Astrologian buffs confirmed

[RichardButte]

In situations where it's Astrologian & White Mage, White Mage will handle the bulk of the healing and Astrologians will be a pseudo-scholar but will still be prioritizing their main core system, the cards. Astrologians are there to increase DPS and whatnot, and capitalize on certain situations such as saving a Balance with spread during a burn phase and coordinating with the party to stack damage buffs for maximum effect. In addition to this, since AST doesn't have Virus or a reliable type of Sacred Soil, you can shift your party composition to compensate for that. So yeah, in the event you run AST & White Mage, you should maybe take in a more defensive party composition and have a Warrior, Monk, Summoner & MCH for the stacking damage/stat reducing debuffs.

The problem with this is twofold...

First of all, forming a raid group around the weaknesses of the AST isn't going to go over well with many players. If I was told I couldn't bring my BLM because we need to build the raid around compensating for the weaknesses of the AST, it's only going to stoke the flames of animosity toward ASTs.

Second, if savage encounters are lenient enough on healing that you can lean on one healer to do the majority of the healing, then the encounters are going to steamrolled by groups bringing two reliable healers, unless every encounter has a DPS check with a wipe mechanic, but it's not like AST can reliably get a RRed Balance every single time, either. The odds are sadly in favor of the AST actually adding no meaningful contribution via their cards at...all. Building around an AST is just inviting trouble.

And if you COULD build a group that would only need one healer, you'd be better off building that group with one extra DPS instead of an AST.

At this point, I think they should just give the AST some more healing potency and call it a day.

-Remove the stupid 25% potency reduction on Light Speed and have it reduce the GCD as well
-Let us move while in CU so we don't waste it seconds after we cast it when a random AoE pops up
-Maybe make ED 20 seconds instead of 40 for CD
-Make the CD on LA 90 seconds instead of 120
-Let Noct stance's shields crit like SCH's do

There, now the AST will be only slightly less reliable than one of the other healers instead of massively less reliable, and the cards will still be shit the majority of the time but will occasionally help the party a little bit.

But in the meantime, people won't be groaning every time an AST shows up in DF, and really, so long as ASTs are queuing as healers and not some support hybrid, they should be able to handle emergency situations like other classes because those situations are GOING to happen in DF runs.