Done with AST

[Assirra]

AST performs just fine for your everyday content. If healing dungeon runs is an absolute train wreck to do, there are some fundamental issues that need to be addressed, because an AST is entirely capable of healing them, speed runs and all.

I haven't dabbled in 3.0's raid yet, but I think some of the drama surrounding AST will die down over time as gear levels go up. Right now, healer DPS is cutting edge and very important to clearing raids, and that makes the margin of error even smaller for healers when the whole raid is likely undergeared as it is.

When your average party is able to pass DPS checks without being dependent on healers, there will be less pressure for healers to have maximum DPS uptime. Good raiders will still have DPS'ing healers, yes, but it won't be a critical facet to clearing the fight (they were designed that way to begin with). There may also come a point in ilevels where the WHM's healing throughput becomes redundant, allowing AST to step in and provide double buffs with a SCH's Selene with less issues.

During this time, when item levels are reducing the amount of pressure on AST, is probably when AST will be under heavy scrutiny from SE. They need to know AST's potential when geared, undergeared, and overgeared, and that potential is further skewed when you consider that the ilevels of the party members that AST can be buffing must be accounted for as well. SE could have buffed more with AST, but what if those buffs make AST incredibly strong with a party full of i210 players? They'd be forced to nerf the class, which no one likes.

We as players should continue to experiment with the class, push it to new limits, and continue to offer constructive feedback. As it is now, AST can be viewed as a challenging progression healer, and a seriously hardcore raid group doesn't look for a class with a built in challenge. They look for consistency in WHM and SCH.

The problem is a lot bigger currently then you make it sound. There is a 145 pages thread on the japanese forums last i checked since they keep their discussions in 1 thread. Something i wish we would do here as well btw. The fact that everyone makes their own thread and the other threads get pushed back makes it seem a lot smaller then it actually is. This is not just some drama, this is currently a big issue.

Nobody is even talking about DPS at all here, people are talking about the healing ability of the Astrologean which is simply inferior to the other 2 healers. That is something that has to be fixed if we want to viable in all the content. It seems they thought cards would be nice but none of those actually improve our healing so for our healing kit all those spells are actually useless. Then we got sects which are basically nerfed spells on which they are based, either HoT's of White mage or shields of scholar.

Also, what you are basically saying is "as long as AST on farm content is good enough, it is fine". Not literally but that it what it comes down to. How in the world makes logic like that sense? Yes i rather have them fixed now and be nerfed later. The fact that a class would get so much out of gear is honestly a bad design and should be scrapped on drawing board so i hope it is not like that.