Astrologian impossible to balance as it is

[TatoRazzino]

I see you bring up this point a lot and I unfortunately have to disagree on a semantic.

I do agree there are many situational ability/spell in the game. Like you've mentioned, Feint, Fists of Earth, Titan Egi. Repose can be added to that list as can Keen Flurry, etc etc.

However, I do feel you're either undervaluing how situational Nocturnal Stance is or overvaluing how important people feel about the very niche abilities/spells.

I feel this way because, while Nocturnal stance is indeed a single ability, it represents an entire healing paradigm.

Nocturnal Stance changes how you play the healer. You don't have HoTs anymore, you now have mitigation spells. Your heals, while slightly more powerful, require you to output more on-demand healing as you don't have more MP efficient HoTs that help normalize healing requirements over the course of a fight. Nocturnal ASTs will consume more MP than Diurnal AST, thus changing how one manages their resources. Time Dilation and Celestial Opposition have less targets to "extend".

When a MNK goes into Fists of Earth, they know they're doing it as a temporary basis to reduce damage received. It doesn't change the fact they're punching something in the face - they're still using the exact same rotation to pummel their foes. Likewise, using Titan-Egi doesn't necessarily mean the SMN is changing their DPS rotation, though it might mean they need to Sustain every so often.

Nocturnal Sect fundamentally changes how the AST heals their party. Unfortunately, it is generally inferior to Diurnal as Diurnal allows you better sustained healing via HoTs, better MP efficiency due to HoTs, higher DPS due to the attack speed, and better options with Time Dilation and Celestial Opposition (extending HoTs or Cards or both).

Ignoring the whole Noct AST vs SCH and focusing on Noct AST vs Diurnal AST, it would be nice if (1) Noct received some polish so the decision isn't so cut and dry regarding Noct versus Diurnal or (2) as you mentioned, a Sect swap that makes use of the full kit AST brings [hopefully in 4.0 when they can flesh out the kit further to incorporate such a dynamic].

Nocturnal represents a healing paradigm, that's accurate. However, it's a paradigm you're not required to use. You use it because you want it, not because you're forced to. That's the key point. Being situational is not reason enough to change how something is built; if any fight required AST and you were forced to use Noct. AST, I'd agree with you, but that's not the case.

If you want to compare AST/SCH, I'm down for it and I've done it in other threads. The first thing is noticing that SCH also has healing paradigms with their summon spells. People overlook the fact that choosing Eos over Selene represents a raid-wide DPS loss to allow the SCH more healing options (and vice-versa), and while it's possible to change it during combat, this consumes resources and GCDs that could be better used in other contexts; what I mean is that the complete toolkit is not accessible to SCH all the time. The shields and emergency heals are the things that are available 100% of the time. AST has similar issues: you have to choose between hp-extension shields and HoTs, but you always have your healing cooldowns, your 2nd tier healing spell and your support toolkit all the time. This allows AST to be able to do more sustained burst healing since the job is not constrained by stacks and cooldowns to do basic stuff like Helios or Benefic II. This is an asset that has been pointed out by the OP and it's one of the reasons AST is hard to balance. This also represents some big differences in style and functionality between AST/SCH.

One of the issues that makes SCH more powerful than AST is the fact that fights are built around the SCH healing toolkit, and because of that all the weaknesses and restrictions of that toolkit are not noticeable. The fact that AST's weaknesses show is another consequence of that. This is something that can't be fixed by changing how Nocturnal Sect works. Nerfing SCH won't work as well.

Another issue is the fact that AST was not built as an off healer, and this is something that bugs me a lot in relation to comments about Nocturnal Sect. In my opinion, any fixes should take into consideration that Nocturnal doesn't need more mitigation or more DPS, but better healing options to compete with WHM and Diurnal as well. AST shouldn't compete with SCH in this matter; the next healer should be off-healer oriented, and then we'll see SCH being left out. This is not new to raiding, and it's not a problem. WHM/AST not being an optimal combo is not a problem, because it's only restricted to raiding, and in this game there has always been a sub-optimal combo. Like in 2.4, when DRG had no raid utility when compared to MNK/NIN and MNK/BRD had a fixed spot because of things only they could do; in this expansion, it's WAR/SCH's turn, and MNK lost its place because 1) DRK can function as well as PLD and add the debuff MNK had, and 2) the traited Mantra lost its value. Basically, not having WAR/SCH/NIN already means your party is sub-optimal.

That's not problem at all; the real problem is that fights were poorly designed, and the optional, optimal combo is being considered mandatory. There's no way to fix that by changing the jobs, only by changing the fights.

That is, if SE doesn't remove the restriction to change sects.