Your thoughts on Astrolgian so far?

[Kerrigen]

It's baffling that each of the AST skills comes with a significant drawback considering how weak its healing throughput is. I agree that it should at the very least be MP efficient, which it isn't at all in relatively high damage situations.

- Draw is on too long a CD for what it brings to the table, or the Card effects are too weak. In a raid situation, 30s is a long time. We're trading throughput for buffs but the buffs themselves aren't that potent / frequent.
- Not being able to Spread outside of battle is completely arbitrary. I get that it's to prevent you from "choosing" and storing a card before starting a battle but there's already a way to do that for content that matters, it just makes it extra annoying.
- I could understand not being able to switch Sects during battle if we had actual healing or mitigation CDs that work. As it stands I don't think it's justified and it could even add an extra layer of steategy.
- Luminiferous Aether should scale with PIE, otherwise it'll be far too weak 2 years from now when we have close to 20k MP. Both WHM and SCH have MP recovering actions that scale with PIE, AST doesn't (outside of maybe preventing decay with Ewer but then you're not buffing someone else so what's the point?).
- I don't see how Lightspeed warrants such a huge potency penalty considering how situational it already is. You're just losing throughput for no good reason when you use it. It's OK to cast stoneskin on people in between pulls, I guess?
- Synastry is nice on paper, but too restrictive for what it brings to the table (only works with Benefic/II basically).
- Time Dilation is nice, but it wouldn't be game-breaking if we could use it on ourselves considering our CDs aren't potent to begin with.
- Collective Unconcious is almost insulting in its current incarnation. With how restrictive it is, its effect should be much more potent, say 3 times more potent. When you're using it you're not doing anything else for up to 18s AND standing still, come on.
- an extra 5-10s on Celestial Opposition wouldn't hurt in regard to its CD and the fact that it's a lv60 skill. 5s is like 2 GCDs.

I don't think having lower potency heals is AST's main issue to be honest; it's that outside of spamming baseline heals all day you're powerless on the healing front with the weak CDs it has. They offer very little synergy to your healing actions. It's currently not very flexible, as if they were so scared that it'd be overpowered they felt the need to gimp every skill they created for it [or it hasn't been playtested in real conditions].

Sorry if that comes off as a rant, it really isn't and AST is still fun to play. But I definitely think it's undercooked and need mostly minor, sometimes major (Collective Unconcious) adjustments to be fully functional in a raid environment. It's not that it cannot do content, it's that I currently don't see the draw in bringing it over any of the other healers.

Edit: post above mine really captures my feeling, I'm glad I'm not alone.

[Zoralink]

- Synastry is nice on paper, but too restrictive for what it brings to the table (only works with Benefic/II basically).

I'm with you besides this. Synastry is extremely powerful in diurnal stance, pop an aspected helios on the party and an aspected benefit on the synastry target, then throw out your benefic IIs if need be. That's a lot of raw healing (And a lot of enmity) and can be used as a pseudo "oh shit" button in lieu of any other option.

Doesn't really help noct stance though.

Personally I think Synastry should just be a permanent buff, but only something like 30% potency is transferred. It's bizarre to me how long its cooldown is for what it is.

[SuzakuCMX]

It's bizarre to me how long its cooldown is for what it is.

That applies to almost all AST's CDs.

[Zoralink]

That applies to almost all AST's CDs.

Ha, fair enough.

[KisaiTenshi]

- Luminiferous Aether should scale with PIE, otherwise it'll be far too weak 2 years from now when we have close to 20k MP. Both WHM and SCH have MP recovering actions that scale with PIE, AST doesn't (outside of maybe preventing decay with Ewer but then you're not buffing someone else so what's the point?).

It does scale with PIE, it scales with the BASE PIE, the PIE that you get from leveling, not the PIE added by gear/bonus-points. It's 33% (potency 80), same as Shroud of Saints. What AST doesn't have is the equivalent of Energy Drain/Assize.

[Kerrigen]

It does scale with PIE, it scales with the BASE PIE, the PIE that you get from leveling, not the PIE added by gear/bonus-points. It's 33% (potency 80), same as Shroud of Saints. What AST doesn't have is the equivalent of Energy Drain/Assize.

I thought that it was obvious that I wasn't talking about base PIE when I mentionned that it wouldn't be enough 2 years from now and comparing it to WHM/SCH MP regen skills, but total PIE. We need a %-based MP regen if that makes it clearer, something that will scale with gear.