3.1 : Astrologian "adjustments''

[Alistaire]

The Royal Road tweak surely cannot be the only change we get, I suppose they are waiting for the longer final patch notes before they show how much they have done...

Here's hoping they don't destroy the job :/

I'd love to agree but they've never held back on these kinds of notes...they only ever hide spoilers and stuff that'd make people rush to the market board to inflate new synthesis materials...

As someone who actually started levelling AST after the announcement that 3.1 would bring more changes I'm definitely very annoyed.

[Vlady]

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.

A flawed argument. It is weaker in aoe scenarios by roughly 4% but stronger single target so to say that white mage is still on top is no longer the case. Duirnal being the goto sect for 99% of content in this game is a flaw that does need to be fixed but buffing nocturnal stance in any shape and form destroys all form of balance in this game. According to the leader board on the reddit forums astrologian job is starting to over take white mages as the main partner with scholars in raids. Do anything to nocturnal stance in form of buffs along with buffing our strong utility any more and you will see the paradigm shift even more.

Before nocturnal can be looked at or anything else the astrologian cannot receive any more pure potency buffs or buffs to the bonuses of duirnal and nocturnal. Alot of things will have to be redone to get the astrologian correct. Putting our potency spells back a bit in duirnal stance will most likely happen to prevent us from making white mage obsolete any more.

[Yuyuka3]

A flawed argument. It is weaker in aoe scenarios by roughly 4% but stronger single target so to say that white mage is still on top is no longer the case. According to the leader board on the reddit forums astrologian job is starting to over take white mages as the main partner with scholars in raids.

Could you please explain where you see that? What I see when looking at that board is that a whopping total of ONE AST stands in AS4. 3 in AS3 (but here the dark figure is much higher since not every group submits a parse there). Against 8 WHM. Am I doing something wrong? Is there another part of the ranking I don't see? Because no matter at which turn I look, WHM always is more used than AST...
Besides, believe it or not, there are groups out there who actually run WHM/AST *gasp*
Yeah, AST surely overwhelms WHM right now...

Oh, and if I want I outheal (and out-DPS...) most ASTs any day of the week, thank you.

[AzureFlare]

Stuff

Reddit doesn't represent the whole community.
White mage is not obsolete. Just don't be one of the derp WHM that never use their cooldowns.
Not a clue how buffing Nocturnal Sect or any spells using Nocturnal Field would 'shift the paradigm' when the offhealer's healing potencies isn't what is holding nocturnal back. It's the tip of the iceberg.

Just for a bit, look at what a SCH brings to the table that makes them so desired. 3 DoTs that can't miss, of which one stationary AoE. Being able to play mana-neutral on long fights while pumping out a lot of damage. The fairy still being able to heal while doing all that damage. 2 mitigation tools that don't require any healing to be done. One mitigation tool that, without critting, is already strong and on a crit can possibly make a mechanic trivial. Either an on-demand haste increase + AoE dispel or on-demand AoE healing increase + magic damage reduction. A buff on the fairy so she can do her job even better while the SCH continues dealing damage. And when it gets bad, SCH can still fulfill healing duties just fine by switching how they use their Aetherflow stacks and their GCDs. It can do so even better than a noct AST. If you want to get close to that as WHM + AST you'd essentially have to rotate DoTs, which WHM + SCH can do too anyway.

I'm honestly interested what would happen if Nocturnal Sect increased damage dealt by 5% and reduced mana cost of offensive spells by 50% on top of what it currently does. You'd still miss globals as N. AST to replace the fairy's throughput, no answer to E4E, Fey Covenant and Deployment, pretty much be required to stack accuracy so Malefic 2 would hit with a near 100% hit rate since AST is more filler-dependent than SCH and probably some other stuff. And that has to be made up with the cards, Time Dilation (which is bad on shields) and Celestial Opposition (which is bad on shields).

[Mibgestalt]

You guys need to stop responding to Vlady. He's either a troll or completely out of touch with the raid meta, it's like talking to a wall.

Unrelated, and hilarious, something AST is preferred for is buffing a single DPS on farm content so they can top ff logs leaderboards. Though, I would hardly call that meaningful when it comes to raid progression balance.

[Mayvee]

Vlady's been shitting on WHM for a while

He had a WHM is DOOOOOMED because everyone runs "real content" on SCH thread a while back lol

[AzureFlare]

Just wish he'd actually back up his claims with a bit more substance. Protein's also part of a healthy diet.

[Vlady]

Vlady's been shitting on WHM for a while

He had a WHM is DOOOOOMED because everyone runs "real content" on SCH thread a while back lol

Shitting on white mages? Last I looked I do not want white mages to become defunct. Some of us still care about balance. And taking statements out of context is a poor choice of counter argument. If you want to go by the entire statement I said if scholars were allowed to have all spells stack with two scholars in a raid scenario then the white mage would be benched in 2.0 era.

And SE gave white mages tetra which was a much needed spell for white mages against the then OP scholar lustrate which allowed the job to stay in cleric stance and quickly save a tank without losing stride for the most part.

[Vlady]

Reddit doesn't represent the whole community.
White mage is not obsolete. Just don't be one of the derp WHM that never use their cooldowns.
Not a clue how buffing Nocturnal Sect or any spells using Nocturnal Field would 'shift the paradigm' when the offhealer's healing potencies isn't what is holding nocturnal back. It's the tip of the iceberg.

Just for a bit, look at what a SCH brings to the table that makes them so desired. 3 DoTs that can't miss, of which one stationary AoE. Being able to play mana-neutral on long fights while pumping out a lot of damage. The fairy still being able to heal while doing all that damage. 2 mitigation tools that don't require any healing to be done. One mitigation tool that, without critting, is already strong and on a crit can possibly make a mechanic trivial. Either an on-demand haste increase + AoE dispel or on-demand AoE healing increase + magic damage reduction. A buff on the fairy so she can do her job even better while the SCH continues dealing damage. And when it gets bad, SCH can still fulfill healing duties just fine by switching how they use their Aetherflow stacks and their GCDs. It can do so even better than a noct AST. If you want to get close to that as WHM + AST you'd essentially have to rotate DoTs, which WHM + SCH can do too anyway.

I'm honestly interested what would happen if Nocturnal Sect increased damage dealt by 5% and reduced mana cost of offensive spells by 50% on top of what it currently does. You'd still miss globals as N. AST to replace the fairy's throughput, no answer to E4E, Fey Covenant and Deployment, pretty much be required to stack accuracy so Malefic 2 would hit with a near 100% hit rate since AST is more filler-dependent than SCH and probably some other stuff. And that has to be made up with the cards, Time Dilation (which is bad on shields) and Celestial Opposition (which is bad on shields).

I agree scholars are in a good position right now and can see their offensive abilities being hit in the near future as well. Cleric stance should weaken the fairy the same as it does the scholar in healing when it is active.

[Yuyuka3]

Vlady's been shitting on WHM for a while

He had a WHM is DOOOOOMED because everyone runs "real content" on SCH thread a while back lol

Yeah, I know. I follow this forums ever since I started to play this game - which was in beta. Unfortunately, I got no tolerance for idiocy... that's my problem, and all that idiocy finally made me snap it seems. Another one is that there are actually people who believe him. Which is quite sad, but I heard some shit already about WHMs. Not very often, most players are actually smart enough to see their value, but there are people out there who seem to think a pure healer has no place in this game.