Scholar vs Astrologian Mitigation

[Wintersandman]

let you and your co healer dps easily ?

This right here. If i have all 3 hots up on the tank it is more effective for me to do Time Dilation on the tank while I go Nuke happy.

[Heilstos]

It is worth to give 5% additional balance for 15 sec (and maybe overwrited by the next card spread or wait 15 sec...) to one dps or give 15 sec additionnal of your 1-3 HoT (and + maybe the balance effect) to your tank, and let you and your co healer dps easily ?
I take the 2nd choice, it's very powerful for progress and speedkill.

Yep Ceasaria is right. That is great if you have the chance to do that. 3 HoTs and a Card buff feels great. The extending is not only the cards. But extending shild bring nothing sadly. In Nocturnal you only can extend cards with Time Dilation.

It feels like options are missing in Nocturnal.

[Seraphor]

And yet i always feel far more effective in nocturnal than diurnal.
Shields give you a chance to premptively heal through attacks and give you more control over fast paced battles.
Regent restricts you to steady healing over time, even if the casting is slightly faster, your overall healing still ends up being slower and more reactionary.

[VanilleFang]

Regent restricts you to steady healing over time, even if the casting is slightly faster, your overall healing still ends up being slower and more reactionary.

Eeeh... They are used in different situations. Granted shields are better, as eHP is amazing, but HoTs aren't entirely reactionary. I think HoTs are far more useful for allowing for more DPS up time because shields are usually destroyed fairly quickly, while HoTs last a while and slow the drop of HP. Shields are expensive to cast, while HoTs are very MP efficient as well. Shields can save someone from death, but HoTs allow you to heal someone consistently with only 1 GCD.

The best case scenario is having both a shield and HoTs on the tank. That's why DB+Regen is so ridiculous.

[Gemina]

All this AST talk is making me want to unlock my last healer and start the learning process again ^^

Right now I'm all, "Diurnal, Nocturnal..?" Yeah, it's high time I learn what this job is all about.

[Fernosaur]

All this AST talk is making me want to unlock my last healer and start the learning process again ^^

Right now I'm all, "Diurnal, Nocturnal..?" Yeah, it's high time I learn what this job is all about.

Do iiiiiit. Leaving all the meta discussion aside, AST is really fun to play in general, specially so once you reach the lvl 70 mark. It feels a wee bit underpowered in dungeons if you're coming from WHM, but remember that Collective's HoT is your friend on big trash pulls, haha. Good luck levelling!

[Squintina]

All this AST talk is making me want to unlock my last healer and start the learning process again ^^

Right now I'm all, "Diurnal, Nocturnal..?" Yeah, it's high time I learn what this job is all about.

Do it.

When this thread started I was like...50 AST, and now I'm 68 (will be 70 tomorrow) and it just makes so much more sense.

Plus AST is its own kind of fun.
WHM = fun if you want to focus on what you're doing.
SCH = fun if you like having a lot of things to keep track of and press in a fight.
AST = fun to see how to make the best of the RNG and limited weaves by quickly thinking of how to best use it.

[RulerOfPotaoes]

most SCH mains will tell you that sch has better mitigaion because of Crit adlo and deployment tactis... BUT heres the thing:

1.You can only use Deployment Tactis very few times in a duty due to its cooldown and you first need to pray u get a Crit and also pray the shield reaches everyone.

2. The difference in shield potency of Crit adlo vs Crit Aspected benefic is very very small. Adlo can’t compete with AB shield since it has no cast time,lower mp cost and its a way stronger shield with no crit and almost identical with crit.

3. Succor vs Aspected helios: Helios is also stronger and more mp efficient than succor.

If you think about it AST has better (constant) less rng based mitigation than SCH which is ironic lol. getting lucky with a spread crit adlo before boss ultimate doesnt = you did better mitigation overall in the entire duty.

[Fernosaur]

most SCH mains will tell you that sch has better mitigaion because of Crit adlo and deployment tactis... BUT heres the thing:

1.You can only use Deployment Tactis very few times in a duty due to its cooldown and you first need to pray u get a Crit and also pray the shield reaches everyone.

In a setting where mitigating so much that Deployment Tactics makes the difference between life or death, meaning only a handful of Savage fights, Deployment ends up being way stronger than Aspected Helios because you can stack Healing potency+ buffs and spread a gigantic shield even without a crit, which is something AST can't do other than stacking Largesse+Mantra. Also, the shield not reaching someone is mostly irrelevant in a setting where people know not to stray too far from the group.

Regardless, shield mitigations are not why SCH is better at mitigation, Sacred Soil and Fey Covenant are. In scenarios in which you would outright die without shields, percent based mitigation is quite a bit stronger because it reduces damage further, and it's usually the difference between life and death, which is why things like Reprisal, Addle, Feint, etc are so important.

NoctAST has answers to this in the form of Collective Unconscious and spread Bole, the later which you will hardly ever see because lol @ getting a spread Bole precisely the moment you need it. Add to this that NoctAST's shields, while being more reliably powerful, cannot hope to reach the same level of power Deployment Tactics can reach at its peak, and you start seeing why SCH is usually superior.

That said, other jobs' mitigation tools make NoctAST's lack of a real response to Fey Covenant and the comparative lesser availability of Soil vs Collective less problematic. The issue with this is that you might end up needing a very specific party composition, as it happened with UCoB and Morn Afahs.

Anyways, the point is mostly that AST has more reliable and on-demand shields that are stronger than SCH's on-demand shields, but the rest of the mitigating kit is less powerful by far, and even though CU has a (ridiculously good) regen attached to it, it still has less range than Soil, a longer CD, and it being channeled makes it much less flexible.

Do keep in mind though, that these differences matter very little, if at all, in most fights in the game, since mitigation THAT strong doesn't tend to be a deciding factor other than for ignoring mechanics (like in the case of ignoring the proximity damage of Head On in v5s). The only fight where NoctAST was having trouble mitigating was in UCoB, which shed light on just how ridiculously strong SCH's mitigating kit is now that Succor was unnecessarily buffed. Other than that, Head On might be the other example, but I'm sure that bringing a MCH instead of a caster and forcing a WAR to burn Raw Intuition and maybe Thrill for Shake it Off mostly solves that.

Aspected Benefic is definitely a better single target shield than Adloquium, that's for sure, but it can't really carry NoctAST into mitigating better than SCH. For tank busters maybe, but WHM does that better than both for free, ironically, and Excog trivializes most tank busters anyways.

[KDSilver]

Why would you time dialate your hots of all things? Buff extension is for cards, any hots that get extended are just a happy accident, since a non trivial number of hots end up as overheal anyways?

Buff extensions are for everything you can align with it.
10 more second on CU definitly worth it since this HoT is basically a Regen.
You also need it for your Lucid Dreaming.
15s more of HoT for your tank mean less mana to spend, and maybe more dps from the two healer.

That's a matter of choice and a funny mechanic only Ast has.
Of course, the perfect combo is to buff cards AND regens or anything else you'd need at that moment.
But you don't specificly hold it for cards only.