Please do not nerf Astrologian instead buff WHM/SCH

[ToasterMan]

I don't think AST needs to be necessarily be nerfed. I think it needs a complete rework.

[loreleidiangelo]

I don't think AST needs to be necessarily be nerfed. I think it needs a complete rework.

^^^^^^^

Failing that though, Balance at the LEAST needs to be looked at/addressed. A flat 10% DPS increase on everyone in the raid is something no other healer comes even close to emulating in value.

[Lildragora]

^^^^^^^

Failing that though, Balance at the LEAST needs to be looked at/addressed. A flat 10% DPS increase on everyone in the raid is something no other healer comes even close to emulating in value.

Thats their thing though, powerful party buffs. They should keep the cards the way they are, the other healers should be able to output more HPS or Mitigation however. Let them specialize. I am of the mindset of no nerfing, you just bring up and build content based on that. It's fine if some fights need harsh dps checks, just like some fights you would prefer raid healing or mitigation. Any combo should be fine to use together and there will always be a meta, but if given the option some fights would be better suited to different combinations giving every roll a place but doable with any. Ideally at least imo.

[Sylvina]

Thats their thing though, powerful party buffs. They should keep the cards the way they are, the other healers should be able to output more HPS or Mitigation however. Let them specialize. I am of the mindset of no nerfing, you just bring up and build content based on that. It's fine if some fights need harsh dps checks, just like some fights you would prefer raid healing or mitigation. Any combo should be fine to use together and there will always be a meta, but if given the option some fights would be better suited to different combinations giving every roll a place but doable with any. Ideally at least imo.

Pretty much this. Powerful party buffs from cards is what makes AST unique. No reason to nerf everything which makes classes unique, that just makes the game boring. what they need to do is make EVERY class unique in meaningful and useful ways.

[Hikuras]

^^^^^^^

Failing that though, Balance at the LEAST needs to be looked at/addressed. A flat 10% DPS increase on everyone in the raid is something no other healer comes even close to emulating in value.

Why? Why does everyone want to kill BALANCE? Leave Balance along. So what that Astro gets that card.. it's an astro's card. Whm and Sc don't need to take Balance away. instead LEave astros alone and just give the other two healers some tools that are only for them. LEts do THAT instead of fucking up Astro cause of a card it was made to have. :c

[Minizomb]

^^^^^^^

Failing that though, Balance at the LEAST needs to be looked at/addressed. A flat 10% DPS increase on everyone in the raid is something no other healer comes even close to emulating in value.

Why should another healer come close to it they are different classes with different strengths and play styles. I main Astro and I have to say that would be silly to take away their strength, astro is a great quick spot healer with good rotation on cards and I even like the new skills. Let them adjust other classes don't take away from astro cause another class cannot do it wouldn't make sense their different classes for a reason.

[HyoMinPark]

Failing that though, Balance at the LEAST needs to be looked at/addressed. A flat 10% DPS increase on everyone in the raid is something no other healer comes even close to emulating in value.

The trade-off for that though is the RNG, I think. I will have some runs where I get Balance after Balance, and other runs where RNG says "Oh, I heard you really wanted some Spears." Really, they could rework Spears to make them useful for more than just Royal Road/Minor Arcana burning. Instead of limited CD reduction to CDs used during the duration, maybe adjust to 10% reduction on CD timers on party members outright (5% if AOE). Not too OP (20% single/10% AOE outright could possibly border on OP), but now not nearly as useless. Only time I use Spear is on myself for Lucid Dreaming timers. If I have one at the ready when I need to pop Lucid. If they changed Spear to where it just flat-out reduced CD timers of skills already on CD, it would be useful to throw on tanks to allow them to get their mitigation CDs back faster. Especially on tanks like DRK where certain mitigation skills are very situational (Dark Mind), and they only have a couple solid ones for all content (Rampart and Shadow Wall, for example).

They could look at other cards to try and make them more viable and more desirable, but everyone is going to desire DPS increases in a game where the playerbase cares so much about numbers, so Balance will always be the card people care the most about. There isn't really a way around that other than nerfing it to the point where no one cares. And if they don't add viability to the other cards, AST will go back to 3.0 AST--undesirable because they don't bring anything the other two don't already have. That doesn't solve anything. Just makes another job gimped where as the others aren't. One shouldn't have to suffer at the expense of "fixing" the others.

I like the fact that I can buff on AST, and I don't really want them to change the buffs on AST. Rather they need to look at the other two healers and buff them; give them things that AST cannot bring to the table, be it more powerful HoT/HPS, or more potent/longer-lasting shields, or better mitigation. Fix SCH's fairy to where Chocobo Companions DON'T out-heal them. Give SCH fairy maybe different buffs (something other than Fey Wind/Fey Illumination to make them desirable). Expand on WHM Lilies maybe (can't speak much on WHM right now since I haven't looked into the whole Lily/Confession thing yet). Something to give healers their own niche rather than taking away from one healer because they can't figure out what to do with the other two to bring them up to speed.


For those saying AST needs reworked: how are you wanting SE to rework the job? The idea behind ASTs was the card buffs, little weaker HoTs/HPS, little weaker shields (though right now Noct shields are better than SCH even with Noct losing it's heal potency increase--SCH definitely needs to be looked at and buffed to bring it back to viability). What rework would you propose to make all three healer jobs viable in some way while also maintaining a sense of uniqueness about them all?

Before when ASTs were garbage, they had nothing to bring that the other two didn't already have. Their buffs' effects were negligible, and the Draw design was clunky at 3.0 launch until SE fixed it. Then SE buffed the cards (Balance in particular), and now AST is suddenly too OP and needs to be nerfed? Nerfing AST buffs will just make it back into a weaker version of WHM/SCH with nothing to bring to a group that matters.

The thing that needs to be done is not nerf one job to make the others viable. Rather the other jobs could be buffed instead to give them their own niche back. AST's niche is its cards, and it took SE basically an entire expansion to get AST into a good place (and really, I sometimes think they still aren't entirely sure what to do with the job sometimes). SE needs to give the other two healers tools that AST doesn't have; tools to give them a uniqueness and make them appealing to a group/static setting. The solution should never be to nerf one job so that the others can be viable again.

[loreleidiangelo]

snipperooni

This is a pretty big wall to respond to, so my solution is to respond with an equally as long wall because I just can't shut up when prompted:


1.) I don't care if you've had a streak of bad RNG where you never see a single Balance, there are plenty of ASTs that are seeing plenty of Balances in the content that they do, and this is reflected on things like FFLogs everywhere. There is a 16% chance to draw it outright, then a 20% chance to draw it after that, THEN a chance you can STILL get it if you're willing to sack Sleeve Draw at level 70. I assure you, Astrologians are not struggling to AOE Balance nearly as much as you're trying to claim. Consider that it takes at least 60 seconds to set up, but LASTS for a whopping 30. (40 if you blow Celestial Opposition every 2 minutes.) We'll be generous and assume it takes you that two minutes to set up AOE B - that's 40 seconds of 10% AOE DPS uptime out of two minutes - or 33% uptime. And from personal experience, that's being pretty generous - I'd say I can set up an AOE Balance reliably every 1.5 minutes on average now that Spread works better and Redraw is on the same cooldown timer as Draw. Ninja's Trick Attack, which was used as a comparison earlier in this thread, is 10 seconds every 60, or 16.67% uptime, and Trick Attack is already being discussed by the DPS community as a fundamentally problematic skill that makes Ninja a highly desirable DPS choice for raids.

I think a lot of people are falsely conflating me disliking Balance with me wanting to ruin the card system as a whole, and that's not the case. I'm just tired of Balance being the only desired card in my deck, and I think the community's general response and reaction to it should be a CLEAR indicator that the skill is not well-designed in regards to the rest of AST's kit. I'd love to see cards like Bole, Arrow, Spear see more use, instead of just being Royal Road or Minor Arcana fodder. Sure, we COULD try to buff those cards to ridiculous values to make them "as good as" Balance, which is what people in this thread seem to think is the solution to everything, but that's just not fundamentally possible by design (except with the exception of Arrow, obviously, which could be buffed to be a bigger DPS increase than Balance at the cost of TP/MP hits). As you said, all the community GAFs about is DPS increases, so the best way unfortunately to make the other cards have value is to make NONE of them DPS increases.

The kneejerk reaction to this suggestion seems to be, "but then no one would take an AST to raid anymore", but that just doesn't make sense to me. SCH and WHM didn't have DPS increases in 3.0 and yet they were taken over AST - AST had lackluster healing and Balance wasn't as easy to get in 3.0 as it is now (2 minute Shuffle cooldown lmao and it could still give you the same garbage card you were trying to get rid of). AST now has similar healing, BUT AOE Balance is also insanely easy to get, so my suggestion is pretty much to either nerf their healing again (hard to tune) or just get rid of Balance so that all three healers pretty much heal the same (theoretically; SCH isn't doing so hot right now and definitely needs buffs) but none of them bring a 10% raid-wide DPS increase anymore either.

I'm not really sure why I'm bothering explaining my position, tbh. I'll never get clingy AST mains to agree that their favorite toy needs to be taken away. At this point I'm just gonna wait and see what the developers decide is the best choice of action - if they feel like my OP ez mode class is fine the way it is, I certainly won't complain haha.

2.) In regards to a rework, I want the devs to keep the card system (aside from Balance's ironic broken-ness, I think the cards are pretty well-designed overall and the interactivity and fluidity of using them is great) but scrap the stupid hybrid "can be a SCH or a WHM" healing system and give ASTs something new. I could type a whole diatribe on what could be done (and have in other threads in the healer subforum, in fact), but I won't make this post any longer than it is by going into at length here. But the short of it is that I think AST being able to slot into the WHM or SCH spot, with all of their inherent strengths BUT a massively OP raid utility that the other healers can't emulate (without basically giving them a raid-wide 10% DPS increase cooldown) is a serious design flaw and should be rectified ASAP. AST SHOULD have drawbacks, possibly more drawbacks than WHM or SCH have, because of their super-good card utility. I DON'T think the solution is to give all the healers "similar raid utility" because short of homogenization nothing can really compare to AOE Balance, and if it can than we're looking at some pretty awful power creep overall that I don't think this game needs. I think AST should just have more defined weaknesses as an actual healer (NOT just talking about straight potency nerfs a la 3.0 AST), and the easiest way to give it those weaknesses is to have it heal in some way that isn't a "WHM or SCH" way.

There are a lot of possible healing avenues that haven't really been explored yet, and it's been a pretty big disappointment of mine that AST was created to basically copy two healing avenues we'd already trodden, rather than shirking the trend and trying to be something new. Time/space just SCREAMED "HoT-based healer!!!111" to me, but with that spot being bizarrely given to WHM instead of WHM being a bursty mana-hungry healer like I envisioned from old-school FF games, the devs probably would have had to try something different. Still, just about anything would have sufficed, and hopefully have made AST different enough where their strengths would be better suited to some encounters while WHM and SCH strengths would be better suited to others. Right now I'd actually argue that all three healers have such similar throughput (or did pre-4.0 at least) that it's so easy to compare them and see which ones just plain aren't cutting it when it comes time to form up for raids.

Compared to my ideas of nerfing Balance though, I actually think a lot of people playing healers at the top ends of play are in favor of AST being completely re-done at this point. Similar suggestions have gained decent traction both in the healer subforum here and on the FFXIV Reddit. Those obviously aren't the be-all/end-all of the playerbase, but I just thought I'd put it out there that AST's hybrid design doesn't seem to be as well-liked or conceptualized as people might think. It's also a nightmare to balance, for what it's worth, and we've been seeing the endless tug-of-war in relation to that since 3.0.



EDIT: Upon further reading, I realize that a lot of my phrasing is pretty harsh, and I apologize, since that wasn't my intention. I just get a little frustrated at the illogical approach of "buff everything! nerf nothing!" because in a development environment that's just not feasible, I'm sorry to say. I can't say I AGREE with Square's nerfs to SCH this expac, but I can respect and understand that they probably NEEDED a few donks with the bat for balance's sake. I think that AST if nothing else didn't need the ridiculous buffs it got, but now that they're here I can only reasonably suggest that they get tweaked in other areas too. Tbh, I think 3.2 AST was a pretty solid case of balance (except with Nocturnal Sect), but for some reason the dev team just took it a step farther and I just don't even.

[Raikai]

^^^^^^^

Failing that though, Balance at the LEAST needs to be looked at/addressed. A flat 10% DPS increase on everyone in the raid is something no other healer comes even close to emulating in value.

Instead of messing with Balance, wouldn't be better to improve Chain Stratagem and/or whatever utility WHM has? (I don't have the job)

[Verdan]

Instead of messing with Balance, wouldn't be better to improve Chain Stratagem and/or whatever utility WHM has? (I don't have the job)

(they have none)

(I'm not even being sarcastic)

(they have an AoE stun, a knockback/bind, and a sleep, but Square decided that CC isn't a thing in dungeons or raids)