Astrologian "BUFFS"

[DreamWeaver]

@jojober

Interesting idea you have there, but this will mean that AST's only viable partner is SCH in tough content, as your new Noct Sect provides no mitigation tools to help with tank busters etc.

[jojober]

@jojober

Interesting idea you have there, but this will mean that AST's only viable partner is SCH in tough content, as your new Noct Sect provides no mitigation tools to help with tank busters etc.

I don't think this is the case. One of the card buffs could be a substantial mitigation ability. We already get damage -10% damage with The Bole, so if we are buffing them up as a tradeoff for heals, this could very well be feasible.

[chumsy]

Its the step in the right direction however, not quite there yet. I still don't get why they have a 150% enhanced potency at the cost of 2 cards, and double duration at the cost of two cards, essentially making it equal. Royal road needs to be reworked, where either the cards potency should be worth more than 2 cards; you are essentially using a CD skill to receive some kind of benefit not to receive equal or less than. To make this an effective/useful/meaningful skill increase CD and boost all output potency/durations.

[Tint]

why should i, as a whm, want to heal together with an ast? he has NO healbuff for me. i have to work harder to compensate his lower heals and don't even get a buff from him...

[jojober]

why should i, as a whm, want to heal together with an ast? he has NO healbuff for me. i have to work harder to compensate his lower heals and don't even get a buff from him...

We can give you a pretty decent mp refresh. We can give you haste which will make you cast faster. We can give you cool down reduction for the awesome heal buffs you have that we lack.

[Dyvid]

why should i, as a whm, want to heal together with an ast? he has NO healbuff for me. i have to work harder to compensate his lower heals and don't even get a buff from him...

Your right, we don't and you make a good point. We don't have any buff cards to help healers. Maybe they could do something like changing Balance from "+attack power" to "+action potency". Or instead of Bole's defense boost how about "Increase HP recovery by actions".

Also another question for fellow AST. You prefer spread save Card or Royal Road effect?

[Parawill]

Your right, we don't and you make a good point. We don't have any buff cards to help healers. Maybe they could do something like changing Balance from "+attack power" to "+action potency". Or instead of Bole's defense boost how about "Increase HP recovery by actions".

I've introduced Reflect in some of my suggestions, but I have no idea how to implement it. The only reason I introduced Reflect was because since Astrologian is a buff-like class (despite it oriented around cards), adding a reflect effect would be interesting. Maybe instead of a flat shield it's just flat mitigation + reflect % of damage.

Aside from that I actually thought about reverse cards like reverse reads in tarot. At first I was thinking of opposite effects, but in tarot reading it's not necessarily like that. For example (not a tarot example), a non-reverse Bole will be its regular effect; however, a reverse Bole would be increased healing. Ewer can keep its refresh, but in reverse it can boost magic defenses or reduce magic damage the boss will do (debuff).

This may over complicate things, but hopefully it may spark even better ideas?

[Karen_Cerfrumos]

Support is not an excuse for gimping. This is a design fallacy that keeps cropping up with certain classes. In reality, most (if not all) jobs already bring support at no extra cost. DRG has the too-good-to-be-true battle litany, disembowel, CC mantra; WAR has mitigation and slashing debuffs; NIN has TP refresh that they can actually control; SCH's fairy and its abilities such as magic defence on Eos and AOE Esuna + haste on Selene also come with zero penalty. So why is it that ranged and AST specifically have to suffer for their extra tools? It's obvious that there's no true support classes and no support role in this game at this moment. So the logic "AST is support so it has to be weaker" simply doesn't work. Both BRD and AST have to perform in their own roles first, and bring extra abilities to differentiate them from others in their role second. I mean, ranged have damage penalty integrated into their weapon damage already, they don't have to suffer extr... but I'm trailing away. So AST.

RNG gods do not love you. You can't design a game like this around RNG. It simply doesn't work with the battle design. Everything is premeditated. We know when there's gonna be a tank buster, when there's gonna be a burn phase and when the boss is going to jump. All the other classes got abilities to answer those specific situations at completely predictable times. Making AST's card buffs largely random means just one thing: they don't matter. You can't design fights against random toolkits. When Akh Morn comes out, you either have your HG, or a bunch of your cooldowns saved specifically for it. You know what you won't have? Bole. It just didn't come up! I WHM'd A2 the other day with an AST co-healer, he was getting Ewers for days and maybe one or two Balance and Bole. MP regen is nice but I already knew how to manage MP in that fight and Ewer did very little for me. It doesn't take a star reader to predict that RNG-based abilities effectively amount to nil because you can't put them up when you actually need to, and if you end up doing so, you just got lucky. Yes, every card is useful, but in many situations their usefulness ends up being negligible simply because you can't reliably answer to problems at correct times. It's like using Goad in a 2-minute fight against single target. Yeah, you're helping... But I wasn't running out of TP anyway. That's the elephant in the room of course. Cards are flavour. Any of those buffs would be good on paper and probably would've been reasonable grounds for reduced healing capability if you could control them like Ninja controls their Mudras, RNG knocks the wind out of them way too hard.

Spear is bad. So bad. Now, what the hell is going on with the Spear. It seems like it'd be the talk of town, eh? Reducing cooldowns! Once again practical applications are very limited. It doesn't alter how you play with most large timers. If you reduce Hallowed Ground cooldown, it's just a bit really, you will still want to hold it out against Akh Morn 4, or against Final Liberation, or against specific situations. Same with Battle Litany. You want Battle Litany for a burn phase, not whenever. On Mudras it straight up doesn't work because anything less than a 20s reduction will bring no results for that ability. If you put it on a BRD or a SMN at the wrong time, you've just ruined their CD alignment plans. So in other words, it does not meaningfully alter how we play. It helps to make things like Leg Sweep / Mercy Stroke / Repelling Shot / Essential Dignity et al. come up faster, I guess. Overall, doesn't feel like the strongest suit (har har).

"But don't just make AST the same as the other two healers!" Why not? It already is! You got your basic cure, stronger cure, AOE heal, regen, AOE regen, raise and esuna. At its most basic, all healers are expected to perform these functions in similar capacity. There's a few flavors here and there, like SCH's AOE regen is stuck on Eos, WHM's got Cure III and AST can alter the effect of Aspected heals. The little diversity while maintaining similar throughtput is all we need really. Nobody ever complains that DRG, MNK and NIN's abilities boil down to 1-2-3 in various configurations, right? So why here? No, the real problem with AST isn't the baseline healing, it's

Uncool cooldowns. It feels like whoever designed the cooldowns for AST didn't actually communicate with battle designers for this game because they feel like they are either made different for the sake of being different or are trying to solve problems that do not exist.
Lightspeed. Well, enough has been said about Lightspeed. It could've been AST's Presence of Mind, instead it's a MP conservation tool with an extra "heal on the go" effect. So they made it helpful while maintaining originality. Lightspeed has been fixed. It's cool now.
Luminiferous Aether. I mained WHM for months in 2.x series and never once did I say "Gee, I wish my enmity reduction move worked like Quelling Strikes instead". Healers don't frontload if they aren't dumb and put their AOE regen before a bunch of adds spawn. They can get a lot of enmity over time however and Shroud of Saints answered the problem perfectly. Remember T9 and how you could build hate on Nael while nobody else could? It worked there. With LA you have to pop it before you start expending MP, but why? Feels like inconvenience for the sake of difference.
Disable. Virus that works against auto-attacks and doesn't work against continious damage such as Akh Morn or Bahamut's Claw. So in other words, a Virus that's less versatile for some reason. Since AST doesn't get access to any form of Virus otherwise, it's cool to have this, but at the very least it should not proc against auto-attacks. It'd be cool if it worked on... say, 3 next actions over its 10 seconds. Is that too strong? It'd help with fast multiples, it would cover the auto-attack problem and it'd just generally be easier to use.
Shuffle. Make it unable to turn up the same card. Full stop.
Time Dilation. Can't find anything wrong with this one. Synergizes well with the cards, the problem is the cards, works great otherwise.
Collective Unconscious. <Sigh> What is the intent behind this move, I wonder? Making you unable to do anything while this ability is rolling is ridiculous when we look at Sacred Soil (on a much shorter cooldown) and Asylum (doesn't prevent you from healing, damaging or executing mechanics). I can think of very few uses. In Bismarck you can put it up while the second half of your team is hitting Bismarck on the spine and you have nothing to do anyway. But WHM can do this even if they're part of the group going on the boss, and furthermore if your party doesn't do the 4-and-4 split, which is possible, well there goes that usefulness. Next, using it as Sacred Soil. Only works as well on phase transitions, and doesn't work for any other situations such as phase 4 Gigaflare because Scholar would take that time to Adlo the tanks for the next Akh Morn or straight up damage the boss. So, phase transitions. First of all, very few bosses even have screen-nuking phase transitions! Primals do, certain raid bosses do and... well, that's it. In practically every case the attack is so drawn out you have 3-4 GCDs to recover effortlessly after it with a Cure III or Medica II or Indomitability. With Diurnal CU, you'd have to give it time to regen people back and that defeats the purpose. All in all, very unwieldy move that loses to its sisters on other healers at practically every turn.
Celestial Opposition. Hahahahahaha 150s CD stun. Hahahahahahahahaha. Are you serious? Give it an Assize/Indomitability effect, reduce cooldown to 120s. I mean, 150s stun. Hahaha oh my god.
Synastry. Perhaps AST's most unique and helpful ability severely gimped by the fact it doesn't get triggered by HOTs or AOE healing, only Benefics. Very, very useful for double-tank situations or moves like Earthshaker, but doesn't feel powerful enough. In 4-man instances is effectively useless. It needs to be triggered by all the heals an AST can cast (ED can be excluded I guess since it goes up to 1000 potency and that's quite a lot) including those that land on AST themselves AND the Synastry target. In this way it could be used as a little single-target Divine Seal and would probably be considered our real powerful healing cooldown. Reduce healing channeling to 30% from 50% in that case, even! I wouldn't mind if it created more situations in which this ability could be used in the first place.

Nocturnal Sect. Aspected Benefic potency should be 280 (285?) to bring it up to Adloquium level. MP consumption should be reduced in that sect. Possibly make it DPS+shielding stance as a result.
Enhanced Benefic. I've seen good ideas about how to make this trait useful. Resetting Essential Dignity cooldown a-la Bloodletter would've been a godsend. If not, instant Benefic II under this trait should not trigger GCD so that it would be actually... instant, and not simply moved to the front of the cast time, making it only so effective.

tl;dr There's two ways to fix AST, which is undeniably underpowered right now: Make it a good buffer, or make it a good healer. The former under this kinda class design would still be subjected to RNG and that'll forever be its falling. Making it a good healer first is much easier.

[ArcheDragon]

What they said!

[ArcheDragon]

What Karen said! (Stupid no edit feature for phones)