Suggested changes to AST Design to bring it in line with WHM/SCH

[Miunih]

Astro to be retooled will have to see an entirely new concept and should not step in the toes if white mage and scholar. Wont happen until 4.0 and right now it is as good as white mage in progression. Synastry is very good and should not be changed.

No it's not, that's the whole issue. You will NOT see one ast in any world top 5 groups unless they change something drastic before 3.2. Sad as the class is really fun, but true.

[AzureFlare]

I'm sorry, but for someone that has so many world first/second under their belt, you're undermining the issue in favor of potency buffs. Sure, your suggestions improve AST but improving can also lead to it becoming blatantly overpowered.

Just going to nitpick a few things out of it:

Stella heavy to stun. Please, don't. As an avid PvP player I would absolutely skewer anyone who comes up with this, even if you give the Heavy to Malefic, it would just make it even more broken in PvP. Stella is fine where it stands, Malefic is the bloat spell.

Combust 3/Gravity 2: We don't need any other AoE beyond Gravity, at least not in this fashion. If you want to make it interesting, make it so that Stella on a target with both Combust and Combust 2 caused a Supernova or something for that AoE.

Time Dilation: Extending debuffs will not help your mana unless you're going to idle instead of tossing Malefic 2. Time Dilation is already a tool hard to use for average/new ASTs since they get tunnelvisioned on the cards, while it can extend 3 HoTs at best + Bole on a tank. Now that is mana saving.

Collective Unconsciousness: The regen has no penalty bar channeling a maximum of 3 seconds, and just getting the regen on everybody will make it beat Asylum. The mitigation does have a penalty since you need to channel for as long as it takes to land the hit(s), but you already have a regen and a mitigation component. Channeling it longer than required to get the HoT off is just icing on the cake and free potency you won't have to spend later. Like literally, it could be replaced with a same radius instant buff for everyone near you to give a 15s regen and a 3s mitigation and it would be the exact same bar channeling it further, except having the mitigation be extendable.

Card to get mana back: No. All the cards are fine, what isn't fine is drawing cards of the same category into one another (Spire/Ewer/Spire, 3x spire, 3x spear). Whoever thinks mana is a problem for an AST is missing the part where it isn't the mana, but the fight itself making you spend mana differently and arguably, less efficiently. I've already mathematically proven in another thread that two blank or an extended Ewer will put you ahead of WHM with both having 14k mana total, for any fight lasting shorter than 11 minutes. Unless your RNG is really bad, you will get to that point.

What is keeping AST back are unfavorable fights and people not accustomed to utilising the full kit it has. Fights favor a main healer + hybrid DPS/healer that can chip in more healing only during heavy burst, meaning AST would never have the second healer slot over SCH. On the main slot it is already getting close to WHM, only missing a few comfort things like a disjointed AoE heal (or one slightly more powerful than Helios) compared to Cure 3 and Medica 2's superior range. Surely if you are high level, you can ensure a tag on Aspected Helios when it comes out? CU already is stronger than Asylum. You also have the added benefit of it reducing damage which Asylum can't.

I mean, have you even done some of the math and possibilities AST has and compared it to practice, and what is keeping it from getting to those things? Increase the potencies to make it match fights favorable to WHM, and they will become the weakest link no matter what the fight asks of them. You even make questionable comments on your own stuff: first you state Aspected Benefic's mana cost isn't fine for what it provides and then go on to Benefic where you say the lower mana cost of Benefic is justified because Aspected Benefic's mana cost is high. So if we decrease the manacost or increase the potency of Aspected Benefic.. is it still fine? And then in the end you decide the cards should be nerfed to compensate for the increased potencies we get, because it makes sense to homogenise us even further when half the AST community has been screaming 'we want to be different from a WHM/SCH!'?

Want some real issues? Look at:
Shuffle giving you back the same card (you did mention this one). This is one of the main card-combo killers and most ASTs know it is an absolute mood-killer. Like "getting a call from your mom during sexy time" mood-killer.
Nocturnal having really, really lackluster synergies with CO and TD compared to Diurnal. Having lower potencies is one thing, having even lower potencies because all they do is extend your shield duration (with 30s already being stupidly lenient) compared to the Diurnal counterpart actually getting more potency out of this is.. no.
CU being tied to the server timer. Having to wait for the full 3 seconds sucks, but at least you can worst-case it.
Spire being a lackluster card.
Spear being an obnoxiously hard-to-use card.
Arrow being a card capable of backfiring due to it making people eat their resources faster.
AST being a very pug-unfriendly healer thanks to no disjointed AoE heal and Aspected Helios having lower range than Medica 2. In a serious environment, that range difference should be worked around just like how you tag a Succor.

But most of all: teaching fellow AST what kind of options there truly are. AST is weird because it has a very big combo-element to it thanks to the cards, CO and TD. We started off with a horrid reputation because our potencies were lower and our abilities lackluster, our cards harder to use and less beneficial than they are now, and the first impression is always the strongest. What we need are good ASTs that show the job has potential when given the chance to shine, just like there are good WHM that show WHM can shine, but WHM has had years to do so while we are still working on the first one and in general people are afraid of stepping out of their comfort zone when they don't have to.

[Vlady]

No it's not, that's the whole issue. You will NOT see one ast in any world top 5 groups unless they change something drastic before 3.2. Sad as the class is really fun, but true.

No it's not. The whole issue is you will NOT see one white mage in any world top 5 group unless they change something drastic before 3.2. The job is really fun but sucks.

See how easy I can insert any made up statement on the spot? Just because someone makes stuff up out of thin air does not make it true. The only reason no world first had an astro was because white mage was able to stomp curve the astrologian in the pure healing for the first two months of the raids. If new content centers around tank taking massive damage and less on hard dps checks you will see astro make a greater appearance then white mage since the astro is the best tank healer right now.

[Mibgestalt]

No it's not. The whole issue is you will NOT see one white mage in any world top 5 group unless they change something drastic before 3.2. The job is really fun but sucks.

See how easy I can insert any made up statement on the spot? Just because someone makes stuff up out of thin air does not make it true. The only reason no world first had an astro was because white mage was able to stomp curve the astrologian in the pure healing for the first two months of the raids. If new content centers around tank taking massive damage and less on hard dps checks you will see astro make a greater appearance then white mage since the astro is the best tank healer right now.

He's probably a bit more qualified to speak on how high end competitive raiding will go.

There's really no situation where Synastry does something that a WHM/SCH can't do when it comes to single target healing. Like... at the end of the day it's still bombing single target heals for heavy constant tank damage, and a lot of that simply gets wasted due to overheal. Divine Seal + PoM would do just fine in the same situation. Maybe even better given the higher frequency of heals. Higher throughput on paper doesn't mean better once the limits of actual practice are applied.

Now an even more extreme version of a situation like A1S where one healer has to heal both preys/OT might be something only an AST can do, but that probably won't happen.

I don't really agree with all of OPs changes, they seem like too much, but the point about GCD use being on the high side comparatively does feel right to me.

[TatoRazzino]

From what I read, most people blame the AST for not being something it's not supposed to be instead of trying to understand the mechanics that account for what the AST really is. Add some misconceptions and bad reputation from the start of the expansion and the result ican be seen in this post. You may have some pretty impressive achievements, but your evaluation of the job is flawed by rhe fact that you're basically trying to turn the AST in a WHM with cards. AST is weaker than WHM in several aspects but this is so by design. For example, AzureFlare and I have discussed DPS output in another topic and our math showed that not only ASTs are not so far behind WHMs in DPS output (which is a general claim), but that if the AST was buffed even by a little in this aspect, it would make WHM look ridiculously weak since not only ASTs would be able to do over 1K dps on their own (in a pretty solid way), but they would also be able to buff their party overall DPS. If we had more MP control, we would rival with SCHs and would be able to take their spot as the best DPS off-healer. Buffing their AoE healing potency even more would make 2 AST the best combo in every single aspect. That would defeat the purpose of having more than one job in each slot and would be a terrible example of game design.

[TatoRazzino]

There are lots of situations in whicn Synastry make life easier, and the prey mechanic in A1S is one of those times. The challenge back when the fight was new was not healing the prey target but keeping the tank in a good state to prepare for the tank buster. ASTs have always done that easily even when Synastry didn't give a healing buff. WHMs and SCHs could do it (they had to be able to do it), but each of them had to put a little more effort into it. The point is not doing something that would be impossible to do eith the other healers; it's having multiple ways of achieving the same/similar results. Just like the three melee DPS in the game do something unique and bring utility in different levels.

[Mibgestalt]

There are lots of situations in whicn Synastry make life easier, and the prey mechanic in A1S is one of those times. The challenge back when the fight was new was not healing the prey target but keeping the tank in a good state to prepare for the tank buster. ASTs have always done that easily even when Synastry didn't give a healing buff. WHMs and SCHs could do it (they had to be able to do it), but each of them had to put a little more effort into it. The point is not doing something that would be impossible to do eith the other healers; it's having multiple ways of achieving the same/similar results. Just like the three melee DPS in the game do something unique and bring utility in different levels.

I am aware of that, I did qualify "when it comes to single target healing"! The burst split healing is one of the things it excels at. He was specifically citing AST's "tank healing", which to me means single target throughput.

Edit:
And (to respond to your post about math and DPS) as much as I enjoy a good theorycraft, I'm dubious of their value, because often times it just doesn't transition in practice. Especially with something as dynamic and changing as healing, it's significantly less valuable. Not to mention relative difficulty is something that needs to be considered. If a WHM has a more direct, simpler, easier to use kit, even if the results are the same, then it's going to be played more and preferred more (though personally I don't think that's a problem that needs to be fixed).
This tier in terms of competitiveness is kind of a wash when it comes to comparisons because the state of ASTs for the first bit was bad enough that people swapped out of it, but ideally this "high DPS check" meta would have been where ASTs were preferred. However on my server, even with groups catching up, WHMs are still by and large preferred. Whether this is just stubborn thinking or indicative of a larger problem is probably up in the air for now.

[TatoRazzino]

This is a point that has been made by a lot of people: WHM is easier. Another thing: raiding as a WHM didn't require a job learming curve, only an encounter one. People started as WHM/SCH not because the AST was bad (it was impossible to foresee that before the actual fights), but because it is always safer to use the combination you're already familiar with. The groups that used AST faced three problems: unbalanced new job, learming curve to a different healing style and encounter learming curve. Some people simply gave it up and now the job has a bad reputation. It's impossible to say what aspect was the most important, but the result is the same. Now, months later, people are still crying about a job that's perfectly fine instead of actually trying to learn it.

[TatoRazzino]

And (to respond to your post about math and DPS) as much as I enjoy a good theorycraft, I'm dubious of their value, because often times it just doesn't transition in practice. Especially with something as dynamic and changing as healing, it's significantly less valuable. Not to mention relative difficulty is something that needs to be considered.

That was precisely our point. While a WHM can reach over 1K DPS in a dummy, while an AST may only reach 900, the AST dps toolkit is way simpler and easier to use. To reach that number, a WHM would have to weave in lots of Off-GCDs, while healing and dealing with some longer cast times. In real fights, that's not easy to do and it may mess up healing output.

[Mibgestalt]

That was precisely our point. While a WHM can reach over 1K DPS in a dummy, while an AST may only reach 900, the AST dps toolkit is way simpler and easier to use. To reach that number, a WHM would have to weave in lots of Off-GCDs, while healing and dealing with some longer cast times. In real fights, that's not easy to do and it may mess up healing output.

That's subjective, which is good of course, and if you find WHM more difficult to play optimally then I'd say Square is on the right track. I find WHM too straightforward and blunt for my tastes, and that sort of difference in opinion is great.

And again, I can't speak for everyone. It's entirely possible that many people are too lazy to adapt to play AST correctly, but I also don't think it's fair to dismiss people's complaints about the playstyle/difficulty/kinks of the class as "crying instead of trying to learn it".
I'm not convinced there is some big secret to playing AST that people just haven't realized yet. I feel like the serious FFXIV players around the world can bring out the max in a class in very short order, and that there has been enough time for that at this point, yet we're still seeing people concerned. That's why I'm dubious that it's just a "L2P" issue across the board.