Yoshi-P's Interview with Famitsu includes a few comments about AST

[Dyvid]

You're missing the point a little. The idea here is to give secondary benefits to make cards a little useful even when their primary function is unnecessary.

E.g. If you have no need to Bole your tank, you can throw it on a DPS or the SCH for a tiny crit boost. As for Arrow, it's already plenty useful in most situations and doesn't need a mini-Spire as a consolation prize.

Hmm, interesting idea but the secondary would have to be done in such a way to not OP the cards. AoE DEF + Critical Hit bonus on the whole team is something to consider.

[Geardagas]

You're missing the point a little. The idea here is to give secondary benefits to make cards a little useful even when their primary function is unnecessary.

E.g. If you have no need to Bole your tank, you can throw it on a DPS or the SCH for a tiny crit boost. As for Arrow, it's already plenty useful in most situations and doesn't need a mini-Spire as a consolation prize.

That makes sense. If that's the case, you'd actually want secondaries that don't match the primary buff because it would spread out the rng. Not a bad idea.

The reason I mentioned the tp usage reduction for arrow is that sometimes people complain that it's running them out of tp...although they more often complain that it messes up their rotations in relation to their buff/debuff timers, which really can't be helped.

[Taranok]

That will, sadly, still have the same problem right now. The cards aren't good enough individually to take something like an AST over a Scholar. If you want more DPS, the cards need to directly compete with the Fairy and actually beat it at its own game all the time, which they just don't. Even with secondary benefits, they'd still be trash, they just wouldn't be completely useless on top of it.

The issue the AST suffers from sadly won't be fixed by fixing the cards, either. It's a class without an identity. From the ground up, it was designed so that it could either replace the WHM or the SCH, but it wasn't made powerful enough to actually accomplish this for the obvious reason that if it can replace either, it will replace both. As others have brought up, the class just needs a complete rework to design it such that it's actually a unique healer apart from the Scholar and WHM, instead of trying to be a bad replacement for the SCH/WHM. The devs really messed up on this class.

[Assirra]

That will, sadly, still have the same problem right now. The cards aren't good enough individually to take something like an AST over a Scholar. If you want more DPS, the cards need to directly compete with the Fairy and actually beat it at its own game all the time, which they just don't. Even with secondary benefits, they'd still be trash, they just wouldn't be completely useless on top of it.

The issue the AST suffers from sadly won't be fixed by fixing the cards, either. It's a class without an identity. From the ground up, it was designed so that it could either replace the WHM or the SCH, but it wasn't made powerful enough to actually accomplish this for the obvious reason that if it can replace either, it will replace both. As others have brought up, the class just needs a complete rework to design it such that it's actually a unique healer apart from the Scholar and WHM, instead of trying to be a bad replacement for the SCH/WHM. The devs really messed up on this class.

Finally people are starting to get it.
This class feels like a rushed mix of ideas without a care of how it would actually work. Purely from design this thing needs a rework from the ground up. We are currently a support healer in a game that does not allow it. You can buff the cards up to 1000% potency but it wouldn't fix the design issues and will turn us into a farm content healer.

[SuzakuCMX]

Finally people are starting to get it.
This class feels like a rushed mix of ideas without a care of how it would actually work. Purely from design this thing needs a rework from the ground up. We are currently a support healer in a game that does not allow it. You can buff the cards up to 1000% potency but it wouldn't fix the design issues and will turn us into a farm content healer.

It doesn't need a total overhaul. If we had a way to buff our own healing temporarily or a way to shove our missing healing to the other healer, our healing would be fine. If cards were more reliable or more effective, they would be fine, too. Neither of those need a total reworking of the class.

[Vlady]

It doesn't need a total overhaul. If we had a way to buff our own healing temporarily or a way to shove our missing healing to the other healer, our healing would be fine. If cards were more reliable or more effective, they would be fine, too. Neither of those need a total reworking of the class.

Agreed. Astrologian does not need any overhauls and there are two prime cooldowns ripe that could be changed to boost our abilities somehow. Also I love your sig art.

[Muahbec]

...

What she means is that no matter how much they buff us, we will still be a whm/sch jr.
Both whm and sch are unique
Whm: burst healing, raw healing power.
Sch: Damage mitigation healer.
But AST is just a ripoff of both.
Sure, they'll buff ast, but it will still be an almost complete copy of whm and sch, there's nothing unique about it.
When you switch from whm to sch you gotta learn how to play a complete different job with different tools.
But when you switch from whm/sch to ast, you will pretty much have almost everything you had, with just different animations and some useless cards.
Nothing unique about it.
Ast really needs its own identity.
But sadly SE came up with the "brilliant" idea of turning it into a hybrid, instead of using the amazing time/star mage theme to make something unique like they did when they created SCH.

[SuzakuCMX]

Agreed. Astrologian does not need any overhauls and there are two prime cooldowns ripe that could be changed to boost our abilities somehow. Also I love your sig art.

Oh, thanks I did it myself from the Countdown 10 art.

What she means is that no matter how much they buff us, we will still be a whm/sch jr.
Both whm and sch are unique
Whm: burst healing, raw healing power.
Sch: Damage mitigation healer.
But AST is just a ripoff of both.
Sure, they'll buff ast, but it will still be an almost complete copy of whm and sch, there's nothing unique about it.
When you switch from whm to sch you gotta learn how to play a complete different job with different tools.
But when you switch from whm/sch to ast, you will pretty much have almost everything you had, with just different animations and some useless cards.
Nothing unique about it.
Ast really needs its own identity.
But sadly SE came up with the "brilliant" idea of turning it into a hybrid, instead of using the amazing time/star mage theme to make something unique like they did when they created SCH.

I don't necessarily agree that they need a complete rework to become a unique healer. Instead of copying WHM/SCH they could just keep their basic abilities the same now while tweaking CU/CO and somehow incorporate the cards into healing (Synastry perm buff and heals someone for 10% of their max HP when a card is used?) They could also further develop the support healer by giving AST a Mind buff and letting them place a 5-15% Healing Buff on their co-healer, so that way AST can only soloheal content they are overgeared for or that has low healing requirements and in raids they can become the DPS/Buffing healer that only throws out heals every once in a while.

Also I'm not sure I'd classify SCH as "damage mitigation healer." They only have 4 spells that mitigate damage (Adlo, Succor, E4E, Supervirus) and half of those can be cross-classed to WHM and the other half aren't their primary form of healing. Succor was formerly their only AoE heal option outside of a fairy CD and Adlo was only used before big hits, in the same way that WHM used to use their 18% Stoneskin before a big hit. The difference between SCH and WHM was also slightly lessened in 3.0 because of SCH getting a couple more AoE options and WHM getting better MP management and oGCD heals. WHM is still THE powerhouse due to Divine Seal and Presence of Mind, but SCH always had Eos if they wanted to pump out more heals anyways. Lustrate and Fairy Healing was just good enough to get by without in 8-man content, but now a SCH/AST duo would probably require Eos to make up for that (but since it's a DPS loss to use Eos over Selene in raids and AST is a DPS loss as well.....)

The biggest differences in WHM and SCH healing is that SCH traditionally had better oGCD heals (3x Lustrate per min vs. Benediction 5 min) and better MP Management/Efficiency (Lustrate and Aetherflow and Fairy Healing).

If AST could bring a buff that matched or surpassed Eos consistently and they had better mana management, a Di AST and an Eos SCH would probably be a worthwhile raid composition.

AST is just comparatively bad right now, though.

[Asheilin]

just saw this post. Made my night
to comments:
I feel AST's identity is actually its cards and Aspected spells because you can change how you do things by a switched stance. I practically mained WHM in 2.0 but after trying AST I feel in love with it and its star globe/deck animations and because my job is to Heal >/= Buff> dps instead of DPS >/=Heal. the RNG and Potency made me cry and I decided to work on a dps class to 60 first, let them make some changes. After 3.05 I was so sad that more hadn't been done for AST. now as I'm about to start it up again, I see this!
Cheers Yoshi-P, thanks for seeing and listening to our fears for AST

[Khalithar]

Snip

I thought about this as well and I happen to agree with you that the class needs an overhaul. What are your thoughts on them making AST a HoT based healer with a few direct heals that are buffed depending on how many HoTs you have rolling on someone? That would certainly make it different than the other two healers, as for the cards, I've been really having trouble thinking of a fix, but I do like the idea of the card fitting in with the HoT idea above, but not sure how.