Quote Originally Posted by Reinhardt_Azureheim View Post
Hi, I think you need to take a step back and actually check what you wrote because to me it looks like you think that the "one of the worst ideas of job design 'compensation'" was my personal idea let alone suggestion. It was not - it was what I expect the devs to do.

I would not mind AST losing 4000 damage on Macrocosmos, assuming it is accordingly compensated. Given the oGCD nature, it would still be part of its' burst at 8000 base damage following a Gravity II Dualcast.

To address the elephant in the room though - at 15y radius, 12000 damage alone would be insanely strong, but it also comes with Microcosmos' damage consolidation to heal. Given the heal part is part of being a Healer, it would make no sense to reduce the radius. Instead, a reduction in damage makes more sense.

Compensation besides the "I expect SE to do this" could be:
- Gravity II + Dualcast getting the 4000 damage (2000 each).
- Some dualcast adjustments like using Macro granting 66-100% of a charge of Dualcast
- Boosting the heal capacity of Macrocosmos
- Boosting the heal capacity of Aspected Benefic


...as you can see I got many ideas of what they could give AST to keep it strong without having to keep the 12000dmg 15y nuke that currently plagues FL. Maybe instead of just kneejerk reacting with "worst idea ever", refusing to elaborate unless "I" asked and generally acting with way too much aggression you could just ask for clarification or hell, discuss it with me.
I can't speak for others, but IMO those are really REALLY bad compensations that will kill AST's job design. The reason Macrocosmos and Aspected Benefic works in the toolkit is because AST has a lot of decision-making to how they want to spend their healing and leverage the full power of Aspected Benefic's regen and Macrocosmos' compiled healing effect in a chaotic and frequently spiky damage in PvP. The key to decision-making on AST is how Dualcast interacts with the rest of the toolkit, including the RNG of card buffs. Buffing Gravity II + Dualcast to increase damage just forces AST into a state where "you're now forced to use Gravity II + Dualcast on cd or you lose egagarious amounts of damage since the biggest portion of the damage is locked here". That is even worse for gameplay since Dualcast and Gravity II are both 15s cooldown. There's no more gameplay decision to be had anymore in how you spend your remaining Dualcast charge. In other words, AST currently feels good because it managed to balance the entire toolkit and offers meaningful gameplay decisions - and all the while keeping it fairly straightforward and simple.

With the current setup, you at least have choices because a portion of your damage is locked behind Dualcast Gravity II, but there are more situations where it can be beneficial to forgo Dualcast Gravity II for healing as aspected benefic alone isn't strong enough, but doubling it up with dualcast gives it a unique advantage to other healers. Forcing Macro to lower dualcast recast speed results in being unable to leverage Macro's healing compiling fully since you would want to use it on cd to access Dualcast Malefic more. The changes would contest too heavily on Dualcast Aspected Benefic to gain usage out of it. Not to mention, I'll just be ignoring leveraging the card effects fully and stick with the same strategy if healing & Gravity II gets buffed on AST. If I'm playing AST in Frontlines, I don't want to be locked into a more static gameplay rotation. Static gameplay rotations runs completely counter to how AST was designed to be played.

As per the original idea - In PvP, AST's Draw is currently already a 20s CD. The duration of a card's buff is 15s. The most you can buff Draw by reducing its cd is 5s. The difference between Draw at 20s and 15s gives you leeway to hold the card for a slightly more favorable situation and time to realign your dualcast proc. Reducing the cooldown of Draw does nothing for AST in that regard. Not to mention, the complaint was that 3 AST stacking Macrocosmos is strong to people who don't have any clue how to play around it, but buffing cards literally does nothing for that composition other than nerfing that composition without giving anything in return. Only 1 card buff can be active at a time in a party, so any additional ASTs just straight up loses damage and card flexibility further. That's incredibly huge difference in power gap. If you were to tell me this is compensation, I'd take that as a thinly veiled provocation to nerf AST.

If you were thinking about buffing Malefic so AST can recoup damage through their ST nuke, that's a new can of worms that the healer forums will probably chew you out for. Everyone's so sick of that in PvE. Forcing an increase in ST nuke means you want to heal as little as possible to keep up sustained dps, but due to the spiky nature of damage in PvP it's better to err on the side of caution than on the side of DPS so that also especially runs counter to how AST wants to play when leveraging limited dualcast charges.

If you were thinking about buffing Balance, you have to remember that is completely RNG so that's actually pretty bad in terms of card balance and opens up more issues. If you were to guarantee all cards will give a DPS increase in addition to whatever additional effect the other cards will provide, then you start stepping on BRD's toes.