How would you change Nocturnal AST to be competitive against SCH?

[_slowpoke_]

or.............. You could give WHM a chance to shine as the off healer.

WHM cannot "shine as an off-healer" because they don't have the MP solvency for sustained DPS in longer fights, you will simply run dry after just a few minutes without extensive outside assistance, and the same is mostly true for AST (unless you keep throwing Ewers on yourself, and that's the shittiest possible thing to do with an Ewer in raid content). That is a major part of why SCH is the dedicated off-healer and will continue to be - basically infinite MP while DPSing, there's no contest here.

[Rawrz]

WHM cannot "shine as an off-healer" because they don't have the MP solvency for sustained DPS in longer fights, you will simply run dry after just a few minutes without extensive outside assistance, and the same is mostly true for AST (unless you keep throwing Ewers on yourself, and that's the shittiest possible thing to do with an Ewer in raid content). That is a major part of why SCH is the dedicated off-healer and will continue to be - basically infinite MP while DPSing, there's no contest here.

Maybe SE should look into that, if you really want to achieve Balance by all three equal opportunity at the main heal and off heal slots. I accidentally deleted the part when i said that, maybe, AST could share luminiferous aether, like a goad that hits a party member as well as yourself, while formatting to bypass character limit.

Offensively, MP is a ridiculous struggle for WHM, but both AST and WHM gear heavily for piety. The cards are stacked allot worse for AST, since their heals are the only things subsidized, which i feel their mp management is centered around. A little push towards mp recovery or subsidation would go a long way. (Something similar to the cure 2/3 proc while under the effect of cleric stance, between Aero, Aero II, Aero III and maybe a 100% chance to lower the cost of Stone III by half after casting stone II.)

Maybe in 4.0 we'll see some exciting interactions between the (4?!) Healers.

[_slowpoke_]

Maybe SE should look into that, if you really want to achieve Balance by all three equal opportunity at the main heal and off heal slots.

Uh, but why would you do that? Having semi-specialized healers is a good thing, removing this would not only severely homogenize all healing jobs, but also make the healing meta in this game extremely uninteresting. The problem is not that the main healers can't off-heal, the problem is that we only have one job that is viable for off-healing, and the only other one that could theoretically fill the slot is a broken mess. As I've said multiple times before, it is unlikely this will change before 4.0 (or even later) because a) that's the earliest they can fundamentally redesign Nocturnal AST (since buffs won't cut it), and b) it's the earliest we can get another healing job (though I suspect we'll have to wait way into the expansion for that because SE have said they won't do 3 jobs at once again, and I suspect the first job they do in the next expansion won't be a healer).