How could you do this to AST?

[HyoMinPark]

go check my post in about sage job maybe thay may open your eyes on why noct is awesome

I’ve already been reading your posts—and responding to them—in the other thread about Sage. I’m still not convinced.

If you’re referencing the post with the crazy amount of stacked shields you made in that thread—I already replied to it. As I said there: better get all of those prepped pre-pull because AST cannot swap sects in combat, thereby losing the ability to stack that many resources at the same time. Double AST is not a meta comp, so even if you ran two ASTs, you would never blow all of your major healing cooldowns like that at the same time anyways. That is a terrible allocation of resources.

The amount of misinformation on noct being bad is blowing my mind rn. Noct's ability to mitigate and remove damage with ogcd's is pretty strong. Diurnal doesn't even get damage mitigation unless they channel their bubble. Their shield potency is higher than sch's. And saying noct is worse than double regen just are spending too much time hard casting asp.helios and not enough time OGCD healing mechanics. That being said sure double regen will be good on easy content. But don't act like noct ast doesn't have a very welcomed place next to whm.

Please don’t act as if Nocturnal Sect is the more valued of the two Sects. It has never been more valued over Diurnal Sect in the 6 years AST has existed. If it was so valuable and so good, then why is it readjusted multiple times per each expansion? Why is it not the norm for the job? Why is it not meta? No one is saying that Noct AST is weak—they are saying that it is not as valuable or as efficient as Diurnal. Standard healer comps are still WHM/SCH or DiAST/SCH. While WHM/Noct AST exists, it is most certainly not the norm or the meta.

Personally, I think you’re the one who is a bit misinformed here. That, or you are blinded by your love for the sect and unwilling to look at what has been proven again and again. Diurnal AST has always been the more efficient and more desired of AST’s two stances.

Actually, both of those can stack with each other but not on top of the same thing; I've physically tested this.

They never said that they don’t stack—they said that they don’t stack continuously. I’m guessing they what they meant is that: Neutral Sect is an ability with a 20-second duration on a 120-second cooldown. Therefore, every 2 minutes, you have the ability to cast shields that stack for a total of 20 seconds (the shields last the standard 30 seconds). However, you do not have the ability to do this constantly during a fight. Continuous stacking of shields would be overpowered, especially when paired with AOE mitigation from other jobs.

[Zolvolt]

I’ve already been reading your posts—and responding to them—in the other thread about Sage. I’m still not convinced.

If you’re referencing the post with the crazy amount of stacked shields you made in that thread—I already replied to it. As I said there: better get all of those prepped pre-pull because AST cannot swap sects in combat, thereby losing the ability to stack that many resources at the same time. Double AST is not a meta comp, so even if you ran two ASTs, you would never blow all of your major healing cooldowns like that at the same time anyways. That is a terrible allocation of resources.



Please don’t act as if Nocturnal Sect is the more valued of the two Sects. It has never been more valued over Diurnal Sect in the 6 years AST has existed. If it was so valuable and so good, then why is it readjusted multiple times per each expansion? Why is it not the norm for the job? Why is it not meta? No one is saying that Noct AST is weak—they are saying that it is not as valuable or as efficient as Diurnal. Standard healer comps are still WHM/SCH or DiAST/SCH. While WHM/Noct AST exists, it is most certainly not the norm or the meta.

Personally, I think you’re the one who is a bit misinformed here. That, or you are blinded by your love for the sect and unwilling to look at what has been proven again and again. Diurnal AST has always been the more efficient and more desired of AST’s two stances.



They never said that they don’t stack—they said that they don’t stack continuously. I’m guessing they what they meant is that: Neutral Sect is an ability with a 20-second duration on a 120-second cooldown. Therefore, every 2 minutes, you have the ability to cast shields that stack for a total of 20 seconds (the shields last the standard 30 seconds). However, you do not have the ability to do this constantly during a fight. Continuous stacking of shields would be overpowered, especially when paired with AOE mitigation from other jobs.

You're over-valueing the meta for speed kills. Its hard to see the game outside of the 1% where you shave minutes off of kills, skip mechanics, and avoid enrage-aoe spams. But thats not average. The majority of players who do savage content rely on shields such as noct-stance because of how valuable it is. Your glasses are tinted because all you care about is the meta and spoilers, the game is not designed around the top 1% of players. That doesn't mean noct is bad just beacuse diurnal is good in speed kills.

[HyoMinPark]

You're over-valueing the meta for speed kills. Its hard to see the game outside of the 1% where you shave minutes off of kills, skip mechanics, and avoid enrage-aoe spams. But thats not average. The majority of players who do savage content rely on shields such as noct-stance because of how valuable it is. Your glasses are tinted because all you care about is the meta and spoilers, the game is not designed around the top 1% of players. That doesn't mean noct is bad just beacuse diurnal is good in speed kills.

The majority of healers that run Savage do so with a SCH in the party, and rely on SCH shields. SCH is the norm for shield healer—not Noct AST. This has always been the case. Again, WHM/Noct AST is not the standard composition for healers in softcore, midcore, or hardcore groups. Most healing comps usually always have a SCH present compared to a Noct AST. You’re focusing too heavily on my mention of meta when what I am saying goes beyond just the meta. What I am saying is the standard.

You’re also completely missing the point about my meta talk. Mathematically, Diurnal AST is the most efficient AST over Nocturnal. It doesn’t matter how “strong” Nocturnal is; it is still not valued nearly as much as Diurnal by most healer mains. The misconception you and some other posters seem have is that Nocturnal is “better”—but it is not. IceBlueMage has consistently been insisting that Noct is better—but it has never been better in terms of efficiency and resource management. It has never been balanced, and it has never been the go-to for most ASTs. This is not just applicable to the 1%.

As I said above, but you seemed to ignore: No one is saying that Noct AST is weak—they are saying that it is not as valuable or as efficient as Diurnal. Standard healer comps are still WHM/SCH or DiAST/SCH. While WHM/Noct AST exists, it is most certainly not the norm or the meta.

I do believe I'm not going too far out on a limb to say that Neutral Sect, and by extension Celestial Intersection, has done quite a number on nocturnal sect and probably necessitated its' removal.

I have to personally disagree—if only because Nocturnal Sect has been through so many adjustments during AST’s lifespan just to try and incentivize it over Diurnal. The problems with Nocturnal Sect existed well prior to Neutral Sect and CI being implemented—they date back all the way to HW (3.0 and 3.x). It is quite reasonable to assume that their addition further exacerbated the situation, and further invalidated Nocturnal Sect despite the developers still trying to give it more efficiency in ShB (e.g., when they reduced the MP costs of it versus Diurnal); but I think this was a problem that has existed for a while. As I said before, AST has always been a balancing nightmare in this game. It’s never been properly balanced against the others: either its worse or its better. All three are viable—don’t misinterpret what I’m saying with regards to better or worse—but mathematically, there has always been a “better” or “worse” in one of the healer slots. SCH has very firmly held on to the shield spot—the regen spot has always been a contest between WHM and AST.

I think what's going on with AST, as many have said, is that it's trying to balance itself to be useful in everything which naturally is going to shaft a lot of people who play a specific job out of high-end content. The case that its' nocturnal potencies are slightly higher than a scholar, and thus stronger shields, somewhat proves this.

Despite its slightly stronger shielding, SCH is still more common in high-end content versus Noct AST. But it is impossible to make both Sects equally good—or rather, too good. Because then you risk situations like late-HW where AST completely shat all over WHM, Patch 4.3 where Malefic III had its cast time reduced to allow for better weaving—which had an immense effect on their DPS contribution now that they weren’t clipping their GCDs with cards (again, this mostly affected WHM), or Patch 4.4 where CU applied its HoT and mitigation immediately rather than on the server (another affecting WHM). WHM really suffered in Alphascape back in SB. AST was just better. Some of this was fight design (Final Omega was very movement heavy and WHM has never had high mobility), but some of it was also job design and changes. AST consistently got changes and buffs in SB, but WHM didn’t get near that amount of adjustments (it got some, but none that really pushed it above AST). None of this is even considering the card aspect and what that brings to a party, which has always been something AST has held over WHM.

If you did the same with Nocturnal Sect and made it “too good”, well now SCH is the one being shat on versus WHM. So I really think the developers were hesitant in that aspect to really give Noct AST the boost it needed. They saw what effect buffing Diurnal AST and adjusting it had on WHM. They likely did not want to repeat it with SCH.

[Cidel]

This is unexpected but still not entirely surprising. AST seems to had been created as an intermediary healer between WHM and SCH. Since you bring two healers to just about everything they didn't want to lopside a 2 HoTs to 1 barrier healer and vice-versa, so they let AST be either as needed.

This seems like probably the easiest answer to adding yet another healer and not having to go through the headache of creating a different-but-similar healing gimmick (I honestly wouldn't put any faith in their battle team to properly balance that anyway). If anything though, now I expect healer balance to be even more cutthroat/homogenized since they've delegated two healers to two separate "styles." And Twelve help the forums if WHMs once again consider themselves inferior to ASTs in any way.

On a side note, I'm not torn about losing Sects/Noct. Was never my favorite stance. The appeal has always been the cards for an extra layer of activity whilst healing. If that gets taken from AST- then that'd be something to complain about.

[Piarkire]

They never said that they don’t stack—they said that they don’t stack continuously. I’m guessing they what they meant is that: Neutral Sect is an ability with a 20-second duration on a 120-second cooldown. Therefore, every 2 minutes, you have the ability to cast shields that stack for a total of 20 seconds (the shields last the standard 30 seconds). However, you do not have the ability to do this constantly during a fight. Continuous stacking of shields would be overpowered, especially when paired with AOE mitigation from other jobs.

I do believe I'm not going too far out on a limb to say that Neutral Sect, and by extension Celestial Intersection, has done quite a number on nocturnal sect and probably necessitated its' removal.

I think what's going on with AST, as many have said, is that it's trying to balance itself to be useful in everything which naturally is going to shaft a lot of people who play a specific job out of high-end content. The case that its' nocturnal potencies are slightly higher than a scholar, and thus stronger shields, somewhat proves this.

While I don't exactly condone the strategy used to solve it, I personally expected this one.