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

[Cressidia]

I Would like to have some suggest
For healing Spell :
1/ Make the card Party buff while lower it to 50 % , it will take care some rng issue , the rest of royal road will extended duration or potency buff.
2/Make Shuffle not give the same card
3/Nocturne sec may turn into an ability which trade regen for shield in 20s
4/ Can cast spell in CU but the effect end if moving
5/ CO should have add healing potency and lower CD to 90s
6/Proc benefic II : instant and reduce mp cost by 20 %
For offensive spell:
1/Stella Leave Dot
2/Gravity have some additional effect like Slow or paralyze.

[NovaAshontia]

I main a AST and I love it how it is but just as you mention, MP managment and the ability to DPS without wasting the precious mana pool of an Astrologian, as well as a stronger Noc Sect and shielding. Its a kinda 'I love to eat it but hate the aftertaste' thing with AST and by fixing those 3 things it could be on par with the other two healers. AST's biggest strength is it's Raid Utility, but its utility is worthless since no one wants them to be used in Savage or in any progression whatsoever. SE FIX THIS PLEASE!

[AzureFlare]

Also, note that using an ewer on yourself would beat the purpose of bringing an ast in the first place, you bring them for dps buffs ^.^

And this is exactly why AST isn't used heavily in the low/midcore. Everyone is literally tunneling on the DPS cards. We all know savage was an utter DPS-check infested hole, but come off it already. You use Ewer on yourself and use the mana you get to DPS more yourself. You use Bole to save mana and switch that mana back into damage. It isn't as efficient as Balance or Arrow, but that's the whole point of the design, you cook a dish with the ingredients you get. If you don't know how to cook a vegetarian dish and only want meat, well too bad. Surely if you can draw 18 cards in a fight, you can give yourself an Ewer a single time to make up mana differences? Or play that AoE Balance and decide not to DPS because you know that will increase your DPS contribution more than the WHM can dish out.

Aspected Benefic's total potency is 1030 for a manacost of 707. Regen's total potency is 1050 for 618 manacost. Regen's potency per minute is 3000, Aspected Benefic's potency per minute is 3433.33. That's more than a whole Cure in difference. For 60 seconds, you need 2.86 regens or 3.33 Aspected Benefics. That's 1767.48 mana for regen, 2354.41 for Aspected Benefic. Factor in that cure, you get 2209.47 mana for the WHM to spend. 145 mana each minute and the WHM has to make up the potency difference with a global. Does that sound so bad?

**LATE EDIT**: For whoever reads this, I decided after a Reddit post to recheck my math. Since you can do the math on your own above (add 1 cure to 2.86 regens, 3.86 casts vs 3.33 casts) it isn't a huge thing, but Aspected Benefic saves you 12-13 globals on 21 minutes (converging point of both Regen and AB) at the cost of 2287 mana after factoring in the difference in cures. All things considered that's not a bad tradeoff at all.

No one will disagree with you, we have a GCD problem and they could tackle a few things in this department, but increasing potencies as a whole is not the way to go. If we get encounters that really push for MP, where MP is the limiting factor rather than GCD, AST will be a lot better. Heck, if you want to tackle GCD problems, suggest things like "Lightspeed now gives you 5 stacks of the buff. You lose one stack per cast. As long as the buff is intact, spells will cost 25% less mana, decrease in cast time by 2.5s, reduce the global recast time by 1.25s (or even lower) and reduce damage from offensive spells casted by 25%". Lost its interaction with CO, but the exact same mana-saving utility, cast time reduction utility and makes you pay for trying to be offensive on the move. Only doesn't factor in spellspeed anymore.
Another one: "Enhanced Benefic: Benefic has a 15% chance of making Benefic 2 instant and not trigger the global cooldown." A trait with a backfirish element now saves you globals and no longer backfires on you. Hurray.

And something that seems to be ignored. If SE designs a fight where this

followed by this

is possible every single time without overhealing in abundance, then of course WHM is going to pull ahead. That's not an issue with AST, that's an issue with fights being catered to WHM. That is a real design issue. And that scenario happens a lot.

[AzureFlare]

That's why I'm dubious that it's just a "L2P" issue across the board.

It definitely isn't just a L2P issue, but it does play a big part. But you can't simply tune AST to be more like WHM. If a fight is designed to be able to be single-target healed fairly easily with just Cure and Cure 2, while having large AoE damage come out, then Divine Seal will always win over Synastry because Synastry doesn't carry over AoE heals or regen heals, doesn't boost them as high as Divine Seal and is on a longer cooldown. If you design a fight where dualhealing is king, let's say something like Skyward Leaps during Thordan ex, then Synastry is favorable over Divine Seal since Synastry is more powerful and more bursty. And whoever says 'just combine DS and PoM', PoM has a cooldown 2 and a half minute and you burned two cooldowns just for one mechanic. If that mechanic returns after 90 seconds, you can't use Divine Seal in between to save mana over the AST and you're going to spam costy Cure 2s.

Going to play devil's advocate really badly here: try PvP as a healer and see how different it is. Ignore the players for a bit and pretend it is the environment that is facing you instead. Seize Rock on EU/NA data centers in general are ideal for this, since most people are very unorganized. Suddenly, the healers are a lot closer and Nocturnal AST is one of the best healers if not the best healer. And then you compare it to savage and see what aspects of PvP will probably never be used as a mechanic in PvE, and why Nocturnal AST can't shine in its current form in PvE but could shine in the future, or what changes should be made for it to shine. PvP as a whole is really good at this since players get creative, wacky and out of control and show what possibilities a job truly has.

[TatoRazzino]

That's why we used Drk in A3/A4S World First clears, including Lucrezia as well, and most that followed. It was a totally new class, but it outclassed paladin, which was a 1.0 class. Learning a class, especially in this game, is very easy, and ast is pretty easy as well. The problem is ast does not compete with neither whm nor sch, and will still not be used in end game progression that aim to be the top 5-10. It just does not keep up.

Funny enough, everyone everywhere whined that Drk was shit and pld was amazing, just like now when everyone says ast is fine, while in reality it's a severely underperforming class that no top group will take to progression.

It took a while to see those clears and the reason they took DRK to those fights is DPS output. A3S and A4S were built with massive magic damage, which makes a PLD pretty much useless in there. In fact, the general consensus is that DRK is overpowered in relation to PLD. DRK is an unbalanced job that can perform as well as PLD in defense and is better in offense (or so people say). The unique aspects of PLD were made useless by the way people are organizimg their strategies. A person with so much raid experience should know this by now, but it seems that you're ignorant to the fact that a hybrid job can easily become overpowered to the point where it takes the place of the specialized job. That happened to PLDs and can happen to WHM. I'll stop this discussion since you're not here to discuss anything, but to support absurd game design to match your desires (you want to play WHM, but AST is prettier, cooler etc.). You blab so much about GCDs and ignores the attack speed buff that ASTs get in Diurnal, ignores the fact that Synastry is a GCD saver, ignores the fact that AST takes less GCDs to apply DoTs with combined potencies higher than the WHM ones (which can all miss by the way). Another thing you ignore: this game has more than raiding, and some spells/stances were build with other things in mind (E.g. Swiftsong, Fists of Wind, Fists of Earth, Feint, take your pick)

[AzureFlare]

Just going to chip in a little more.
World first clear was registered as the 23rd of August. The 3.07 patchnotes that balanced AST potencies (and rather, helped the cards be more useful as well as help its cooldowns be more useful) were released on the 25th of August. Everyone knew AST would not be a world-first competitive class in the state it was released, heck you couldn't even have possibly cleared world first with the new AST, so why are we even discussing this? Surely if you participated in the world first/second clears, you'd know what was and wasn't possible?

Dark Knight had a solemn advantage because the cooldowns lined up better, it made MNK obsolete (who was already being outperformed by both NIN and DRG in contribution) and it did more damage than PLD to boot. Back on the tank forums, people are already guessing DRK will sink like a brick the moment we go back to physical-heavy encounters, and I'm inclined to agree now that PLD got a small DPS boost with Shield Swipe becoming OGCD. Or maybe the new LB rules will make double WAR the godcomp, since they don't even care about what type of damage except for Raw Intuition and Foresight?

[Mibgestalt]

Going to play devil's advocate really badly here:

Again, I was responding to one guy who said that AST was "the best tank healer", to highlight the dubiousness of that claim when it comes to Synastry. I actually mentioned that the split healing was the strongest, so I dunno why you're repeating this. I said that combining PoM and DS would arguably make WHM stronger for burst tank healing, not that you should do it all willy nilly.

And anyways, I've never said that I want AST brought closer in line to WHM in terms of healing. I am actually fairly content with our healing, though I feel like it demands more of the AST and PUG groups for slightly weaker results.

I'd just like more strategic control over our cards. Spire is flat out useless on, say, A1S unless someone dies. Just because you CAN throw a Bole on a tank at any given moment doesn't mean it's particularly effective. Diurnal AB + Fairy was already keeping him topped off in DPS stance during this low damage phase, did it do something? Sure. Did it do something HELPFUL? Ehhhhhh. I'm not asking to get Balance on every draw either. Just more skill-based control. My dream would be some kind of compounding mana cost on Shuffle to put the whole system at a risk/reward tug with MP, but something as simple as being able to Royal Road your spread card, or giving Celestial Opposition some interaction with card draws would probably be enough.

Mrs. Devil, I PVP all the time, and don't think most of the experience is really transferable to PVE. AST isn't just the strongest healer there, they are downright broken. The damage randomness and burst and CC all factor together to make a situation that other healers actually CAN NOT keep people or themselves alive in situations where the AST can, a situation which we both know would never see the light of day in a raid. It's only because it's instant, barely telegraphed life or death with constant threat of interruption that Noct Benefic shines, and they can't put that in PVE because WHM and SCH would have ZERO chance. You're comparing apples and oranges when it comes to design. Not to mention that Mana Draw, Retrogradation, Aetheric Burst, kiting, and actually being able to stun incoming damage does A LOT to alleviate traditional healing concerns. All of those things aren't available in PVE.

[LegoTechnic]

Here's a thought I had. For me the biggest detriment to AST is its mana regen, or rather its utter lack thereof. Especially in Noct stance when pretending to be a SCH only having a single shroud mechanic is very limiting. Sure there's ewer, but RNG is the last thing you want with mana regen.

Why not let us discard a recently drawn card for an immediate amount of mana, similar to how aetherize works? Even if just a small amount it's a move both with cost and balance (you lose your active card), it uses the class's primary feature (cards), and in the event that you shuffle a Spear and draw... another Spear... it would at least keep you from sighing. Also the wince from having to discard a Balance would be equivalent to a SCH using Dissipation, and therefore right up design's alley!

[AzureFlare]

Stuff

Not everything I said was in direct response to you, given it did seem that way. My apologies for the confusion. What I meant to illustrate, which both you, me and others have mentioned a plentora of times on the forums, is that all healers have abilities that are best suited to different situations and that naturally escalates in the whole performance. I used your line as a base for that, since while I do believe that people are asking for buffs that can be solved by looking at different interactions within the job, it isn't the sole reason.

Just like you state, if AB + Fairy keep up the tank then there isn't a whole lot of use for Bole. But others like me would argue whether that situation happens too much or not, and whether it is the problem of the raid's design instead of a problem with the cards. A bit more control would be nice, but amongst ASTs there is a lot of discussion whether we want to be subjected to RNG, and to what degree.

And why shouldn't we compare apples with oranges when it comes to design? I'll sidestep the whole PvP healer debate since it will derail the thread, but why shouldn't we be able to use more CC in PvE, or worry about interruptions, or kiting? We don't have to do it as extreme as PvP, but we can take elements from it, tune them and apply them in PvE to spice it up. I mean come on, even the average SNES game has more randomness than savage does, and Nocturnal is great at alleviating mechanical setbacks due to its instant nature.

[Mibgestalt]

other stuff

I don't think some RNG is awful, it's entirely possible that I just get very unlucky when I feel I need it most, or don't notice the times I do pull the perfect card as much.

It could very well be a raid design problem. I'm a healer at heart, so I'd love a meta where I get to mostly heal, or a fight where if I draw Bole it's noticeably useful 90% of the time. Hopefully it goes in that direction next patch so we can see.

And yeah I totally agree on wanting to see MORE mechanics like that in PVE. I'd love to see tons of creative mechanics in PVE, and more encounters in general. I just feel like Square plays it very safe with mechanics when it comes to PVE, whether it's because of small development team size or whatever, so I don't think we will for a very long time. New encounter mechanics are few and far between in this game. So I don't think it's bad to discuss, but I'm not holding my breath on seeing truly unique things here either, which is why I'm not sure we can hope that it will remedy certain class design disparities.