Seriously, when are you guys gonna nerf ASTs again? Its highly needed.

[Dimitrii]

3.0 Bard says hello?

Except Bard isn't a melee and he was joking anyway.

[Moonlite]

Except Bard isn't a melee and he was joking anyway.

Well it used to be more melee than magey. I meant be careful what you wish for. How do you know that they won't put a finishing move on Monk that needs a cast bar? You know it would be awesome just like the Black mages that got trapped in circles for dps.

[Enlial]

A crit clean shots damage calculates at the same time as BTE. As does tornado kick into axe kick.

If you stun -> buff clean shot + BTE all of that damage will calculate at once because of the cleanshot damage delay. Same with tornado into axe kick. Tornado calculates slow and axe calculates fast... it isn't an exaggeration, you are just using a false assumption of damage calculating the millisecond you press the skill.

If you don't understand this, I can't take the rest of your post very seriously. How much do you even play high level PvP?

You're talking about animation cancelling which is a really weird thing. Using an instant "fast" ability immediately following a slow one will make the slow abilities damage appear on your screen, and in your combat log, much faster. Clean shot has about a 1 sec delay, but by following it up with an off-gcd you reduce that delay to about .05 seconds (no really, I fraps'd and checked it frame by frame xD). The weirdness comes into play when you consider that the game exists in multiple states. What you see, what the server sees, and what others see. The game has to make some sort of compromise between those different states and it seems to have a lot of strange rules for how it does that. As an example, anyone who's ever raid tanked as war knows that butchers block is a horrible way to pick up hate because of its delay, so yeah the delay is definitely real in some ways. On the other hand, if I use butchers block on a low level mob, and another character, in my case an alt on a separate account on another computer, shortly after uses an instant cast+fast ability, both attacks appear in the combat log, and the instant cast does appear first, but the kill gets awarded to the butchers block (and this explains a lot of what happens with kills in frontlines xD) So, in some ways, animation delay isnt real and the game considers the attack to have happened much sooner than when you see the damage appear.

I'm not saying you're wrong, just that its more complicated than you're making it sound. I'm not really sure I follow the argument here at all, actually xD 2 competent DPS should be able to destroy an equally competent AST. 2 bad dps wont be able to kill a mediocre AST. 2 mediocre dps vs a good AST, well idk, thats a tossup xP depends how good and how mediocre I guess. You shouldnt be comparing AST to DPS, though, because, um, its not a dps? I think ast and whm are pretty well balanced, actually. I feel like ast has an edge at lower skill levels and whm would probably, with the major advantage of sleep, at higher ones, but idk because Im a casul scrub. Sch is def inferior to both, in feast at least. Frontlines all 3 are perfectly viable for the most part. So really I think you'd need to either bring sch up to whm+ast's level, or bring ast+whm down to sch's, and then decide if the role of healer is too great in pvp.

But... really, and frankly, I think people aught to stop looking for scapegoats to blame their failures on.