Astro in savage

[RichardButte]

so if i get this right the OP and his supporters, want AST to have equal healing power to WHM or SCH, but give more dps to the raid than both? how is that gona be ballanced? and would the other jobs have the same problem if the AST has their healing power + more DPS? what would be the point to play SCH or WHM then?

That's really not what anyone's asking for.

No one wants AST to be overpowered by having godly heals and godly buffs (not anyone in their right mind, anyway), but AST either needs to bring as much to a raid as SCH/WHM do or there's no point in ever bringing one, ever.

The buffs are pretty damn terrible right now, but making them more potent isn't going to make the AST better at keeping people alive or anything so I don't personally think that's the route to go.

[Ghishlain]

Forgive me father, for I have sinned: i was tired and forgot to divide by two.

That totally justifies telling me that I "need to stop talking about math", which is then totally not offensive because it was prefaced with "no offense".

Never mind the fact that I was wrong in my favor, meaning my argument was actually stronger than I stated, so it's not like I was trying to mislead anyone.

Besides, if I stopped talking about math, who would you be smarmy and condescending to?

Consider how badly you use math to try to justify your position, yes, you should stop talking about math. Considering you're trying to argue balance, you're continued mishandling of math does nothing more than undermine your own position as an advocate for AST balance. I was trying to be nice and not try to make you look like a complete fool but hey, if you want to be salty, let's play.

1.5% for each of 8 people, which is a cumulative increase of 12%. If we want to call it 1.5%, we can, we just have to then divide AST's 1.5% by 8 to get the actual number since we're only casting that buff on one person instead of 8.

The 10% chance at boosting DPS for 15 seconds comes at the cost of a 1 in 6 chance to get that ability, which averages out to a 1.67% DPS boost on one player per minute. It would have to be closer to a 40-60% DPS increase for 15 seconds to actually be worth anything

Your first error with your math is you have no understanding about how to balance the power of a card with the probability of the effect you're trying to garner. When you tried to equate 8 people doing 1.5% additional damage is the same as one person getting a 12% increase on a single player, you showed how heavy handed your balance suggestions actually are. As every player in the game has a different DPS potential due to their job, skill, and equipment, giving an extreme single target boost would be devastating to game balance.

Let's consider your example of boosting Balance and Arrow to 40-60%. Now, let's consider this A1S parse for Faust - the DPS check wall and make an assumption that we're gonna RR every first card for the bonus effect. Since we have Shuffle up every minute, you'll be guaranteed to get Arrow or Balance 55.5% [ 1/3 + ( 1/3 * 2/3) = 55.5%] of the time. We will also assume Arrow / Balance gives the same boost despite the job in question just for easy math (since everyone's baseline is Fey Wind 1.5% haste increase = 1.5% DPS increase).

Group DPS = 8,020
SMN DPS (highest) = 1,581.66

Extend Balance / Arrow = 20-30% increase in DPS 55.5% of the time = 11.1% - 16.7% increase = SMN DPS being increased by 175.56-264.14. A 2.2% to 3.3% increase in total raid DPS.
Enhanced Balance / Arrow = 15%-22.5% increase in DPS 55.5% of the time 8.3% - 12.5% = SMN DPS being increased by 131.28 - 197.71. A 1.6% to 2.5% increase in total raid DPS.
Expand Balance / Arrow = 10-15% increase in raid DPS 55% of the time = 5.6% to 8.3% increase to total raid DPS

So, right there alone, getting the WORST card combination is still a minimum of a 1.6% raid DPS increase. Then consider that drawing Balance in your initial draw is equal to drawing Extend. This means you have a 50% chance to get Extend (Balance/Arrow/Spear), 16.7% chance to get Enhance (Bole), and 33.3% chance to get Expand (Ewer/Spire). If you do the weighted averages.

With a 40% Balance/Arrow - 2.2%*0.50 + 1.6%*0.167 + 5.6%*0.333 = 1.10% + 0.27% + 1.86% = 3.23% average increase to raid damage
With a 60% Balance/Arrow - 3.3%*0.50 + 2.5%*0.167 + 8.3%*0.333 = 1.65% + 0.42% + 2.76% = 4.83% average increase to raid damage

So, at this point, why would I bother playing any other healer if double AST, with the buffs you're suggesting, and just have them alternate when they Royal Road and buff?

people would cry OP because they don't understand how statistics work...

^ Which leads to the irony of this statement.

The more I think about it, the more astonished I am that you can revel in the math of this discussion like a, no offense, pig rolling in filth, yet somehow still completely miss the point of it...

We're talking about the fact that the buffs do not compensate for the AST's overall craptacular healing and terribad mana management. No amount of card micromanaging is going to change that fact.

Either the cards make a HUGE impact on ending the fight more quickly or the AST needs to have its healing potencies dramatically increased

I haven't missed the point. I just take issue with your attempts to make the card system "better" when it doesn't need the dramatic buffs that you continually suggest.

To me, AST will never be viable in any progression content because they lack the proper tools to heal efficiently. Buffs of any nature won't do you any good if your tanks and DPS are lying flat on the ground, and no amount of "buffs to cards" will fix that. Your buffs to cards will make AST the defacto healer to go to in farm content, but do nothing for low ilvl progression content. There will be an inflection point in player skill, gear, and job composition that will put an AST over a SCH or WHM in progression content, but that point will be a very narrow range.

That's why I made a few suggestions to Synastry and Celestial Opposition a few pages back to help with an ASTs output. Just to add to that, I'd like to see Enhanced Benefic be adjusted for which sect you're in. Having Diurnal Sect Benefic proc should make the spell become oGCD and having Nocturnal Sect Benefic proc should either make the spell cheaper in MP or heal for a higher %, perhaps in the range of 20-30%.

First thing first - balance the baseline healing toolkit so it's perfectly viable to take any healer to any content. Then make tweaks to the unique features of their kit. Afterwards, let the player's decide which healer they want to take based on their skill, gear, comfort level, and job composition.

[Vlady]

Some very strong points made. A well thought out post but balance I believe is the only buff that exponentially buffs all damage across the board including cooldowns. If you manage to spread it pretty fight it has bumped dragoon dps by several hundred on burst phases and the 20 point potency hit only averages out to about a 5% heal difference. If someone dies while astrology was healing then the raid was moar likely in trouble anyhow.

[TyloRime]

Most of us wishing to main Astrologian in progression content would agree the Job needs more help than its been given... We're "on the same side" so to speak, so perhaps we could contribute to the feedback discussion witgout being downright rude and hateful towards each other, considering we all want the same end result: a viable end-game healer.

[jojober]

Tried making a general thread, but of course it got pushed to the back of the line immediately. I made a smaller reply about this idea in an earlier AST thread here on healer forums, but here is a little more thought out.

Hi hi^ ^ I know there have been a million threads about AST and how to change them etc etc, but I had what I think was a good idea. I put this as a reply to a thread in the healer forum, but since Grekumah said to post how we thought changes could be good, I decided hopefully here it has a better chance of getting noticed.

I know most AST, myself included, don't want to be a copy/paste of whm or sch. We want to be our own type of healer. WHM is kind of burst healing, SCH is best for Mitigation. So where can we fit in without stepping on toes? We are supposed to be a hybrid healing job, so let us be, and here's how...

Right now, Diurnal Sect is our go to for most stuff. It is basically a watered down WHM. We have decent heals without all the awesome cooldowns, and we have our cards that are meant to balance the slightly weaker heal kit. What if we flipped that for Nocturnal Sect? Instead of having good heals and minimal card support, what if our cards were as strong as our diurnal heals, and our heals were as minimal as our diurnal cards?

Several times when the question of adding a support role has come up, the answer has been no because that would cause a problem with party/duty finder, and that makes sense to me. We are still healers though, we would queue as such. Then we would analyze the situation and decide when is best to be in heal mode and when is best to be in support mode, much like how whm/sch stance dance with Cleric's. This would of course require the ability to change stances in battle, but to make it so we can't do it all at once, there should be some kind of cool down on that.

How does this make us unique? Instead of burst heals or mitigation heals, we are helping the battle to go faster and or safer. I feel like that is the direction the job was meant to go in the first place. This idea still incorporates the risk v reward feeling that a lot of AST want, and it adds a new level of strategy since we wouldn't be able to flip back and forth.

Now I am no balancer genius, so I won't propose what each card should do in its buffed up state, so I will not even try that. But if anyone has an idea of what would be reasonable to make our Nocturnal Support side work, please lets get some ideas going!

Sorry again for the millionth thread, but I hope you took the time to see it through!

Jojober

[NorthernLadMSP]

I really liked the idea someone else had (sorry, can't remember who it was) about adding a brand new switchable stance where one stance would strengthen the heals (up to the equivalent of WHM/SCH) while keeping the cards as they are now and the other stance would keep the weaker heals like we have now, but really buff up the cards. So, you could choose to be in Diurnal and Nocturnal as they are now, but there would be this additional "heal" stance and another "buff" stance. I know that would make me very happy.

[Kietsu]

(A long and intelligent post goes here)

The problem with the cards, and the current meta as it stands, is that the amount of damage you add to the party's total DPS is almost always less than it would be if:
A) You were a Scholar.
B) You were a White Mage, thus allowing your Scholar to spend more time dealing damage.

[Koopatroopa]

Reduce Draw to 15seconds
Shuffle cannot re-draw the same card
Collective Unconscious = added benefits- 'Nocturnal- increases direct heals taken by 15%, Diurnal- increases shields by 20% - Remove the channel but silence the caster. Can click to stop it prematurely

Celestral Opposition = remove the stun and 5 second buff extension, gives everyone the Spread card to full effect.

Time Dilation = reduce cooldown to 1 minute, also doubles target Ast shield strength.


Synergy with the WHM/SCH, weaker heals stay but make up for the buffs they provide as they can be pumped out more frequently. I think this is a nice tradeoff.

[Elleia]

In my opinion, the main issue with AST is that it lacks the healing ability and buffs to enable the same amount of DPS that a SCH/WHM combo can bring.

Using savage Faust as an example, I typically pull ~200 DPS on my WHM before switching over to healing while our SCH does between 600-750 (an all time high for him). I don't believe there is any combination of cards that would increase DPS by 800 overall, even if rng is being good to you.

With a SCH/AST combo, the AST has a much harder time solo healing than a WHM, and in most cases, the SCH cannot afford to dps as much. I have yet to try WHM/AST, as my healing partner only has his SCH leveled. I would assume this would allow the AST to directly dps a bit more, but even then I doubt the dps would match up.

I do love my AST and yes, it is capable of healing all content. Unfortunately at the moment, it doesn't bring much to the table when compared to the other healers.

[Ghishlain]

I'm not a math wiz, but I'm going to try to follow the logic of this sentence and equation. Draw is on a 30 second cooldown and Shuffle on a 60. So you can draw a card 3 times a minute. 2 of the 6 cards are the ones we would want. This means we have 1/3 chance to get something useful on one Draw and 2/3 chances on another draw (1/3 on second Draw, then another 1/3 after you Shuffle the one you don't want). I still can't seem to figure out what the first 1/3rd refers to in that equation? I know it's Friday afternoon and I'm tired so maybe I'm way off base, so Ghishlain can you explain it? I'm curious the thought process.

I'm no statistician, so anyone with more knowledge in field can correct my logic if I'm mistaken. If I recall my math properly, here's the logic.

The first 1/3 is the chance of you drawing the desired card (Arrow / Balance). This is a 33.3% probability

The second half of the equation is 1/3 * 2/3. This is the math to indicate the probability of drawing Arrow / Balance again if you had the opportunity to re roll your chances. You have a 2/3 chance to require a re-roll, and in that re-roll you have a 1/3 chance to get the card you want - hence the 1/3 * 2/3 = 2/9 or 22.2% chance.

You combine the two probabilities together to ascertain the probability of acquiring an Arrow / Balance card in two attempts, which is 55.5%.

With the assumption that I intend to RR my first card (regardless of the situation), my second draw will always be at the one minute after I potentially used a shuffle two draws ago, so I will always have shuffle up at the same time I'm drawing the card I want to use my RR effect on.