I've leveled Astro to 60, and completed the last current dungeon. My Thoughts.

[SakiKojiro]

SE will probably be buffing this class, anyways. If you look at what the skills supposedly did before the patch, some of their abilities actually had an emphasis on buff spreading, Looks like they removed that and gave it to scholar. Then to replace it they gave us "buff time increase" abilities at the last second hoping it'd be a good substitute. It wasn't. That isn't even the whole problem, but still.

To be fair, Time Dilation is very useful and not a bad ability, but Celestial Opposition...ehh

[Omnia]

Yeah, I never expected to be able to heal on par with White Mage. White mage should still be the supreme healer in terms of raw potencies. Problem is situational+RNG=Unreliable. This job NEEDS better buffs and utility or the lack of reliability will make it unused as anything but a wanna-be White Mage, and why wouldn't you just get a White Mage for that?


Lower Heal potencies a little bit, Give more utility and fix these skills. That's my solution.



P.S. Make spread use-able out of combat. That rule is stupid.

Give AST World of Warcraft's "Shaman chain-heals" so they are unique to a point where they wont lack potency. And have their cards act like "Shaman heal totems", except not so trashy, lol. They copied the Paladin's beacon of light... so might as well go the whole 9 yards for a legitimate heal. Copy/Paste Shaman, and remove the SCH/WHM mirror. Monitor feedback on Blizzard forums about Shaman heals, and adjust the AST copy accordingly. WIN!!!!!

[Lafier]

I don't play the class myself, but I'd totally be down for lightspeed to reduce the GCD by the same % it reduces potencies by.

[Rajeme]

When you say remove the GCD what do you mean exactly? Make it so as fast as you press the button it heals?
Removing the cast time is still a very important buff since the spell is instant and doesn't take time to cast first.

Lightspeed's real potential is in its quick, emergency healing. However given the weak potency of the spell, you need to practically spam helios 4-5 times to actually recover a below 30% party back to health, which translates to roughly 10s or more. Those 10s are enough to kill your pt 5 times over already! Given the very long cooldown, I feel it very inadequate as an emergency button, if not borderline useless at all. The 25% reduction only makes things worse.

[lordparanoia]

SE will probably be buffing this class, anyways. If you look at what the skills supposedly did before the patch, some of their abilities actually had an emphasis on buff spreading, Looks like they removed that and gave it to scholar. Then to replace it they gave us "buff time increase" abilities at the last second hoping it'd be a good substitute. It wasn't. That isn't even the whole problem, but still.

To be fair, Time Dilation is very useful and not a bad ability, but Celestial Opposition...ehh

do you know what Celestial Opposition was supposed to do before this "nerf"?

[SeleneFatalis]

Lightspeed's real potential is in its quick, emergency healing. However given the weak potency of the spell, you need to practically spam helios 4-5 times to actually recover a below 30% party back to health, which translates to roughly 10s or more. Those 10s are enough to kill your pt 5 times over already! Given the very long cooldown, I feel it very inadequate as an emergency button, if not borderline useless at all. The 25% reduction only makes things worse.

I only ever use Lightspeed for Stoneskin and Protect, because it doesn't decrease their potencies. Otherwise, I keep up with healing just fine. The reduction is just far to great for me to justify using it for healing, when normally I can get people from 30% to max health in fewer casts. Plus, you still have to deal with the GCD.

[Tayolynn]

SE will probably be buffing this class, anyways. If you look at what the skills supposedly did before the patch, some of their abilities actually had an emphasis on buff spreading, Looks like they removed that and gave it to scholar.

I was also hoping that it was either a bug or will be given the buff in later patches where AST can use Time Dilation on themselves. I'm currently out at the moment so I'm unable to further test this out if I was doing something wrong or not, but even in the Job Actions video for all new job skills, the Astrologian skills showed Time Dilation used upon themselves, so I was confused.

Other than that, AST is pretty awesome.

[Alahra]

AST definitely needs some numbers tweaking. Going through the 50-59 dungeons as AST, I'm finding that things can be pretty dicey at times. The first time to 60 I ran as NIN with a WHM friend, and there's a significant difference in their overall capabilities.

That being said I love the feel of the class and it's general playstyle. Everything (mostly) works, it's just a matter of turning some knobs here and there. Why Collective Unconscious is so limited, though, I don't understand. Locking yourself out of movement and healing to get the full benefit is a really heavy cost (one that SCH and WHM don't have to pay at all for their analagous abilities).

[Aeliott]

Celestial Opposition really needs a buff. 2.5 minutes CD is a bit much. If you need an aoe stun Holy can be used 50 times in the space of a CO cooldown and do damage too. Sure there's the aoe 5 second buff extension but even being potentially raid-wide it's not that big a deal. And honestly it needs to be. AST is basically somewhat of a Time Mage from FF, with healing and cards. Speed and durations seem to be the main theme but it's all a bit tame. Either make the time extension longer, add a new effect like a heal / temporary aoe speed buff or something to fit the theme, or reduce the cooldown.

People aren't really acknowledging how great Time Dilation is amidst all the negative feedback, I think if they give a decent emergency heal button (or change lightspeed) to accompany it and make the card effects slightly stronger / tweaked (shuffling into the same card....drawing a card you have held already, except Arrow...) and we're onto a winner in my opinion. Oh, and the channeling of Collective Unconscious needs to go. Or at least let us cast while it's active while retaining the loss upon movement

[Rajeme]

I only ever use Lightspeed for Stoneskin and Protect, because it doesn't decrease their potencies. Otherwise, I keep up with healing just fine. The reduction is just far to great for me to justify using it for healing, when normally I can get people from 30% to max health in fewer casts. Plus, you still have to deal with the GCD.

The thing is we kind of lacking in the emergency healing part, so my thought was to tweak lightspeed a little bit to reduce/remove gcd totally during the duration to make it via-able as an emergency button. It's not always that bosses allow us time to cast a few times to recover though.