Astrologian is noticeably weaker than the other healers

[Korihu]

I have played a fair number of games on my AST since the expansion comes out, and what I can say compared to the other healers is that it feels far too weak and needs something to help bring it up.

It's issues are that it has very little in the ways to help sustain themselves, and their teammates.

Consider that:
White Mages get Regens, Assize, Divine Benison Shield, Protect, and Fluid Aura (knockback AND bind) to help defend themselves and their teammates. Furthermore, Protect lasts longer than Disable, the cooldown is shorter and the cooldowns of all their other skills can be shortened even further by Lilies. This gives them many, many options to keep their teammates and themselves alive.

Scholars get powerful shield, Eye for an Eye, a knockback, powerful healing burst in Summon, and chain strategem and Broil's mana drain really helps their team gets kills fast. Summon is seriously really powerful.

Astrologians I find have little ways to defend themselves and sustain their teammates.
The only actual healing cooldown we get is Essential Dignity. Besides that, Lightspeed's main use is for kiting, it doesn't boost our healing output, so it doesn't help in defending our teammates. The synastry target gets an extra 25% heal when you heal them, so putting Synastry on the person being focused and healing them helps yield slightly higher heals. But we cannot use Synastry on ourselves. If we get lucky we can get Bole, but that's RNG and not reliable at all.
To top this all off, we have no mana regen except for a 1/4 chance for Ewer. Sure Lightspeed reduces mana cost but that can only take us so far if we get unlucky and never get an Ewer.

Then we have Deorbit.
This skill is very cute for pulling in people who try to run to the enemy base before boxes are even collected or for people who overextend into entire enemy alliances in Frontlines, but that's it. Literally, the only usefulness in it is when your teammates are bad. I toyed with the idea of using it to help ease damage on the target just for a bit by pulling them away from the enemy melee, but you have to be at a far distance for that to be helpful and you want to be at a moderately close distance for navigation around walls. And, this is the most important point, it does nothing to help Astrologians defend themselves! What this essentially means is that where Scholars and White Mages get an extra powerful defensive cooldown to help themselves survive such as Divine Benison/Protect/Fluid Aura and Eye for an Eye/Summon/Aura Blast, Astrologians get an empty slot. Combined with the lack of any Hots or Shields and Astrologians become a noticeably weaker healer who will fold immediately under pressure. Note also that all those WHM/SCH skills listed can be used on both themselves AND their party members. As mentioned earlier, AST's skills Synastry and Lightspeed are only useful for their party members OR themselves. All we got is Disable and Essential Dignity. Bole is there but it is extremely left to RNG when we don't have Redraw.

Our gimmick with Benefic making the next spell instacast, while cute, doesn't particularly help us since we still have to wait for the global cooldown. It's helped in the few situations that I coincidentally had the buff going whe nI got stunned so I could instacast out of the stun, but that's really situational and hard to get. What little kiting we can get from having one instacasted spell is sad. Whereas for WHM and SCH, their Lilies and Shields are always useful.


I think that Astrologians should be looked at and be considered for rebalancing before the season comes out. At the very least, give us a more useful skill than Deorbit. It feels like a waste of slot. AST needs something to be able to defend ourselves because Essential Dignity isn't enough.


If other Astros or healers would like to give me their opinion on the state of AST, whether they agree or disagree with me, I'd love to hear it. Some discussion would be nice. Maybe I'm just missing something about AST's new toolkit.

[Cabalabob]

I haven't played AST yet but I find it hard to believe it's worse than SCH right now, we literally get 2 single target healing spells and 1 single target heal burst that's so weak a melee does more damage than it heals. That is our entire healing kit not including the fairy that we have to build up to even use.

Being a SCH sucks now, I feel like a BLM attempting to heal with physick more than an actual healer.

[Poisonous]

Just play another class then. I saw benefits to all the abilities and think that any team should have a variety.

Instacast heal is always useful, as is instacast slow/damage. Came in handy a number of times if you know how to make the most of it.

I used the Rescue multiple times on our best tank and occasionally other teammates. I had one teammate who repeatedly went way too deep and so I just never used it on them, because it was a waste of a spell. Instead I saved it for the best who needed rescuing as we were retreating or if they were getting focused.

It felt perfectly capable in combat and helpful to the team, even with the reduced functionality of the cards.

Can't be OP all the time friend.

[Korihu]

I haven't played AST yet but I find it hard to believe it's worse than SCH right now, we literally get 2 single target healing spells and 1 single target heal burst that's so weak a melee does more damage than it heals. That is our entire healing kit not including the fairy that we have to build up to even use.

Being a SCH sucks now, I feel like a BLM attempting to heal with physick more than an actual healer.

I haven't toyed with Scholar myself yet, but I have been up against some powerful scholars who seemed to be holding their ground well. But you do have assistance with the shield mitigation, a knockback that applies slow to help with pressure on yourself and Summon. How have you found those tools? Useful, not very useful? Lustrate does seem to be rather poor, seems like it's more there for the Faegie Gauge increase more than a burst heal like it was before?

Just play another class then. I saw benefits to all the abilities and think that any team should have a variety.

Instacast heal is always useful, as is instacast slow/damage. Came in handy a number of times if you know how to make the most of it.

I used the Rescue multiple times on our best tank and occasionally other teammates. I had one teammate who repeatedly went way too deep and so I just never used it on them, because it was a waste of a spell. Instead I saved it for the best who needed rescuing as we were retreating or if they were getting focused.

It felt perfectly capable in combat and helpful to the team, even with the reduced functionality of the cards.

Can't be OP all the time friend.

I do not see how "just play another class" is useful discussion. I will play another class if I feel that AST is still weak going forward, but the point of my thread is to give my feedback on the state of the class and see what others think and spark some discussion and debate.

I'm not sure how useful instacast is personally. We don't get interrupted by damage anymore and our casts are already pretty short. We still have to wait out the global cooldown, so its not as if our overall output is any faster. I see its usefulness from when i get stunned and happen to have the buff so I'm able to get it out before/after the stun quickly, but it's just that, it's when the buff happens to be up. I just generally feel that shields and hots are all around more useful. I'd like to hear your thoughts on this more.

Are you speaking about Deorbit in terms of Frontlines or Feast? I can see that it might be cute in Frontlines to help retreat but in Feast I don't find it useful at all. The map is fairly small and healers do need to be positioned at a relatively close distance in Feast because of all the Line of Sight walls so I feel that it doesn't help much as a 'mitigation' tool. Bear in mind that my posts and thoughts are pretty much entirely in relation to the Feast 4v4, as that is the mode that SE chose to be the 'competitive' one and hence I feel that balance there is more important than Frontlines, which I feel is a more casual and fun mode.

But what is with that last statement? "Can't be OP all the time friend"? AST was only ever OP before they nerfed the shields, after that they were just as viable as any other healer, though WHM edged out on top due to the superior CC. I'm not trying to make the class OP either, I just feel like it's weaker than the other healers and would like it to be a little closer to keep it viable in future seasons. Let's keep false condescending statements like that out and keep to discussing about Astrologian.

I streamed Feast last night and I will stream some more games later to further put together my thoughts on AST. If anyone finds my stream and feels like watching I would love feedback if it is simply me not understanding how to play the new Astrologian.

[Rawrz]

LMAO oh this is PvP. Carry on citizens.

[Cabalabob]

Holding your own is realativly simple, I've had groups of 4 pounding away on me, I'll just turtle, summon eos and spam Aldo and they can't kill me, eventually they give up.

It's healing others that's the problem, without succor I can't keep an eye on everyone, pretty much every time I choose to heal someone, someone else is going to die and lustrate isn't strong enough to make up that difference.

Succor and autonomous eos used to be enough to cover the party while we healed, now we have neither.

[Korihu]

Holding your own is realativly simple, I've had groups of 4 pounding away on me, I'll just turtle, summon eos and spam Aldo and they can't kill me, eventually they give up.

It's healing others that's the problem, without succor I can't keep an eye on everyone, pretty much every time I choose to heal someone, someone else is going to die and lustrate isn't strong enough to make up that difference.

Oh i didn't realise you were talking about in terms of Frontlines. That's something pretty much every healer has issues with, since there's so many people there'll be lots getting hurt at the same time so it's simply what happens, especially since none of us have AoE anymore. Just gotta hope your co healer helps pick up the other people. I'm referring to 4v4 Feast more than Frontlines. Maybe I should update my post to reflect that.

[FunkYeahDragons]

God bless Deorbit. Yank that leash, healers.

[Ryannex]

I've been testing the three healers out and I have to agree that AST seems slightly underwhelming. One of the problems comes down to the 'class mechanic' it has. SCH get a period of boosted heals with Eos, WHM basically get a never-ending spear card with lillies... AST's simply get a larger "THIS IS WHAT CARD YOU HAVE" notification with no bonus whatsoever.

In mention to the user up above saying that SCH is weak... IMO SCH is currently the best healer. Broil is such a powerful tool when against AST/WHM's that it can truly turn the tide of battle. Instead of having WHM's spamming sleep, we now have SCH's spamming Broil to drain the MP of the enemy healer until they're useless. Not that I'm complaining -- it's fantastic to see SCH FINALLY able to compete in the feast competitively, but AST is remarkably weak in comparison.

EDIT: In regards to Deorbit... This is what put me off of playing AST right now. I can see no good use for it, but I can see a lot of BAD coming from it. The amount of times I can see myself using it only to be harassed for 'ruining a burst' or 'ruining a kill' has put me off of the class entirely.

[Dizzy_Derp]

Umm, Are you trolling? Like seriously. Because at may very well be the most overpowered class in this game right now.