Astro in savage

[Phenidate]

Greetings,

• Astrologian's healing potency and cards effects

  Astrologian's healing potency and card effects were set with a party's total offensive and defensive capabilities in mind, as they can increase various effects of other party members using their cards.
  

Not sure why Astrologian has to sacrifice so much healing potency and burst healing because of the party buffs they can throw out - especially considering how bland and low power they are. WHM and SCH can both cast Eye for an Eye and Virus. SCH can maintain a haste buff similar to a AST's AoE Arrow for twice as long, every minute, reliably with no RNG or even player interaction required. The fairy just does it for you automatically if you want.

So SCH basically gets one of the more potent 8 man party buffs that AST can cast (not 5% for 15 seconds, but 3% for 30 seconds - the math works out to be slightly better over time even). How is their healing impacted for such a great reliable buff? Well lets see, they get a superior shield heal with a chance to proc a double shield, they get 3 Lustrates, which is far more than an Essential Dignity, and you can time aetherflows to pump out 6 in times of emergency, 9 if you dissipate. If a SCH is in need of even greater potency, they can even sacrifice the shield on Adloquium for ANOTHER 600 potency heal every 30 seconds.

What can AST do in an emergency? Well they can wait for their tank to be almost dead and then throw out a 1000 max potency heal. Bear in mind this falls into the benediction trap - where the tank may just keel over and die as your Essential Dignity goes off thanks to latency. Now you have a dead tank and an ED on cooldown. SCH and WHM don't need to wait until their tanks on deaths door to either heal them to full or throw 1800+ potency worth of healing their way.

So why is Astrologian limited to such a piss poor set of skills, which are basically like WHMs but weaker (lets be honest, who even uses the travesty that is Noct Sect right now?), without the emergency cooldowns and emergency heal output comparable to either sister class.
Because they have a 33% chance of drawing a offensive buff? An 11% chance of drawing an attack buff equivalent to SCHs every minute (minimum)? (AoE Royal Road into Balance or Arrow). A 16% chance of giving a 10% damage reduction for 15 seconds? 10% less damage hardly compares to being unable to burst out thousands in healing within a short period of time.

The numbers just don't add up. And it shows in game, pretty badly when you compare a WHM/SCH combo to a AST/SCH combo, or god forbid an AST/AST compared to a WHM/WHM or SCH/SCH combo. Whats that, card buffs don't stack? Oh dear.

If you really want to make AST sacrifice healing potency for buffs, then all cards should be fairly strong on their own - not situationally useful and requiring RNGesus to take the wheel if you ever want 'situational buffs' to line up with the right situation. You made AST give up 4 skills for this card system, and it's turned out to be a mediocre source of buffs at best, at best filling the place of other abilities like Fey Wind and Eye for an Eye. The only thing it has going for it is it stole BRD's functionality too.

Lets be honest about how Draw works for a second here. Most of the time AST wastes draws, shuffles and royal roads on doubles of cards they don't need, trying to get either a Balance or Arrow with the AoE buff in 8 mans or double duration in 4 mans if they want to optimize their buffs. They MIGHT toss a Ewer out if they or the other healer is low - but they aren't likely to waste time trying to royal road buff it. We can't see TP so making good use of Spire is nearly impossible without someone begging for it on the off chance there is no BRD or MCH and hoping you draw spire. Bole just gets thrown away unless the tank is actually taking damage when you happen to draw it - the spread is usually reserved for the arrow or balance needed for the 'optimal' combo - and lets not forget that if you have the AoE royal road up it's half as effective on the tank when you use it. If it takes you 4 draws to finally get a bole, guess what? A WHM or SCH could have cast Eye for an Eye before, and have it off cooldown by the time you get a single bole out.

Not every card drawn is going to turn the tides of battle. It's likely it's not even going to effect it in any noticeable way if you keep getting junk draws for minutes on end. Statistically speaking, you probably won't even see certain cards for minutes on end! Whats up with the way this game does card draws?

Note: NO, Lightspeed is NOT an emergency healing buff. It does NOT reduce the GCD, thus you are casting heals at the SAME rate you were before. Your heals go off instantly and then you wait for GCD - with zero boost to your heals per second. Compare this to Presence of Mind which reduces cast times and GCD, Divine Seal which boosts heals per second, or Lustrate that can be cast repeatedly off GCD. Lightspeeds only real use is reducing mana cost or letting you run around and heal - which is a VERY situational benefit when most content is built to allow for SCH and WHM 'stand and cast' healing too.

[Phenidate]

snip

And if you want the tl;dr, AST is getting shafted with weaker healing to give out buffs that other Jobs can give on demand, better in some cases, reliably in all cases. They also lose the ability to put out thousands of healing potency in seconds like the other jobs.

Cards are just too weak and too rng to justify the drastic loss in healing potential.

[TyloRime]

It worries me that the Devs seem to think things are already balanced - are they playing the same game?

[Vlady]

It worries me that the Devs seem to think things are already balanced - are they playing the same game?

It worries me that the devs will fall under the pressure of a vocal minority instead of waiting and collecting data on how many people play astrologian actively.

[Sidra]

This thread is kind of funny.
"AST are too weak, I can't clear A1 Savage!"
- pic of AST beating A1 Savage
"Well, That was WHM and AST - it can't be done with a SCH combo it just doesn't have the healing oomph to hand it"
-pic of AST/SCH clearing A1S
"Well, uh, it is still too weak!"

One thing I'd like to add in a WHM/AST combo in terms of DPS - an AST can DPS too - from a single target perspective it really isn't that far off from SCH.

[RichardButte]

This thread is kind of funny.
"AST are too weak, I can't clear A1 Savage!"

I think it's more along the lines of "It's hard to clear AS1 with an AST but SCH/WHM rolls right through it".

And that's definitely a problem, especially when the whole point of AST is that we're supposed to boost DPS enough to compensate for our lack of emergency healing and that's certainly not the case if the DPS boost from an AST is comparable to just having a WHM/SCH combo instead.

[Sidra]

I think it's more along the lines of "It's hard to clear AS1 with an AST but SCH/WHM rolls right through it".

And that's definitely a problem.

Here's the thing though - no one is really rolling through A1S yet, even with WHM/SCH. For every clear video you see, there's 100+ groups failing you don't see. It's hard to clear it with any combo, and right now only the best players are clearing it with any combination of jobs.

[RichardButte]

Here's the thing though - no one is really rolling through A1S yet, even with WHM/SCH. For every clear video you see, there's 100+ groups failing you don't see. It's hard to clear it with any combo, and right now only the best players are clearing it with any combination of jobs.

From earlier in this thread:

I tried.. i really tried... just attempted with ast/sch, and we just could not get off enough aoe healing and topping people off for the double preys.. faust was a pain healing through as well. tanks died so much for us at 6% with ast healing and mild sch dps.. Switched back to sch/whm, one shot faust, i didn't even have to cast a single heal with me back on sch. boss himself went a lot better as well to heal through. i... really tried... and i'm so upset i'm going back to sch </3

Easy answer.

We had a dps low geared for Faust, going AST/WHM resulted in the Enrage.

I switched to WHM/WHM, resulted in a kill.

The effect of the cards are too much irrelevant so what you only compare is dps AST vs dps WHM. Which is actually revelant.

All the content up till now was healable just fine with ast in the group. I think i expected the same for savage, a little difficulty, but not near what i experienced last night. AST healing in savage is ... REALLY close, it can be done, but it's like.. you have hope you make it and nothing goes wrong. AST healing right now is next to impossible for savage and it shouldn't be like that. We should be able to do all content with any combination of healers just as fine as a whm/sch combo. i shouldn't have to be ripping out my hair kuz benefic II spam, lightspeed, ES, bole can just barely keep tanks alive towards end of faust (on most attempts it's not enough), or have to do twice as much aoe healing at whm for all that aoe in A1 attempting to top people off before double prey then bene II spam on prey and ES if i still happen to have it or if i don't need to toss it on my tank> oh crap now i'm out of mp and can't heal through anything else for the rest of the fight... and that's in the first 2 mins... it's shouldn't be like this. I don't see why AST cannot be put to be just has high heals as whm or sch in either sect they pick. We should not have to sacrifice healing and mp just kuz we also have they cards that just tickle... it just... it should be doable with any combination of healers.... SE pls help

I was playing AST before savage launch. He was really fun and okk to good on any content before savage. But his strength falls a lot when we were doing harder content. I was the SCH and I had my partner playing WHM. Our first atempt at Alex Savage went well, we got Faust quickly and we were adjusting to Oppressor. We had to leave duty because of some member rl thing.

After that, we rejoined. Our WHM went as AST. No changes on Faust honestly but when we got to oppressor we were having trouble to adjust heals in some parts that we already had adjusted on SCH+WHM duo, and since AST's healing kit is so simmilar to WHM, maybe this reveals that AST is really lacking on something. Total party damage per second didn't change much, but I can't say if that was AST or our DPSs are still adjusting themselves to the fight. I know I'm still adjusting my stance dance and mana management.

from what i experienced and this is just the first floor

astro with a white mage partner felt just barely maybe doable and everything was in a constant state of emergency
switched to scholar and it all felt pretty smooth and easygoing for healing

the difference was kind of unbelievable

We've seen enough people in this thread who have tried it as AST and then switched to one of the other healers and noticed a substantial difference in difficulty of clearing the encounter (ie it became much easier).

If all other variables are the same and the only change is switching from AST to another healer, then that's our answer: AST isn't good enough. It's not good enough at healing and it's not good enough at boosting party DPS to end the encounter faster, otherwise this wouldn't be the experience these people are having.

[Assirra]

Here's the thing though - no one is really rolling through A1S yet, even with WHM/SCH. For every clear video you see, there's 100+ groups failing you don't see. It's hard to clear it with any combo, and right now only the best players are clearing it with any combination of jobs.

There are AST's in both this thread and the the one in general where their group straight up asked to switch to another job.
When that happens there indeed an issue.

[Alahra]

There are AST's in both this thread and the the one in general where their group straight up asked to switch to another job.
When that happens there indeed an issue.

Exactly. This happened with BLM and SMN at various points. It happened with DRGs in FCOB. It happened with both melee and WARs in BCOB. In all cases when this has occurred, changes have been made. They will likely be made for AST as well--but it's a matter of how long we'll need to wait for further adjustments now.