3.1 : Astrologian "adjustments''

[AzureFlare]

I figure I'll just put my two cents on the table since it's talked about so much in these last few pages.

• [*Freecure is what gives WHM the longevity and power that surpasses AST and nothing can take that away from WHM. Anyone advocating Enhanced Benefic should equal Freecure needs to realize if you do that, you're stripping one of the most potent tools available to the WHM repertoire.

Freecure, looking at healing and throughput, ranges from 663 to 884 in mana (either replaces 1.5 cures or 1 Cure 2). Though Freecure (and Enhanced Medica) as a trait somewhat equalises AST's lower manacosts.

But it's fairly obvious Diurnal is in an okay spot. Even if it is behind in practice compared to WHM, it isn't that far. Minor things are the amount of annoyances in card drawing (Getting baited into using Royal Road/Spread, Shuffle giving the same card, cards coming in streaks that are utterly useless, Spire being close to useless) and how healing is in savage. The real problem is WHM + AST still being shunned largely because Nocturnal AST isn't anywhere close near SCH, which makes Nocturnal Sect as useless as Repose in savage. Might as well rename the ability and have it call down a full moon to hit the enemy for 200 potency after 72 hours.

And it makes even less sense since there are way more WHM than either of the other two healers, according to SE's data. So why would you have AST compete with WHM when the SCH side of the equation is in demand, and not the other way around?

[Lilith_Merquise]

Good points

... Disable though?....

Disable is a joke, sure it can help with a massive AoE, but it's right up there with MCH Dismantle.... rarely ever used, and on a CD too long to be considered very effective, the same goes for Virus. It's not a bad ability, just has such a niche use it's hardly worth mentioning.

Diurnal doesn't effect standard spells, it only applies an effect when using Aspected spells, and on top of that Diurnal only gives an increase to attack sped by 5% making your GCD reset faster, but Nocturnal effects potency.... Which is so useless IMO, would much rather it give -5% MP cost.

As for comparing it to Tetra or Bene, I was just going down the list but that is a fair point being that it is more similar to Tetra. But the main point I'm illustrating is that WHM has 2 big cures where as AST has 1.

I agree CU can do more for a party if used right then Asylum, on top of its damage reduction which is great, but the differnce is that you have to plant yourself, where as WHM's can drop and forgt about it, both having their own beneficial use which is why I made it more of a draw, but I would say that I lean more towards CU.

And frankly I don't feel the trait comparison is not fair, what isn't fair is you look at how many of our traits increase potency and decrease timers, but then you look at WHM and SCH, and their traits actually augment the usefulness of prexisting abilities. Sure they have some cast or potency buffs, but AST has far too many of them as opposed to the other healers.

I'm not here to say that we deserve exactly what WHM has or SCH has, I'm again supporting equal but unique, if we can't heal as hard, we should be able to buff harder to reduce the necessity of healing as much. I'm not asking for WHM's traits and abilities, I even listed what I wanted for this class a while back in this thread which doesn't steal from the other 2 classes. The main point was to say "No, AST Will not be replacing a WHM or SCH any time soon"

[Ghishlain]

Anw, Can we talk about fflogs on this forum ?

It would be like talking about ACT - talk about it at your own discretion.

Freecure, looking at healing and throughput, ranges from 663 to 884 in mana (either replaces 1.5 cures or 1 Cure 2). Though Freecure (and Enhanced Medica) as a trait somewhat equalises AST's lower manacosts.

But it's fairly obvious Diurnal is in an okay spot. Even if it is behind in practice compared to WHM, it isn't that far. Minor things are the amount of annoyances in card drawing (Getting baited into using Royal Road/Spread, Shuffle giving the same card, cards coming in streaks that are utterly useless, Spire being close to useless) and how healing is in savage. The real problem is WHM + AST still being shunned largely because Nocturnal AST isn't anywhere close near SCH, which makes Nocturnal Sect as useless as Repose in savage. Might as well rename the ability and have it call down a full moon to hit the enemy for 200 potency after 72 hours.

And it makes even less sense since there are way more WHM than either of the other two healers, according to SE's data. So why would you have AST compete with WHM when the SCH side of the equation is in demand, and not the other way around?

Yeah, I for one am okay with Dirunal sect and I wish more posters would realize they're more equal than they would think. There are certain flaws that push one healer into more favour than the other but the divide isn't the massive gulf that it was when AST was first implemented.

I do agree the issue is adjusting Nocturnal to match SCH. The difficulty is doing this without breaking either job over the barrel. Make Noct too good and everyone won't bother with SCH and there aren't a lot of Noct AST's ATM because the toolkit is just too limited compared to what Diurnal can bring to the table.

They almost need to rework AST entirely. As another poster has indicated in the past - make a healing sect and a buff sect and to add my own comment to this - just forgo trying to have AST match SCH.

[EDIT]

Disable is a joke, sure it can help with a massive AoE, but it's right up there with MCH Dismantle.... rarely ever used, and on a CD too long to be considered very effective, the same goes for Virus. It's not a bad ability, just has such a niche use it's hardly worth mentioning.

Diurnal doesn't effect standard spells, it only applies an effect when using Aspected spells, and on top of that Diurnal only gives an increase to attack sped by 5% making your GCD reset faster, but Nocturnal effects potency.... Which is so useless IMO, would much rather it give -5% MP cost.

As for comparing it to Tetra or Bene, I was just going down the list but that is a fair point being that it is more similar to Tetra. But the main point I'm illustrating is that WHM has 2 big cures where as AST has 1.

I agree CU can do more for a party if used right then Asylum, on top of its damage reduction which is great, but the differnce is that you have to plant yourself, where as WHM's can drop and forgt about it, both having their own beneficial use which is why I made it more of a draw, but I would say that I lean more towards CU.

And frankly I don't feel the trait comparison is not fair, what isn't fair is you look at how many of our traits increase potency and decrease timers, but then you look at WHM and SCH, and their traits actually augment the usefulness of prexisting abilities. Sure they have some cast or potency buffs, but AST has far too many of them as opposed to the other healers.

I'm not here to say that we deserve exactly what WHM has or SCH has, I'm again supporting equal but unique, if we can't heal as hard, we should be able to buff harder to reduce the necessity of healing as much. I'm not asking for WHM's traits and abilities, I even listed what I wanted for this class a while back in this thread which doesn't steal from the other 2 classes. The main point was to say "No, AST Will not be replacing a WHM or SCH any time soon"

I can appreciate what you're trying to do in the least. I'm just adding my comments to at least balance the argument because some of your facts are flawed and I wanted to straighten out any misconceptions.

For example, you claim Diurnal only affects the Aspected spells and that's false. Try it right now. Get on AST, and before you activate Diurnal, look to see what your cast and recast time of your spells are. Then activate Diurnal and try again. You'll see that 5% applied to all spells in your repertoire.

In terms of Disable, well, I admit I sometime don't use it often outside of niche things but it has its uses. It's 50% less power reduction than Supervirus at 50% less recast so it balances out, kinda. It's nothing to ride home about but for the sake of your compassion, you should at least include it because you're trying to compare tool kits here and can help reduce the healing requirement of a fight - for example Disable on Splash in A3S is fairly potent as you're reducing the raid damage by 10% for those 6 seconds.

I do agree that the traits are more interesting on WHM than they are on AST. I made a comment a awhile ago that Enhanced Benefic should be affected by Sect you're in and modified as such. For example it should give a HoT effect in Diurnal and either a potency buff or MP reduction in Noct. That could be just one way to make the traits more interesting.

I think AST is better than many give credit to, when comparing Diurnal AST to WHM. Now Nocturnal AST to SCH... well, that's a whole other story.

[Mibgestalt]

Freecure, looking at healing and throughput, ranges from 663 to 884 in mana (either replaces 1.5 cures or 1 Cure 2). Though Freecure (and Enhanced Medica) as a trait somewhat equalises AST's lower manacosts.

But it's fairly obvious Diurnal is in an okay spot. Even if it is behind in practice compared to WHM, it isn't that far. Minor things are the amount of annoyances in card drawing (Getting baited into using Royal Road/Spread, Shuffle giving the same card, cards coming in streaks that are utterly useless, Spire being close to useless) and how healing is in savage. The real problem is WHM + AST still being shunned largely because Nocturnal AST isn't anywhere close near SCH, which makes Nocturnal Sect as useless as Repose in savage. Might as well rename the ability and have it call down a full moon to hit the enemy for 200 potency after 72 hours.

And it makes even less sense since there are way more WHM than either of the other two healers, according to SE's data. So why would you have AST compete with WHM when the SCH side of the equation is in demand, and not the other way around?

Pretty much this.
It's supposed to be half and half in terms of competition.

I don't think anyone in this thread has said that AST's healing in Diurnal needs a buff, it's where it needs to be, which is weaker than WHM, but capable of healing encounters. It's just that the card system in general needs an adjustment to reduce the chances of it being useless in any given encounter.

What I hope people understand is that, properly balanced, the benefit from cards and AST's DPS and healing providing DPS opportunities for the off-healer needs to be an equal bit stronger than a WHM's if it's going to have a weaker, more unsafe healing kit. And this is taking into account ALL of the healing kit, not how much raw single target a class can push out.

Raiding is about progressively optimizing and getting better and improving on a given encounter until you beat it, and an unreliable utility kit is pretty much the antithesis of that. An RNG element isn't a bad thing, crits exist, but for something so central to AST's kit, it needs to be an RNG element that is mitigated by player skill and strategy.

As for an AST filling in a SCH spot? Good luck. I don't even know where to start with that, because SCH has so many unmatched strongpoints in their kit compared to Nocturnal. It's not even about the healing.

[Lilith_Merquise]

^^ Oh I agree no doubt, I'm not here saying that the class is garbage like some make it out to be, and when it comes to roulettes or older content and Extreme fights, I can rock an AST like it's going out of style, even put other healers to shame. But to content that really pushes the limits of a healer and separates the bad players from the skilled like Savage Alex, it just falls short. Diurnal is a great over all stance, and it's most comfortable because it favors AoE and can maintain single cures well, where as Nocturnal is much more pigeon holed for single target curing a tank and maybe mitigating a single wide AoE (great example would be first boss Fractal).

But my big gripe with it is that Nocturnal has such an amazing passive with that buff to healing, but faster attack speed is just sort of lame to me. It would be far better served as -5% MP cost, namely because if you're in Diurnal the intention is that you will b spamming off more AoE cures which cost more then regular cures, so being able to reduce that cost would be extremely beneficial making it not as good as the free whm cures, but still great for the long run in conservation.

What SE needs to do is double down on the buff aspect of AST, the whole reason why AST had weaker healing was in fear of the buffs being too overkill on top of the healing, but it isn't even close. If they are going to give us essentially half of a a healers kit, then they need to make the buffs so strong that they make the lack of healing kit balanced. Buffs so good that the lack of MP efficiency doesn't matter because like WAR as a tank, it pushes phases to balance it's lack of damage mitigation. Like these devs have done this sort of Equal but Unique approach, they're just scared of creating the "RDM" of 14 like it was in 11 that was just dominating the healer game.

[Lilith_Merquise]

What I want to see from this class is:

Royal Road = AoE drawn Card
Time Dilation = Extend drawn card Duration
(reduce timers)

Diurnal Sect = -10% MP Cost of all spells
Nocturnal Sect = +10% Haling magic potency

Celestial Opposition = Doubles all "Sect Effects" Potencies active upon cast, Doubles Buff Durations, AoE Stun, 300-500 Potency AoE Damage to all effected.

Stella give DOT and reduce healing.
Gravity give weight and reduce haling of those affected.
Malefic II amplified by +50 potency for each player under the effect of a sect (max of 4)

Make all card based abilities (except Dilation and Royal Road) available every time a card is drawn, first shuffle is free, but every time you shuffle after it costs 100MP exponentially. i.e. 2nd Shuffle 100 MP, 3rd 200, 4th 300, etc.

(I would much rather have my Wild Card / Discard idea of Wildcard increasing the draw rate of a card that is drawn for 5 turns, while Discard removes a card from the deck for 5 turns, but I doubt this will ever be implemented and I imagine it's more going to be tweaks then major changes.

[File2ish]

Synastry got also 20% increase healing. It's 10% less than Divine seal and his cd Is 50% longer but that's not that bad.

Not saying Synastry is bad in any way, it's actually really good since you can single target heal others while still healing the targeted Synastry buddy with single casts. However, unless I'm mistaken, Synastry doesn't affect the potency of HoT ticks nor does it affect the potency of Helios and Aspected Helios.

Divine Seal is just overall better despite having a shorter duration due to it not being locked to a single target, and DS also affects WHM's AoE heals and HoT ticks on top of boosting the heals for everything else that's not Benediction (actually I'm not sure if it affects Tetragrammaton, Assize, or Asylum though. Haven't really tested that out).

Though I think you could argue Synastry is better overall if talking amount healed on a single target. I just quickly did the maths in my head, so yeah. May not be accurate (someone please correct me if I'm wrong on anything in this post). For party wide healing, however, DS definitely beats Synastry.

[tjw]

Not saying Synastry is bad in any way, it's actually really good since you can single target heal others while still healing the targeted Synastry buddy with single casts. However, unless I'm mistaken, Synastry doesn't affect the potency of HoT ticks nor does it affect the potency of Helios and Aspected Helios.

You would be wrong. Synastry merely acts as a less potent Divine Seal with the simultaneous heal perk. Aspected Helios and Benefic (under Diurnal) both have increased HoT potency, and ALL spells that have frontal heals have increased potency.

[Kerrigen]

Yeah I'm not really sure where this belief comes from, it came up like twice in the last few pages and it's a bit weird for something that can be so easily verified.

I don't really understand why people are arguing about AST vs WHM so much when it's obvious AST should be more in line with SCH if we want to have a balanced healer trifecta in this game. It's not about replacing a job, no job is replaced. MCH didn't replace BRD, it merely provided an option. It's about having balanced options and being able to substitute a WHM or a SCH for an AST, for all available content (which translates into progression raiding because the rest is pretty much irrelevant as far as balance is concerned when all jobs are desirable for progression).

It'd benefit everyone if there wasn't a single raid spot for two healers, really.

[AzureFlare]

Stuff about Synastry

Synastry provides both a Synastry buff on user/target (so you can't dilate it but can extend it with CO if both you and target are hit) and a 20% healing potency increase buff on self. The Synastry buff only works with direct single target healing on anyone other than the Synastry target (healing yourself transfers 40% of the heal too). Healing potency buff affects all spells and their components.