How could you do this to AST?

[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.

[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.

[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.

[EaMett]

This has probably been said but I'm willing to bet that AST will hold onto Neutral sect (and may even expand on it). If that is indeed the case, going WHM/AST will very likely be more than viable for savage and potentially ultimate (although that last one might be a steeper learning curve).
We'll only know for sure when the press tour happens.

[Gemina]

I am deeply disappointed by the decision to make AST a pure healer as a player who always play noct ast in savage content along side my whm friend. I know this may be a selfish personal reason but in order for the two of us to continue playing savage content together one of us must now change jobs and as the shield healer it is going to fall to me. In order to play high level content with my friend, I will have to give up my favorite job. Never has this decision been forced on a player before now. You can play any job combination in any party as long as everyone is a different job and this has been the case since ARR. Now we are making it an actively bad choice for Whm and AST to play together and actively bad choice for SCH and SAGE to play together. While its discouraged to have 2 phys R and 2 casters its not an actively bad choice. This hurts.

I think this is such a bad decision for so many reasons. Currently on live any healer combination can play together optimally and effectively. Going forward there are 2 healer combinations that will be lacking due to a loss of shields or actively hindering each other by having non-overlapping shields. We already all hate groups that lock out 1phys r and 1 caster and wait in PF for decades. I fear this will be the new case with healers. Additionally the party match making are going to treat shield healers and pure healers separately as well in order to fill a party. I am worried about this as well since currently on live most of the content you queue for can be done with any healer combination even doubles, so why are we making changes to increased the wait time for these duties?

I just have these concerns and am also upset about the AST change.

Healer adjust?

I say that only in partial jest, because from my perspective it is completely true both from an in-game view when engaged in PvE, but also when dealing with the myriad of changes healers have undergone over the years. Healing truly is a role that is meant for those who can quickly accept and adapt to change, but also simply enjoy doing it without much expectation for a reward. That reward is kind of found when you make clutch saves. There is no achievement or title for it in the game, but the player(s) you keep from falling when they otherwise would have is always appreciated.

It is understandable to be concerned and also expected. It is far to early to pass judgment now, so I would advise on not creating a bigger hole to climb out of by overreacting. I also wouldn't worry about party comps much. One player per job will always be preferred, but not always possible. Just how it goes. The healers will be viable in any composition, that is one thing I can guarantee.

[Karshan]

And they may change that now so they don't hurt Sage and Scholar being able to work together.

They won't though, due to the very way some effects are coded in this game ("if dmg <> 0 then debuff" wouldn't even surprise me lol). This would allow a lot more cheeses on strats.
See E10S tourniquet shield cheese and imagine that on a lot more mechanics. Or how some tanks can cheese with invuln due to taking 0 damage (PLD, GNB) and others can't because they take damage so the debuff anyway. And imagine that stacking shields could sometimes work as those invuln with sufficient mitigation (reprisal, addle etc...)

[RyuDragnier]

They won't though, due to the very way some effects are coded in this game ("if dmg <> 0 then debuff" wouldn't even surprise me lol). This would allow a lot more cheeses on strats.
See E10S tourniquet shield cheese and imagine that on a lot more mechanics. Or how some tanks can cheese with invuln due to taking 0 damage (PLD, GNB) and others can't because they take damage so the debuff anyway. And imagine that stacking shields could sometimes work as those invuln with sufficient mitigation (reprisal, addle etc...)

The thing is, they already confirmed there's going to be battle system adjustments, including a stat squish (since apparently the high numbers are putting a major strain on the system). I wouldn't be surprised if they made it so the debuff kicks in regardless if barriers are there (not invulns), thus bypassing this particular problem.

[Karshan]

The thing is, they already confirmed there's going to be battle system adjustments, including a stat squish (since apparently the high numbers are putting a major strain on the system). I wouldn't be surprised if they made it so the debuff kicks in regardless if barriers are there (not invulns), thus bypassing this particular problem.

Yes but that's also gonna stat squish the incoming damage. So reaching the "zero dmg ergo no bump" level of shields won't be more difficult to atteign. Hence my statement. But I'm not in their minds so I might be wrong as to why they refused (up until now) what could be seen as great QoL (not a healer main but double scholar always feels like you're restrained)

[Ultimatecalibur]

They tried this "MT/OT roles" to try and split the tank and it did not work so they reverted it. They're trying the same thing with healers now. Admittedly I don't know how this problem could be avoided with 4 healers besides having another healer that could do both but we absolutely know that this is going to be problematic.

The MT/OT sub-role split doesn't work due to the nature of fights being designed with tank swaps in mind as all tanks end up doing MT and OT duties. If their were no tank swaps and OTs were expected to spend a fair amount of time out of melee range a 2 melee centric MT/2 ranged centric OT split could work.

Healing on the other hand works better with a separation of duties one healer being proactive (barrier heals) and one healer being reactive (regen/pure heals).