Astrologian impossible to balance as it is

[TatoRazzino]

Long post incoming. No TL;DR, read it only if you will.

I'll be sure to remember that whenever I see two ASTs paired together in an instance.

Please, do. Diurnal/Diurnal is a good combo for lots of DF instances that don’t require any kind of shielding. Who cares if the effects stack or not? You’re already sub-optimal by having two of the same job, so just use what’s better to clear the duty with.

Or rather that people made the natural, logical decision that the 'SCH-like stance' - which Nocturnal was advertised as being, not some PVP niche skill that you keep mentioning - would be a better complement to the WHM's toolkit in a party, instead of being a secondary WHM-type. Except the Sect sucks as doing what's intended in a raid setting (which Jobs are designed and later adjusted around in the first place), while Diurnal doesn't, so it wins out.

It’s not a “natural, logical decision” to pick any job or healing style based on your party composition and disregarding the duty. I’ll bring up the Yoshi-P quote again, since you guys decided to just read what you wanted instead of reading what he said in detail:

Tell us a bit more about the two styles of astrologian.
Y: The best way to put it simply is that you'll be able to switch between stances of a pure healer type and a barrier type. One way to think of it is that the healer type would be kind of like white mage, while the shield type would be closer to scholar. However, it would be too strong if you could switch frequently during combat, so there will be restrictions on how often you can change.

Can you give us an example of what the proper utilization would be?
Y: When you're doing a raid dungeon with a white mage, for example, you might use the barrier stance, and you'd use the pure-healer type stance if you were paired with a scholar.

He said that Diurnal is kind of like a WHM, not a substitute for a WHM (and the same goes with SCH). It was an analogy about healing style, not a statement that AST should replace any of them optimally. People read this as “oh, nice, I’ll be able to replace the other two Jobs!” and Yoshi-P didn’t said that, at least not in this quote.
He used the WHM/Noct x Diurnal/SCH composition as an example of how you could use the Sects. He never said anything about being optimal, necessary or mandatory to do so. Also, he said raid dungeon, which is a label that’s not related to Gordias (Savage) only: all normal Gordias content and Void Ark – not to mention the Coils and the three Crystal Tower duties – are raid dungeons. They’re in the Duty Finder and are the only kind of raid dungeon that you can find yourself paired with anything you didn’t plan on being paired to. To do the Savage version of Second Coil or Alexander – Gordias (Savage), you have to form a pre-made party, which means you’ll include whatever you want. If you choose to be sub-optimal, that’s your problem. Yoshi-P never said it would be optimal in Savage to do so. PLD is not optimal for the last two turns of Gordias (Savage), MNK is not optimal for any of the turns, so there’s absolutely no reason to believe that Nocturnal should be any different. Back in 2.X, there were instances that solo tanking as PLD was the optimal DPS-oriented meta (T5, T7, T8 and T9, which means 1/3 of the raids designed), having a BRD in the party was considered not only optimal, but mandatory for all the 12 battle oriented turns of Coil (I’m excluding T3 for obvious reasons), and having a DRG in the party became a sub-optimal decision as soon as NIN was released. So, please, stop using end-game raiding as a parameter for complaining about how some jobs or stances work, because there will always be a sub-optimal job/stance. In this patch, it happened to be PLD/MNK/Noct. AST. There are other things that could be pointed out:

- In A2S, for example, MCH may fall short in relation to BRD, since the boost to casters provided by BRD is stronger and their AoE potential can be very high with less TP cost;
- In A4S, some SMN mains are using BLM instead to deal with the MP-drain mechanic;
- In A2S, PLD is optimal due to lots of physical damage.

However, I’ll repeat that Nocturnal is viable in all of them. A1S and A2S were cleared week 1 with Nocturnal Sect. In fact, Noct/SCH was used for A2S because the regens were giving tanks a harder time to keep aggro and, since the couldn’t afford to not spam heals with the kind of gear we had back then, HoT effects overhealed more than healed. So the “natural, logical” decision was, in fact, a bad decision for that particular group, which found that the unnatural decision-that-has-no-logic was the better decision in the end. Pretty ironic, don’t you think?

High end raiding tests your perception of things all the time, and the best players know that these natural, logical decisions can mess up progression if you decide to let them constrain you to the point where you stop thinking and let other people think for you instead.

Also, I’d like to point out how sub-optimal Nocturnal actually is in relation to SCH, since this is the biggest issue with the job until now. I’ve done it before, in another thread, with more detail, so I’ll just point out two (big) things:

1) In relation to mitigation, the SCH toolkit has:

- A single target 300 potency shield, which can reach 900 when it crits (Adlo);
- A single target shield that has a 20% chance to reduce the damage dealt by enemies attacking the shielded target by 10%, with a 2 minutes cooldown (Eye for an Eye);
- The ability to spread those two shields in a 10y radius every 90s (Deployment Tactics);
- An 150 potency AoE shield (Succor);
- A bubble that reduces incoming damage by 10% every 30s at the cost of one Aetherflow stack (Sacred Soil);
A 15s 15% STR/DEX/INT/MND reduction debuff with a 90s cooldown (Supervirus);
A 20% magic resistance AoE buff when using Eos every 2 minutes (Fey Covenant).

AST has:

- A single target, instant cast 325 potency shield (Aspected Benefic);
- A 157 potency AoE shield (Aspected Helios);
- A bubble that reduces incoming damage by 10% every 90s (Collective Unconscious);
- A debuff that reduces damage dealt by 10% for 6s every 60s (Disable);
- A random buff that reduces damage taken by a variable amount, being able to reduce 15% of a single target or 5% in AoE (all the variations of The Bole);

Now let’s compare:

a) Since critical hits and cards are RNG based, we can’t consider them a consistent way of mitigating damage. People who play AST or SCH know that you can spend a complete raid night without getting a single Critical Adlo when you need to deploy it or a Bole during incoming AoE damage. For that reason, we can dismiss the critical hits and the AoE boles as being a thing that raiders rely upon to clear content. This makes Eye for an Eye and Fey Covenant more effective than a Bole, and also make Aspected Benefic more effective than an Adloquium. We have to keep in mind that Fey Covenant increases magic resistance values by 20%, and that a 20% increase may will not be translated into an actual 20% reduction;
b) As Ghishlain showed in another topic, Supervirus is more effective than Disable in average mitigation, but they can also reach the same values due to the RNG component of damage equations in this game, so the actual difference in damage output may not be felt as strongly as most people believe. Also, Disable can be used more often and even stack with a SMN Supervirus;
c) Sacred Soil and Colletive Unconscious are both used during spike raid-wide damage, and have the same kind of mitigation. The main difference is not the placement of the bubble since people usually stack for Cure III (assuming we’re doing the natural and logical pairing with a WHM of, course), but the cooldown: Sacred Soil can be used more often than Collective Unconscious;
d) Succor and Aspected Helios are equivalent due to the RNG component of the equations;
e) Deployment Tactics are a way of spreading a 300 to 900 shield to the party. Since crits are not reliable, we must assume that 300 is the default value that groups are going to consistently rely upon. AST has nothing like it;

I believe it’s reasonable to say that for normal mitigation, they’re very competitive for some reasons:

a) SCH’s shielding spells (Adloquium and Succor) have slightly stronger counterparts in the AST toolkit, with the exception of a critical Adloquium which is not consistent;
b) Even though Sacred Soil can be used every 30s, it costs a stack, so it’s fair to say that no SCH with their right mind will spam that and burn their chances of using an extra Lustrate, Indomitbility or Energy Drain. For that reason, let’s assume they’re using it once a minute. This matches the cooldown for Disable, which offers a comparable of mitigation (minus 10% every minute);
c) For raid-wide damage, we can compare Supervirus with Collective Unconscious in relation to the number of times you can use it, with Supervirus being overall stronger in mitigation, which is an aspect that the healing component of Collective Unconscious can make up for. Of course, SCH could use Whispering Dawn, but the Collective Unconscious HoT potency can be way higher (even double it, in some cases) than the fairy one;
d) Eye for an Eye doens’t stack, and can be used not only by SMN, but also by WHM and BLM, so even with the longer cooldown when cross-classed, this kind of mitigation is present even when a SCH is not in the party;

The optimal mitigation comes from two aspects:

a) Fey Covenant even though it’s very strong, has a long cooldown and requires Eos to be present. An AST could answer this with a spread Bole if this more mitigation is actually necessary. Nevertheless, this is something that makes SCH optimal in mitigation;
b) Finally, we reached the Deployment thing, which is the primary reason why SCH’s mitigation kit is overall stronger. An occasional 900 potency AoE shield is not something to overlook, and a 300 reliable shield every 90s is very consistent. The only way that an AST can come a little closer to this number is by using Synastry before casting Aspected Helios to boost the shielding potency to 187, which is 113 potency lower than the regular Deployed Shield. However, SCH can also use Fey Illumination to boost the spread shield to 360 (I’m not even going to consider Dissipation, because that takes the fairy away), which will make the gap even bigger. In actual numbers, the consistent shielding a SCH provides is between 1000-2000 hit points for a non critical hit.

These are raw numbers, without any context. Let’s introduce some situations to see how they fare in the fights we’re actually talking about:

a) For A1S, no shielding is actually required. The fight was cleared with WHM/Diurnal combo, which means that mitigation is not a defining factor. Shields are helpful, of course, but the party is too spread out for Adloquium + Deployment Tactics be a thing you use when the bosses are in the Arena. Jumps are the only situation where this mechanic is viable, but it’s not necessary to survive anything. It was fairly easy to keep everyone topped off before and after the landing impact with no shielding at all (since back then Diurnal Collective Unconscious didn’t provide any shielding). This means that a Nocturnal AST would be just fine for A1S;
b) A2S does not require any shielding as well, specially of the AoE kind. This makes Nocturnal Sect completely viable for this fight;
c) In A3S, the cooldown of Deployment Tactics and Supervirus is not short enough to guarantee its use for every single Cascade and all splashes, which is the mechanic you want to mitigate damage from. This means that even a SCH won’t be able to use its complete toolkit to deal with this kind of damage, and Sacred Soil + Succor will be the reliable kind of mitigation your party will have and it’s honestly the only one it actually needs. This is easily matched by Disable + Aspected Helios, which means that a party can survive any mechanic in that fight with a Nocturnal AST mitigation toolkit. SCH is stronger, that’s a fact, but that doesn’t mean any party requires it for mitigation;
d) Finally, a lot of people say that in A4S the party AoE buster is very strong and that you needed a lot of mitigation to survive it earlier in the patch 3.05, more than a Nocturnal AST could provide alone. I can’t confirm that with my own experience, so I’ll take the claim as true. Nowadays, there have been clears with Nocturnal AST (very few, of course), so it’s viable, even though it’s not optimal. However, I’d like to point out the fact that a lot of groups used DRK to clear A4S earlier in the patch, which means that the party didn’t have PLD’s Divine Veil mitigation. Noct AST + PLD could provide the same kind of mitigation a Deployed Adloquium can (even more, actually), so the fact that groups didn’t use PLD + SCH makes me inclined to believe that mitigation is not the reason SCH is the default off-healer choice. That leads me to my second point.

2) What makes SCH optimal for the off-healer spot is not mitigation, but DPS potential, which comes from the fact that the job stems from a DPS class (ACN, the same as SMN). This already means that the basic DPS spells of a true DPS job are all available to SCH, and so is the resource management mechanic; this puts SCH in a very special spot, which is also occupied by WAR when compared to tanks –MRD is a weird tanking class that has several things we only see in DPS classes, like a sustained increased damage buff (Maim) and a debuff that increases damage dealt by a certain weapon-type (the slashing debuff).

As far as I know, Yoshi-P never stated that Nocturnal would ever have high DPS capabilities, and he only made an analogy about healing style. This means that SCH is not something Nocturnal was ever intended to replace and that groups that build their statics around optimizing DPS output for all roles will have to include a SCH. This is something similar to 2.X DPS meta, which had only 4-DPS spots for fights which required two tanks: before 2.4, the number of DPS spots jobs was five, which meant one of them would be left out. BRD had a guaranteed spot back them. Nowadays, the two healer meta requires a choice similar to what existed in the 2.X – one of the jobs will be left out –, and since competitive groups want to clear the high-end content as fast as possible, DPS optmization is necessary and SCH will have a permanent spot. This is not a problem in the game, but a choice that the community makes with the possibilites offered. We just have to deal with it, since it exists in several games and it exists in FF XIV since 2.0 was launched; if SE has not “fixed” this aspect by now, I’ll assume that this won’t ever happen. My bet is that in 4.0 we’ll see a new off-healer oriented job, and that WHM/AST will fight for the main healer spot and that SCH will fight with the new job for the other spot; the SCH/NEW HEALER combo will be sub-optimal in healing capabilites, just as the WHM/AST is sub-optimal in DPS capabilities at the moment.

Finally, Yoshi-P has also stated that the fights were not designed with healer DPS in mind, and that it is only needed for parties that want to clear the Savage fights below the expected average item level – which has not been stated yet, but while comparing it with Coil we can assume that A1S would be around i190, A2S around i195, A3S would be something like i200 and A4S something like i125. Since clearing the fights before this item level treshold is what the pro-groups want, WHM/AST is not going to be the optimal choice; in fact, it will probably render the effort impossible. However, how many groups are actually competing for the World 1st position to make this whole optimal versus sub-optimal discussion actually necessary?
If, after passing the item level treshold, your group is still not meeting the checks without the amount of DPS a SCH provides, and if your group can’t survive the mechanics with the amount of mitigation a Nocturnal AST can provide alone, then it means that your problem is not a sub-optimal party composition, but sub-optimal players. Most people that cry about Nocturnal are not clearing the fights as WHM/SCH as well, simply because they can’t do the mechanics properly.

This raid tier has been having a lot of issues that are not related to job design, but to raid design. Most groups can’t clear A3S because of issues like latency, which makes the Wash Away + Digititis mechanic impossible to handle. There are groups wiping to the double hand mechanic because latency doesn’t let them place them properly. People are also not meeting Equal Concentration’s DPS check. All of those happen way before healer DPS/mitigation becomes a problem, specially because the DPS check I mentioned is best done as WHM or AST, because of the higher burst in relation to SCH.

In that case, Square-Enix can buff the hell out of Nocturnal Sect. They could indulge the ideas presented in here and add not one but two floating moons to heal and add HoTs while Nocturnal AST blasts the supernovas people suggested in another topic: groups would still not clear it with this raid design.

I’ll give you guys a personal example: I have been doing A3S since september. My static still hasn’t cleared it, because of stupid things. Since we started in july we had to replace not one, but three bards that decided to quit for different reasons. We also lost a MNK who went to Panama and never came back; this led to us having our OT change to MNK and relearn A2S from the gobwalker perspective. This OT I mentioned was already replacing our former OT, who stopped playing because he was in the middle of a divorce. Our original healer composition was WHM/AST, but our WHM had a teenager tantrum because of a stupid fight with a friend of our former raid leader; we replaced him with a SCH that is in the Air Force and two months ago decided he wouldn’t play anymore after he was transfered to Alaska, which means we got another SCH (our third healer so far). The last development happened last week, when our MT decided to quit the game because of lag issues with Comcast, and now our BRD, who lives in the same state, is having lag issues. None of this issues was ever related to my job choice, or even Sect choice for that matter.
This personal story is my own, of course, but almost all groups in my server are having similar problems and stopped progressing not because of job composition, but because of real life issues. Statics are breaking up in A3S because that fight was poorly designed and requires not only an insane amount of practice, but perfect conditions to play, otherwise you’ll wipe constantly to god knows what.

This is the reason why I believe people are overreacting to the Sect thing. In all of the end game raid design, only one fight requires the kind of mitigation SCH offers and in only two of them healer DPS is actually an issue. Square-Enix has already stated that this will be fixed in Midas, so just wait for three weeks or so, and you’ll see how Nocturnal Sect will stop being a problem, even if they don’t buff it or if they don’t take away the restriction to change Sects.