Quote Originally Posted by DaFood View Post
As being one of those stupid dummy who used AST to do the MSQ. Do you know how miserable that is with that potency?
Just looking at E4S, WHM/SCH/AST, Total runs with respected classes are 14.2k/14.1k/2.4k.
Numbers/ logs are telling the truth that AST overall needs some buff other than Noct Sect buffing.
It is just not right for AST to perform harder (throwing cards, using/lining up buffs, plan for stars ) for an overall worst result comparing to other 2 healers classes.
I am not asking for 4.x AST, but at least balance it so AST rdps similar to the other 2 healers considering how much more effort we have to put other than GLARE, GLARE AND GLARE.
At the highest levels, AST is relatively competitive in terms of rDPS with the other two healers—and rDPS is the only metric that matters. Sure, it lags behind by ~500 at 95th percentile (~800 at Max), but I don’t think that’s what’s holding it back. I’d wager that what’s holding AST back is the gameplay: the new card system is heavily divisive between the players that love it and ones that hate it. AST has to do twice the work in their openers and general rotations to achieve the same results as a WHM—WHM has its issues, but it feels far more fluid than AST does. Honestly, the current design of AST is why I’m no longer playing it.

I don’t think potency buffs alone would cause us to see this sudden influx of AST players and make it directly competitive in numbers with WHM and SCH. NIN got potency buffs, but it’s still one of the more underrepresented DPS jobs despite doing comparable damage to the other melee DPS now (this is from it being one of the Top 3 most popular jobs—and one of the staple meta jobs—since its inception). Why? Because people don’t like the gameplay—and its gameplay is actually getting addressed in Patch 5.1.