Quote Originally Posted by AzureFlare View Post
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.