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

[Zari]

Nerf Scholar if you want competition to the so-called off-healer role. It is beyond broken and overpowered. Increase MP costs for Broil and nerf the fairy's healing potency. SE screwed up by creating the most overpowered job in the game. They cannot even nerf most of SCH's spells because it is shared with Summoner.

Scholar has no downsides. It basically has BLM's unlimited resources plus SMN's mobility.

It really isn't broken.

Being really good at its role =/= broken.

It doesn't need nerfs. What it needs is a competitor for off healer, which might be found in the next expansion, hopefully

[Reinha]

Remove the MP cost of summoning the fairy.
Make the fairy drain MP while summoned ala MCH/BRD songs.

This would be a good way to put scholar at the same level as the other healers without nerfing fairy potencies. Fairy heals should not be MP-free. They are already off the global cooldown and automatic. It would also create interesting play with the fairy sacrifice cooldown.

[Nekotee]

Making the fairy drain mana is not a good idea because it would render the sch useless in term of healing
He would become worse in mana management than the whm
Because always losing mana

How do you expect to keep up in a long fight with a draining skill

Bard and mch are différent they are TP based
They NEVER use mana outside of song

You can't expect à healer to heal while having 3/4 of his mana drained for the fairy
Especially since she provide almost 50% of the healing

[Ceasaria]

Instead of draining mana, the fairy could drain TP

[Alistaire]

It really isn't broken.

Being really good at its role =/= broken.

It doesn't need nerfs. What it needs is a competitor for off healer, which might be found in the next expansion, hopefully

And nerfing it still wouldn't deal with the issue that diurnal AST is better than nocturnal by a longshot.

[Ariane]

Why should AST get to take over both roles but the WHM and SCH are stuck in their one role though? Wouldn't that be overpowered?

[technole]

Nerf Scholar if you want competition to the so-called off-healer role. It is beyond broken and overpowered. Increase MP costs for Broil and nerf the fairy's healing potency. SE screwed up by creating the most overpowered job in the game. They cannot even nerf most of SCH's spells because it is shared with Summoner.

Scholar has no downsides. It basically has BLM's unlimited resources plus SMN's mobility.

It has the highest skill ceiling and being able to maximize it doesn't mean the job is broken.

It does have downsides, and that is AoEs + regens are on cooldowns.

It's also the weakest healer DPS potency wise, so there is no need to nerf the damage potencies.

It just gets shoehorned into the healer that usually does most DPS because of it's Aetherflow and fairy flexibility. When in-reality the other two healers have higher damage to contribute. I still feel the best healer combos are the ones that use both their healing cooldowns to raid benefit, and don't overburden the main healer so much where they can't throw up their own DoTs and contribute damage. Broil is also the weakest nuke of the three healers, uses quite a bit MP already. Stone III > Malefic II > Broil.

However, I do believe there are some areas that the nerf bat can hit on without causing much of a revolt.

One skill that is a little condescending with HW was giving both Emergency Tactics and Indom. Scholar has a situation where you probably don't spend the stack for Sacred Soil and just use Indom unless you have to mitigate raid damage. So there is room to re-consider how these oGCDS work.

Embrace getting a potency nerf shouldn't be too much of an issue if they do it between a raid tier or the next expansion. Somehow they are going to have to give Noct AST some real access to regen and/or re-consider the future of some of these oGCDs, fairy cooldowns, and Embrace if they really want Noct to get any serious traction in the other seat. There just isn't much traction they can do aside from Noct buffs without some "resetting" which they can with the next expansion. It's a problem they created with making a job that brings so much to the raid table to ever ask why do you want to try to live without one? Just like Warrior.

[ChaozK]

I think buffing Noct AST to be as good as SCH isnt the right way of making all healers competitive. You cant really make a healer that is copying the niches of both other healers and is beating them at their own game and it would ultimately lead to all future healers needing to do the same.

Noct AST in the end works good enough to shield the party, however there is no benefit of bringing AST over SCH in that scenario so that is where you need to balance - make AST worth it due to its own niche and let SCH stay as the shielding powerhouse.

Here is how i would change it:

1. Make sects changeable in battle. You dont really need to buff noct to be as good as diurnal when you can just make it so you can use both. You could spend the majority of your time in diurnal and just switch to noct when actual shielding is needed. On the plus side this would mainly buff the WHM+AST combo, since regens stack but shields dont.

2. Make all card buffs AOE by default. This is the big one. The main reason why AST cards are meh is because the overall buff is miniscule when its only on one party member and SCHs fey wind even though its just a small speed buff overall beats it because it has high uptime and buffs the whole party. It also would mitigate RNG a bit since there wouldnt be a need to miracously draw the right card at the right time AND draw ewer/spire for the aoe buff.

3. Make different royal road buffs stack and not overwrite each other. What i mean by this is that you can get the duration AND power up buff. This would make "bad" cards less bad, because you would get more out of royal road.

4. Make different card buffs stack. With card effects being AOE there is a higher need to be able to put multiple card effects on the same target.

[AI_wass]

Noct AST is already strictly better than SCH in the shields department. The problem is, it lacks everything else. Reliable DPS buffing, constant free heals including an AOE regen, multiple strong instant heals, sustainable DPS, virtually unlimited MP, these are all departments in which SCH is unparalleled by any other healer. It having shields at all is just icing on the cake; you could take away its shields entirely and replace them with pure heals instead, and it wouldn't make a difference.

[Fevelle]

I think they should just rebalance AST to make Sects changeable in battle. We would then have a high skill ceiling healer capable of doing everything other healers can.

1. Raise Nocturnal Sect healing bonus to 10% and change the speed bonus from Diurnal Sect to a 10% MP cost cut for all spells.

2. Change Celestial Opposition to add a 10% speed bonus for 15 seconds when in Diurnal and extend duration of beneficial effects by 10 seconds in Nocturnal, keep it on a 150 seconds cooldown. The stun should be avaiable in both Sects.

3. Divide Collective Unconscious effects between sects: 150 potency/15 seconds regen when using Diurnal, 10% damage reduction/10 seconds when on Nocturnal. Make both effects last after people leave the bubble, just like the regen does now.

4. Lower Aspected Benefic bonus shielding to 25% to adequate it with the Nocturnal Sect new bonus.

5. Lower Luminiferous Aether refresh potency to 50, raise duration to 30 seconds, lower cooldown to 90 seconds. 500 potency refresh every 1:30 minutes, as opposed to the 640 potency every 2 minutes we have now. This would make Astrologian MP more sustainable while DPSing along with the MP cost cut from Diurnal Sect.

6. Change Enhanced Luminiferous Aether trait into Enhanced Aspected Helios - a 15% chance that when using Aspected Helios the next Helios spell will not have a cast time. Make up for the lack of the very niche Cure III and a little help with MP on heavy raid-wide damage fights.

7. Lower Essential Dignity recast timer to 30 seconds.

8. Remove Stella and Combust II cast time to make AST as mobile as SCH while DPSing.

9. Make Aspected Benefic/Helios and Nocturnal Field not stackable (if you have 2 AST they NEED to be each in a different Sect) as well as making Aspected Benefic/Helios and Nocturnal Field not stackable from the same caster (so you can't put a regen on the target, change sects and cast a shield).

This could even make AST + AST a thing and their gameplay would be finally completely different from the other healers.