How could you do this to AST?

[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.