To Swing a Pendulum - An Astrologian Retooled

[Ghishlain]

~Snip~

Yeah, it's a bit of a pickle to balance admittedly and there are way too many branches to balance in one sitting.

• What I was aiming for in my revised Aspected Benefic (Nocturnal) was making it more plain and the bread and butter for Benefic so it was up to the AST to determine if they want to use the more efficient heal or start hitting Benefics and fish for a trait proc to reset Draw. It might actually do me a bit more good if I tuned Nocturnal Aspected Benefic to have something like a 500 potency and change the MP cost in this Sect to be slightly more MP efficient than Benefic. This should make up to some extent not having access to any HoTs while still encouraging that design choice.
  
• I don't think we'll ever see the TP regenerating Spire be anything significant until we start hitting massive up time fights like T8 Avatar and T11 Kaliyah. Additionally, in any long uptime fight, you'll generally have your BRD / MCH popping TP regeneration for the raid as a whole. It almost makes me think Spire should be a TP regeneration card that acts like an aura around the buffed player.
  
• I could definitely see your Spear change working out well since I could see it working some what similarly to Berserk leading into Pacify style buff transfer and I think I like it more. I'd probably limit Spear to a single stack though in that case.
  
• I still stand by my statement that I feel we need to give AST a more unique identity than make is a shade of both healing jobs and giving it "here's a random mitigation shield tool to make you more SCH like". I do think S-E needs to start changing the raid meta to be more suitable to a non-mitigation standpoint even if it risks putting SCH on a pedestal for raid healing. If they don't, they'll just be pushing SCH or AST + w/e partner harder and harder and push away other healing combinations. Or if they continue to give the future healers similar mitigation tools, it'll leave WHM on a low rung on the healing spectrum.

In terms of complexity, it is indeed complex. It could probably be retooled somewhat to not have so many "and do this if you have this" procs and still retain the core of the design. I feel shifting Nocturnal into the level 40 job slot and CO in the level 50 job slot may help alleviate some of those learning curve issues, especially if we tone down some of the mechanics I threw out there for AST.

Why everyone is dreaming of AST changes since there are no clues that anything is coming ?

I'll just re-quote this in response.

AST is in quite a good spot at this juncture and can deal with some QoL changes (specifically in Nocturnal) to make it how S-E envisioned they wanted. With that being said, the reason I added such changes is not for job complexity but for future balancing.

As it stands right now, AST's current iteration is a shade of WHM or a shade of SCH with card mechanics tacked on. It brings hardly anything unique to itself and lacks any identity that distinguishes itself from the other two healers. While QoL fixes at this juncture can address balancing, if S-E wants AST to grow in future patches and have expanded skill sets, they will need to provide AST a more unique identity. If AST were ever to surpass WHM and/or SCH in any respect, there would be incredible outcry from the healer community as a whole.

Effectively, S-E has designed themselves into a corner as not is AST always being compared to WHM and SCH by design, they will always be compared to itself due to the two sects mimicking the current healer counterparts. To get around this, I am encouraging a Sect changing mechanic that allows the two Sects to work in tandem together, and not against each other in balancing.

Regardless if you agree with my retooling or not, I will continue to be a proponent of AST redesign because I don't want a job that will always be balanced between being a WHM and SCH with some card mechanic tacked on. While healing classes will always have some overlap, I always feel they should at least have a unique style associated with them. Right now, AST lacks any semblance of style and will thus always be designed into a small column between the two jobs they are trying to represent.