Astro in savage

[Troile]

Hi, thanks for dropping by, Grukumah =p

Here's some of my thoughts regarding AST in its current incarnation.

I won't comment about the card system as I know that's an incredible PITA to balance as an AST's buffs are directly dependent on RNG, player skill (both the AST and their party), and the AST's familiarity with other classes/jobs. I do like the idea of Ewer / Spire being Royal Roaded to Expand as Expand has the greatest potential increase to a party's power and both Ewer / Spire are situational compared to the other four cards in the deck.

In terms of healing potency, I feel the goal is to give AST more emergency heals as the potency values of the existing cures feel right. So, here are two ideas to consider to help that: (I apologize in advance if these ideas were mentioned somewhere else on these forums)

• Synastry

  Adjust to make it so that it will always affect the target, even if the AST in question is healing a target that has the Synastry buff. This will directly translate into increased HPS that isn't so situational to "two tank fights" like P2 Bismark and A1 Oppressor. If you wish to make this buff more readily available for use, you can also adjust the cool down to be 1 minute and reduce the potency to be 25% to suit the same potency per uptime. While this does in theory make it more potent than Divine Seal, it doesn't take into account AoE heals and HoT ticks, so I figure that's fair.

• Celestial Opposition

  I feel like if you made this ability grant a 15-20 second buff to AST that allows their Aspected spells to take into account BOTH sects, it may fix a lot of complaints about both the ability and the help increase HPS from the AST. It'd probably need some tweaking but I feel it's a good start and I feel fits the theme of AST and sects better.

I have to say I like the idea of Celestial Opposition. Makes me wonder why we didn't have a cooldown from the start that allows both sects to be used at once. Though allowing the switching of sects in combat would grant a similar effect on a more consistent basis. Even if it would require two casts as opposed to the same cast. Nice suggestions.

On the other hand.....I feel like the Diurnal and Nocturnal bonuses wouldn't be compatible in the same spell. For instance, the shield effect lends itself to spamming. Ie: Cast aspected for shield - enemy hits tank - tank loses shield - recast aspected. If you were to spam a spell with both the regen and the shield, you would be wasting the previous spell's regen ticks.

Still a nice idea though, but it may be better to keep the bonuses separate by allowing the switching of stances in combat.

Perhaps one way to deal with that using your CO suggestion is to tweak how the regen is applied with each cast. For instance instead of just overwriting the current regen, it extends it for a few seconds with each cast up to a limit. For example:

First cast applies regen for 18 seconds. You cast it the second time with with 5 seconds left, it applies a regen effect for 23 seconds. You cast it again with 20 seconds left, but it only extends it to 30 seconds (the max cap). Of course this would only apply when under the buff effect of Celestial Opposition. When not under the buff effect, recasting a diurnal aspected benefic would simply overwrite the regen like normal.