Quote Originally Posted by RegularEggs View Post
Is the DPS outputting enough DPS to warrant me losing personal dps for his own gain? Though I guess you're right about the use of 2 GCDs just for a 10% boost in mitagation/healing. Perhaps keep Draw as a GCD while letting Draw/Minor Arcana stay as oGCD to help balance it a bit.
I assume you meant making Draw a GCD and letting Play & Minor Arcana stay as oGCD. This is still terrible in design because it forces the AST to lose out on Divination by trading their DPS because Divination (which is the DPS buff on the entire party) is locked behind 3 Draws. At every scenario, an AST will lose DPS to give rDPS and that's not a risk-reward play, but a punishment to ASTs in general due to the way the buffs currently work. There is also the matter with SCH's aetherflow & WHM's Thin air being a oGCD. In both instances, SCH and WHM do not have to pay a cost to get mana back. That is not the case for ASTs at all.

Quote Originally Posted by RegularEggs View Post
And lastly, Earthly Star is very much a DPS tool now. The 700 potency you get from it is, imo, irrelevant much like the full heal i proposed. You have better burst healing via horoscope/aspected helios and Celestial opposition, tools that have no other use but to heal. So Earthly Star is then used as a oGCD damage tool every single time its off cooldown. I just thought the full heal would give it the uniqueness and utility warranted for having the patience and pre-planning.
You seem to be misunderstanding how GCD and oGCD tradeoffs work. Earthly star being a 150 DPS potency (100 potency base) vs a GCD malefic IV being a 250 DPS potency. It's better to continue to GCD DPS than to use Earthly Star as an oGCD DPS as oGCDs are free (manaless) and doesn't consume a GCD (in this case trading a 150 DPS potency for a 250 DPS potency if you use GCD healing). Earthly Star having such a high Healing potency is exactly why an AST shouldn't be using it to substitute for a DPS GCD since it can make up for more than a GCD heal. It doesn't matter if ASTs have better burst healing consuming with GCDs - when optimizing and getting better at healing, healers should be minimizing the usage of GCDs to heal while minimizing overhealing as much as possible and they manage this by using oGCDs to both reduce the amount of healing required and reduce the amount of mana spent with healing GCDs. In the proposed example, ASTs have to consume 2 GCDs (Horoscope being a GCD in your example with a 900 MP cost) and Aspected Helios (900 to 1000 MP) to bring everyone to full. Besides the ridiculous amount of overhealing those potencies have on paper and how an AST just spent ~1800 MP over 5 seconds, you can get something that can push everyone's HP to near full with just one oGCD. That means a healer can free 2 GCDs for DPSing (400 MP total). This number only increases with every usage of Earthly Star during the encounter. Not to mention, if for every Earthly Star, the AST has to trade 1800 MP to bring everyone to full HP, then it doesn't matter if the DPS is doing terribly that AST shouldn't be drawing a DPS card. It forces the AST to pull another GCD card to manage their MP, and that's another GCD DPS potency lost. The purpose of Earthly Star having increased potency is exactly because ASTs are supposed to read in the future and plan ahead - they planned ahead by 20 seconds minimum and can change plans on the fly if they choose to detonate it early.