Your thoughts on Astrolgian so far?

[Seryl199]

@Seryl the point is you cannot rely on your deck. Sure it's all nice if you say you can use an expanded bole + disable + collective unconscious or whatever to mitigate party wide attacks, but you cannot be sure that you'll have bole available when you need it because of rng, even if you factor in Spread. This means that every new mechanic must be manageable even without cards so you can just use a SCH and benefit from the higher healing throughput for all the duration of the encounter without having to rely on rng. Also I'd be playing in Nocturnal since the other healer in my party is a WHM and Nocturnal is very bad atm. It gives weaker shields than a SCH's while being very MP consuming. Not good at all.

I'm fully aware of that. This thread of full of things that WHM can do and things that SCH can do. I know that, been playing them since 2.0. I'm here to discuss what AST can do. AST has a chance of providing powerful buffs that can help the party overpower a mechanic that the party may just be able to overcome. If you're looking for AST to SCH or WHM, you're going to be disappointed, every time. Now, if you want to discuss that RNG is too difficult for AST to manage, or that an encounter is too taxing for AST to heal without additionally taxing the other healer, I'm game.

Nocturnal Sect, for example. I'd rather be in Diurnal any day, but if spike damage is really high, there needs to be a healer to mitigate. AST can do that reasonably well, but they lose out on HoT's which really cuts down their efficiency, causing, like you said, AST to use more MP or the other healer picking up the slack.

I'm fine with most of the Draw mechanic, although Shuffle could be a lower CD if only to combat getting shafted on RNG and drawing the same card. Others have suggested that Shuffling a card should remove it from the pool of possible draws, that sounds more reasonable for a 90 second CD.