Astro in savage

[Zilara]

You're welcome to watch Lucrezia's Savage A2 video. It's 10 minutes of nonstop tank damage. Give it a watch and lemme know if you think you'd have the MP management to heal it on Astro.

[Kaizersan]

Also, you might want to read up on this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

Just pointing clear cut facts that people get better as they experience the same thing over and over this is no different.

[RichardButte]

Just pointing clear cut facts that people get better as they experience the same thing over and over this is no different.

And I pointed out that this "clear fact" wasn't relevant to the discussion because the situations people described were that switching away from AST immediately made the run a great deal easier.

They didn't say, "I switched to WHM and then after the DPS finished getting their crap together, we cleared it." They described it as an IMMEDIATE change, not a gradual one.

Well you have to remember though that the people completing Savage now, that can only clear it with healer dps, are doing it undergeared. They should otherwise not be in there. When you have better gear - the point at which the average player decides to go in and try Savage - then it'll be a different experience. Yes it'll be easier than it is now, but that's by design.

Very true, but assuming everything will scale at roughly the same pace, AST is going to continue to be in dead last as a healer in the overall benefit they bring to a raid.

[Leiloni]

Very true, but assuming everything will scale at roughly the same pace, AST is going to continue to be in dead last as a healer in the overall benefit they bring to a raid.

I think everyone agrees AST needs further changes. Just not in the dps department.

[RichardButte]

I think everyone agrees AST needs further changes. Just not in the dps department.

Well, it would depend on whether we're talking about the AST doing more DPS or enabling the party to do more DPS.

I'd rather they just make the heals better, though, as it's easier to balance.

From the next post:

If they happen to not be healing properly then yes because a lot of players panic on heavy damage and waste mp or forget to use abilities that could save them mp and it's not like AST has been around for a year or anything like WHM and SCH have.

So people have been playing WHM/SCH with all level 60 abilities for a year, eh?

Look, people have had to say this in the past and I'll say it again here: there is NO magical trick to AST to "get the most out of it" or some other such nonsense that theorycrafting forumers seem to love to rant about.

The class' healing abilities are largely a watered-down version of WHM's, with a few unique ones like Synastry and Light Speed, neither of which requires rocket science to use.

The only "mystery" here is why people (many of whom don't even have the class to 60) seem to think that it's actually fine when all evidence points to the opposite being true...

Not trying to be mean, but seriously, we can see where the class' weaknesses lie and we need to give SE some good feedback on fixing it. Saying it's all good isn't going to help anything.

[Leiloni]

Well, it would depend on whether we're talking about the AST doing more DPS or enabling the party to do more DPS.

I'd rather they just make the heals better, though, as it's easier to balance.

Oh yes I meant personal healer dps skills only. But our other skills - supportive abilities and heals, could use some love for sure.

[Galdous]

I think everyone agrees AST needs further changes. Just not in the dps department.

I think I am only seeing the same few people agree. Alot of people also feel that Astrologian job is in a very good place and will perform as well as the other healers in Savage which they seem to be doing well in.

[kiraan]

I think I am only seeing the same few people agree. Alot of people also feel that Astrologian job is in a very good place and will perform as well as the other healers in Savage which they seem to be doing well in.

No, just no ... AST is not in a very good place, it struggles to do what the 2 others can do much more easily. So please stop spreading misinformation.

Like its been said a million times already, we know that its not impossible to clear A1S but it shouldn't be that much more demanding than on other healers jobs.

Its not because some people can clear it that suddenly we should turn a blind eye on all the flaws of the job.

[Zholi]

I think I am only seeing the same few people agree. Alot of people also feel that Astrologian job is in a very good place and will perform as well as the other healers in Savage which they seem to be doing well in.

No. A lot of people do not think that. Just about the only ones who do are the handful of people posting that on this forum. Do you know how many people think AST is in a "very good place" right now in the 100+ page thread about them on the JP forums? Exactly zero. Like it or not, in light of literally thousands of examples of negative feedback, AST is going to be changed, despite the fact that about five people on the Western forum feel an inexplicable need to shout from the rooftops that everything is fine even as the world crumbles all around them. This kind of behavior seems to be a distinctly Western phenomenon. Our forum is a cesspool of idiocy and argumentation, as a select few feel the need to shout down the opinions of the majority every few posts, and distract from providing constructive feedback as we have to drop everything to surgically dismantle your fallacious and frankly delusional "points." People talk about the "silent majority" who think AST is fine. On what grounds do you say this? The posts that point out the issues with AST garner in some cases hundreds of likes, while the posts that say everything is fine struggle to break out of the single-digit ghetto. The majority of people I see in-game seem to think AST is in a very bad spot, and the longer the job is allowed to languish in its current state, the more those numbers grow.

Unfortunately, the forums for our language are virtually useless for constructive feedback. On the Japanese forums, instead of everyone feeling the need to post and repost the same opinions endlessly, they make copious use of the "like" button. Posts routinely garner 40+ likes, even hundreds of pages into a thread. You can see at a glance with a numerical value how most people feel about something. Here you'd be lucky to gather even a single shred of useful information from the noise. I do not envy the job of the American and European community teams in trying to select useful bits of feedback from this mess to have translated and relayed to the developers.

As someone who had been looking forward to AST before its release, and playing it regularly since, I have a particular interest in this issue and have been following it closely. I have looked carefully at data points from all sources I can find, and by absolutely every objective measurement, AST is inferior to the other two healers, and I assure you this is much to my chagrin. It gives me absolutely no pleasure to say that this is the worst release-state we've ever seen for a job in FFXIV since its relaunch to date, eclipsing even the debacle of 2.0 Warrior by quite a bit. The situation is dire, and I cannot emphasize this enough. I am in one of the top two free companies in the world and help with the management thereof. I personally know all of the top English-speaking players (and more importantly, healers) in the world, and I hope they don't mind me saying this, but not a single one of them has a favorable opinion of AST. And, apologies to everyone else, quality of opinion does matter when it comes to these issues, and these people have a higher quality of opinion than anyone else I know. When it comes to the efficacy and balance of jobs in a raiding environment, we are experts. We have to be to compete on the world progression stage.

All of that said, I am speaking for myself, and not on behalf of the FC. Hence I am not mentioning them by name. I am not in any of our world top 3 groups. However, I have done progression raiding at a high level, and have achieved world and/or server top 10 on various things. With suboptimal jobs. Jobs that SE had to buff on account of their weakness. Never has anything been as bad for any job as it is for AST right now.

Here are my personal opinions on the abilities of Astrologian:

• Lightspeed - Initially worthless, the most recent update made this marginally beneficial to use. It is still extremely underwhelming, however. For a 150 second cooldown, it allows you to cast 3-4 spells at a slightly reduced cost, with little to no cast time. It still activates the global cooldown, so it provides little to no benefit to healing throughput.
  
• Enhanced Lightspeed - This trait is useless, especially in light of the recent adjustments. Nobody will ever use Lightspeed for attack magic.
  
• Luminiferous Aether - Essentially a copy of Shroud of Saints. This is the only reliable form of MP restoration AST has. With SCH's historical lack of mana issues, along with WHM gaining Assize, leaving AST with the same MP situation as a 2.0 WHM is inexcusable. The fact that we can use Ewer to cover this weakness is simply not a justification for the situation. In order to consistently match the MP regeneration of the other healers, we would have to draw Ewer at a statistically impossible rate.
  
• Enhanced Benefic - Useless. Still have to wait for the GCD. Does nothing but force you to check whether you have the buff or not so it doesn't throw off your timing.
  
• Essential Dignity - There is nothing inherently wrong with this skill. It is instant, off the GCD, and it heals. However, as our only emergency cooldown, the benefit of its relatively short recast is lost. We must jealously guard this, at is the only thing that can possibly hope to dig us out of a bad situation.
  
• Stella - Useless. Low potency, very niche effect, takes up an ability slot in a job that is desperately hurting for useful ones. The additional effect could easily have been rolled in with Malefic, as Malefic becomes completely obsolete at 60.
  
• Disable - Only usable on attacks with cast bars. Some things you want/need to mitigate do not have cast bars. Prone to getting eaten by an auto-attack in many situations.
  
• Synastry - Decent, but the recast is simply too high for what it does. Additionally, it is restricted to direct single target heals.
  
• Time Dilation - Decent.
  
• Collective Unconscious - Useless. Being unable to move or act in order to retain the effect is an extremely high penalty that isn't worth what is given in return. The effect needs to be very good to justify the extreme cost of maintaining it.
  
• Celestial Opposition - Useless. A stun on a 150s cooldown is laughable, as is a 5 second increase in buffs. If this skill were removed from the game just about nothing would change enough to notice.
  
• Cards - Useless. That's right. Taken as a whole, they are useless. The buff strength is simply too small. Their power needs to be boosted so much that most people's initial reaction will be that the developers have gone overboard. The only thing that will allow the card system as a whole to be useful is for individual buffs to be very powerful. Because of the randomness of cards, these effects that at first glance seem extreme will balance out over time. Some of the card effects may even need to be changed entirely (Spear).
  
• Nocturnal Sect - Useless. The effective HPS, even after shields are taken into account, is astonishingly low. In Nocturnal Sect, AST is the only healer in the game without some form of passive healing that can be active at virtually all times. For WHM it is Regen effects. For SCH it is their fairy. For Diurnal AST it is Regen effects. For Nocturnal AST it is nothing. To add insult to injury, their shielding ability is far worse than SCH. The healing increase provided by the stance itself is also effectively useless and does nothing to cover these weaknesses.

I hope you are prepared for an extremely heavy workload if you want to fix this job. I also encourage you to improve your testing protocol, because releasing a job in this state is not something that should ever happen.

[Sidra]

Let's say current Ilvl is 185, and the fight is tuned for 200. At ilvl 200 a group will not need healer DPS to clear. But at 185, there isn't enough tank/mele dps available so healer DPS is needed. That means the fight is tuned for no healer DPS, but the early adopters need healers to chip in. If they did it the other way (tuned for healer dps at 200) no one would clear until close to 200 - and then groups who didn't have healer dps still couldn't clear

I think this is okay like this - as it takes a very skilled healer and group coordination to add dps will also healing in the top line progression content. Not everyone is going to be able to do it even if they tried. But then when the team gets to the proper ilvl - the healers can be less stressed (as we know very well from this forum, some aren't good enough, and some simply don't want to or don't like to) feeling they have to add dps and just heal.

Although one thing that will always be true - if you have 4 DPS at say 900 dps, and both healers at 0 - and you are 200 dps below a check. It will almost always be easier to get a healer form 0-200, than a dps who are already pushing dps hard, from 900-1100. Or even 4 DPS from 900-950.

Although there are semantics in play here too. The encounter is playable now, and people ware trying to clear it now. The fact that it's tuned for Ilvl 200 could be seen as irrelevant, and the case could be made that it is currently tuned for actually needing healer dps to be cleared, despite SE's public stance to the contrary. As "now" seems more relevant a basis point to define from, than in 3-4 weeks when players are more geared.