Astro in savage

[justinjarjar]

Saw these videos on youtube of this AST Yoshiyuki Ly for those that wanna see.

Floor 1 Savage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZkTySAHDI4

Floor 2 Savage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWfPcG43yrA

PS4 gameplay/bars confuse me XD, but thanks for the links .

[Darkseth]

Saw these videos on youtube of this AST Yoshiyuki Ly for those that wanna see.

Floor 1 Savage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZkTySAHDI4

Floor 2 Savage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWfPcG43yrA

Impressive. This gave me much hope for AST, because i like the animations and the Esoteric set. Even more considering the following:
i tried AST (my partner is a sch, so i'm main WHM) today in A1s.
I was hoping, people here in xx Threads would just exaggerate with how bad AST really is...
Honestly, AST is just SO bad and pretty much Useless in any serious raid scenario. Sure, it IS possible as shown in above videos. Sure, its "fine" on lower content below Alex savage. But double Warrior in 2.0 was also possible. Remember that Double warrior T5 clear? Just because it was possible, doesnt mean it's fine. PLD was way better. Just like whm or sch are way better healer than ast now.
But the difference between whm/sch, and any AST combo is so huge...
we had hard problems with Faust, took us like 30 minutes to bring it down. I had non stop zero Mana (and here i was hoping, people would exaggerate too.. Because potency are ONLY 5% lower, but Spell cost 20% less MP) during the end. The heal output is bad, and the buffs were almost worthless. I was even lucky with buffs, and draw like 2-3 attack speed for our Monk, one of them an extendet one + time dilation + CO, which got his dps up by like 50-100 in total? difficult to say... He was just slightly above the drg. My own DPS were stuck at 130, because i just HAD to heal so much.
On Opressor it was also very noticable. My sch partner had to AOE much more, had more MP problems, could dps less. Buffs again... Mostly useless junk. Way too weak to be noticed by any means, unlike the missing healing.
Went out before time up, i changed to war, we oneshotet Faust. I had 280 dps, and had an super easy time healing, without MP problems (endet the fight with 2500-3000 MP ). I probably could have re-newed my dots 1-2 more times.
And during Boss it was similar. Keeping everyone alive was noticable easier and better, than with ast. Despite so little differences in AOE heals. (maybe it was the Mind difference, that gets higher, the higher our Item level goes, since its a flat 3% bonus).
Not to mention, going ast just puts a higher stress on your co-healer, making him less efficient, and maybe even lowering raid dps at all.

Honestly i see 3 ways to fix this job, without a complete rework:
- Bring Healing up to whm/sch level, including potencies. Healing output needs a good buff here
- Cards need to get a HUGE buff. At least 10% -> 40%. The Healing deficite is SO enourmous in my opinion (my whole group noticed it, not just me, and not just my scholar partner), that buffs need to make up for that loss. 10% is just way too low.
- A combination of both.

Since #1 would make it into a whm/sch clone with a different weapon, i guess #2 would be the first pick.

Again: Just looking at potencies, i cant understand why it makes such a big difference. But it does... ;/ i guess, all the small things just add up.

But lets see the positive: SE "has" to do a major Buff (at a similar level as 2.0 warrior) at some point, so we can look forward in a better AST.

[Zhemos]

My suggestion.

Make Celestial Opposition a 60 second cooldown.
Take away the minus 50% potency on RR aoe cards, or increase the duration of the cards by 7 seconds.
Essential Dignity cooldown increase to 60 seconds, potency increase to 600
Make Lightspeed cooldown 60 seconds
Take away the channeling on collective unconscious, make it place where you stand.
Aspected Helios same range as medica 2
Time dilation usable on self
Change disable to decrease potency on all actions used for the next 10 seconds.
PLEASE change shuffle so you cannot draw the same card twice. It happens TOOOOOOO much and is very frustrating.

Nocturnal stance I dunno. It needs to change. The only thing I can think of is to either make the shield like scholars where you get the double potency effect on crit, or allow us to switch freely between Noct and Diurnal with a 10-15 second cooldown.

[AmiraHargal]

I've tried healing savage on both nocturnal/diurnal sect, although being the weak "casual" player that I am, I'm still unable to clear Faust XD, but here is some impression of using AST in savage (note : partner is a WHM, with pretty good skill to cover up my mistake so experience may differ with other AST XD)

- Diurnal Sect is fine, healing wise, but it feel like I overheal a lot with WHM partner whether when I'm stacking regen or we just happen to heat Benefic II/Cure II combo at the same time

- Nocturnal Sect is underwhelming. I really hope they change time dilation and celestial opposition(the AOE stun one) effect under nocturnal sect to enhance RR effect instead of extend effect in diurnal and it also apply to our shield and Luminous MP regen in nocturnal(time dilation is 50% increase in target's shield and buff potency, celestial can be miniscule, like 5% increase in potency to every party member in range). This will basically make us an (ironically) less RNG dependent shielder than SCH yet still weaker as not to replace it completely(because only 50% increase in shield power instead of SCH 100% increase on crit)

- I feel that during healing intensive part of Faust(when you're close to wiping due to time up), I don't have time to draw card or buff people while healing the tank because of the animation lock while doing a draw. If I press heal while my AST just start to do her draw animation, the draw ability will be cancelled and my AST start channeling the heal instead of just the animation cancelling and the card is still drawn. It's also probably partially due to lag on my side(around 200ms ping), but I wish dev team would remove the small window of animation lock where draw cast can be cancelled if you start to cast another spell at the start of the draw animation.

[Richiealvian]

Just cleared A2, and I have to say it really changed my mind on Noct.
It's crazy big, I think it's like having bigger cure2s but still having cards!

As gear scales, I think it'll be very decent. I went sch/ast, but we had no problems with double shield..

Gotta thank that other AST video, the dps soaking vuln up stacks really gave us ideas.

[SuzakuCMX]

Just cleared A2, and I have to say it really changed my mind on Noct.
It's crazy big, I think it's like having bigger cure2s but still having cards!

Yes, I've also realized the 5% potency buff in Noct is actually huge for the healing on Benefic/Benefic II I prefer to use Noct in dungeons on my AST because of the easier (AKA Quicker) healing up from low HP.

[LycorisSelunis]

It's good to hear people using noct after so much bashing on it! I have been using it a lot derping around doing lvl 50 things because in higher level play the main reason I prefer diurnal is that 1 or 2 ticks off of CU in an emergency could be lifesaving and noct CU just doesn't seem worth it, and TD doesn't do crap for noct either...Getting both regens and a buffed bole TD on the tank is great breathing room for fixing derp mistakes someone else made, or adding dps of my own....So when I am level synced below those abilities the shields are great.

@Richiealvian Was it no issue double shield with your sch parter because you co-ordinated your shielding, because the damage was constant enough for shields to always be popping, or because one of you didn't shield much and focused more on raw healing? Were one or both you able to dps much?

edit-also did you stack virus/disable and cu/ss or trade off who was using which cd? Basically having more constant cds or having very potent double cd

[Richiealvian]

It's good to hear people using noct after so much bashing on it! I have been using it a lot derping around doing lvl 50 things because in higher level play the main reason I prefer diurnal is that 1 or 2 ticks off of CU in an emergency could be lifesaving and noct CU just doesn't seem worth it, and TD doesn't do crap for noct either...Getting both regens and a buffed bole TD on the tank is great breathing room for fixing derp mistakes someone else made, or adding dps of my own....So when I am level synced below those abilities the shields are great.

@Richiealvian Was it no issue double shield with your sch parter because you co-ordinated your shielding, because the damage was constant enough for shields to always be popping, or because one of you didn't shield much and focused more on raw healing? Were one or both you able to dps much?

edit-also did you stack virus/disable and cu/ss or trade off who was using which cd? Basically having more constant cds or having very potent double cd

It actually worked out perfectly. There are parts where I was solo healing (well, could say I copied the other AST's video), sch could dps and I was the only shielder. Jagd doll comes, I get Fey Illumination and we were healing different tanks. SCH doesn't have a Benefic 2 powerhouse, so a 7k buffed benefic 2 is just really awesome. If anything my only pet peeve was that I did 26 dps the whole encounter. Only braved myself to use gravity 2-3 times the first few pulls. The difference is crazy, 4.3k becomes 4.8k that's just amazing and will scale more with gear. The shields also do save you from some oh shit situation, it's like a somewhat extra lustrate cause in total it's over 3k unbuffed. Also, essential dignity is buffed with noct as well.

At some point with conva and stuff I remember critting for 16k.. that's really massive.

Here's our clear video, we did have some oh shit moments with the tank..https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwerbtDeBFw

[Vlady]

Finally people who understand the value of Noc stance. It's like people who go huh when a machinist takes feint from lancer.

Nov stance is incredibly powerful. Just people jump on the astro is weak band wagon.

[Cynfael]

Finally people who understand the value of Noc stance. It's like people who go huh when a machinist takes feint from lancer.

Nov stance is incredibly powerful. Just people jump on the astro is weak band wagon.

I see you say things like this a lot, but without anything to support it.

If you're truly invested in the class, you'll want to see it brought up to the level of the other two healers.

The math (including actual party performance math, not just napkin math) doesn't lie about the current disadvantages of AST, and I, for one, don't want to see AST relegated to the niche class ghetto, because that's where it's headed. It needs to be better than "fine" or "not bad" to prove a strong choice for all kinds of content.