second just to put a card on each dps player is particularly nasty when you have Sleeve Draw active.