AST Sect Theory

[Ninimo_Babamo]

Aperion, we get it, you want AST shields to be good. But, sadly, they arent. Once you get your AST to level 60 and start trying end game with it, you will see, very much so, that it is a heavily gimped stance. It has far less heal potential than its regens. There is never a reason to use shields over hots with AST unless you are just in an instance with tons of trash and don't want your regen to pull threat off the tank the second the mob is pulled. Take this from someone with AST, WHM, and SCH all i185. Astrologian doesn't suck, but its shields sure do.

[Apeiron]

Aperion, we get it, you want AST shields to be good. But, sadly, they arent. Once you get your AST to level 60 and start trying end game with it, you will see, very much so, that it is a heavily gimped stance. It has far less heal potential than its regens. There is never a reason to use shields over hots with AST unless you are just in an instance with tons of trash and don't want your regen to pull threat off the tank the second the mob is pulled. Take this from someone with AST, WHM, and SCH all i185. Astrologian doesn't suck, but its shields sure do.

This isn't actually about AST shields, but everyone seems to be focusing on how lacking the AST shields are. Something I'm not arguing against as I'm well aware of the lower potency, combined with no crit shield bonus, means sub-standard shields. To go back to my original statement, I'm wondering if we're meant to play the AST in the sect that matches our co-healer. The topic has been derailed into a discussion about Nocturnal Sect and shields because of how ready people are to point out the shortcomings of that sect.

Look, guys, I've presented a theory, and no one has come back to me with "we tried this". Instead all I'm getting are people pointing to the shields and saying the AST would never use them when paired with a SCH. Maybe the AST never does get to use them, but gets to do other things. I was hoping to get feedback from other healers, not dismissal.

[Spoekes]

Look, guys, I've presented a theory, and no one has come back to me with "we tried this". Instead all I'm getting are people pointing to the shields and saying the AST would never use them when paired with a SCH. Maybe the AST never does get to use them, but gets to do other things. I was hoping to get feedback from other healers, not dismissal.

The problem with your presented theory on SCH + Noct Ast is that it's lacking to begin with.

Why would you want a SCH to "pre-shield" and a Noct-Ast to "post-shield"?
If a "post-shield" is needed, why shouldn't the SCH do it?

As trade off for your "post-shield" (which the SCH should have done itself), you lose regen effects.

If the SCH deploys it's shields (like it should), you have the 2 aspected skills you may only use rarely now.

The lower healing you have now will force the SCH to nanny your healing, most likely hitting it's dps potential.

In theory this is screaming suboptimal, ranging to crippling, why should someone test this at all other than for a fun challenge?

____________

WHM + Diurnal Ast is already a thing that works and in theory provides better potency and mana efficiency than Noct Ast in any situation other than double Ast (which may be the reason you think people "derail" your thread).

[Cassandaria]

I think that you can work any content just fine in diurnal or nocturnal if you use all that is available in your toolkit. I see so many arguments that you can't do noct ast with SCH, but, yes, you can. There are changes to abilities that may not have the best synergy but you forget that being in diurnal lowers your healing potency in the first place. An AST can not replace a sch or a whm, because we are neither, what we have is a series of unique and flexible tools and we should look at the flexibility, not the downside. Noc provides bigger up front heals, but it also provides an aoe shield with no downside that drops incoming damage consistently. Sure we may not be using our scholar style shields if we work with a scholar, but we CAN stack with the defensive buffs a scholar can do on the ground to mitigate incoming damage to an absolutely silly degree.

[Apeiron]

The problem with your presented theory on SCH + Noct Ast is that it's lacking to begin with.

Why would you want a SCH to "pre-shield" and a Noct-Ast to "post-shield"?
If a "post-shield" is needed, why shouldn't the SCH do it?

As trade off for your "post-shield" (which the SCH should have done itself), you lose regen effects.

If the SCH deploys it's shields (like it should), you have the 2 aspected skills you may only use rarely now.

The lower healing you have now will force the SCH to nanny your healing, most likely hitting it's dps potential.

In theory this is screaming suboptimal, ranging to crippling, why should someone test this at all other than for a fun challenge?

____________

WHM + Diurnal Ast is already a thing that works and in theory provides better potency and mana efficiency than Noct Ast in any situation other than double Ast (which may be the reason you think people "derail" your thread).

The pre-shield, post-shield idea is a specific scenario, and not the best example. It would involve a scenario where someone didn't get a shield until it was too late, and now the SCH has to get that person (or persons) back up to a reasonable level of health. The SCH could leave that healing to the fairy and AST, who could utilize any of the healing spells in his toolkit, and focus on keeping shields up, or if they are already in the middle of casting physick then the AST could step in to give their shields.

The fact that the Aspect skills aren't going to get used, isn't necessarily a bad thing, is it? The potency for AB and AH is lower than Benefic and Helios, and when comparing the Diurnal effect to the Nocturnal effect, I saw that the Diurnal regen was only 1.5x stronger than the Nocturnal counter-part -- and that's assuming your party members aren't taking damage greater than what the regen can heal. If the AST in noct is focusing on utilizing Benefic and Helios more than AB or AH, that should be a good thing. That's healing comparable to WHM cure/SCH physick, and WHM Medica (I'd say Succor but the whole shield thing gets in the way. SCH don't really have an AoE heal, and their fairy has a regen).

Testing the theory isn't just for a fun challenge, it's to validate that the problem with AST is more than just shields in Noct. Does anyone here really believe that a fix to Nocturnal Sect's shields is suddenly going to fix any other problems that we might come across in the job? What else are we missing because we choose to ignore an option, without backing it up to say "We've tried to make this work, and it just doesn't"?

I think that you can work any content just fine in diurnal or nocturnal if you use all that is available in your toolkit. I see so many arguments that you can't do noct ast with SCH, but, yes, you can. There are changes to abilities that may not have the best synergy but you forget that being in diurnal lowers your healing potency in the first place. An AST can not replace a sch or a whm, because we are neither, what we have is a series of unique and flexible tools and we should look at the flexibility, not the downside. Noc provides bigger up front heals, but it also provides an aoe shield with no downside that drops incoming damage consistently. Sure we may not be using our scholar style shields if we work with a scholar, but we CAN stack with the defensive buffs a scholar can do on the ground to mitigate incoming damage to an absolutely silly degree.

This is in a similar vein of what I'm getting at. As I see it, the AST job is not meant to replace a WHM or SCH, and yet we're attempting to do just that. Rather than play to the classes strengths, we're attempting to shore-up the weakness of the other healer.

So far I've got one person to come back to me in all of this and tell me that they tried running WHM + Di AST in A1S, and the regen stacking wasn't enough. I'd really just love to hear more people at least try, and tell us what the results were.

Were regens not enough in specific content? What content was it, and what mechanics were you running into problems with? How did you get around it, or did you throw in the towel? Was your healing not up to snuff, what do you think would help? Are you certain its the job or the way you handled the mechanics?

[Budi]

Okay, I'm going to do basic math here.
We all agree WHM > Diurnal and SCH > Nocturnal, so that means:
2x SCH > SCH + AST
2x WHM > WHM + AST.

Now you are asking for test, but what you don't seem to realize is that this was tested back in 2.0 already. Just ask any Scholar how much fun it was to heal Titan HM with another Scholar. Heck, Turn 13 would be impossible to do without a Scholar, and taking an AST instead of a WHM would make the fight way more difficult.

[Apeiron]

Okay, I'm going to do basic math here.
We all agree WHM > Diurnal and SCH > Nocturnal, so that means:
2x SCH > SCH + AST
2x WHM > WHM + AST.

Now you are asking for test, but what you don't seem to realize is that this was tested back in 2.0 already. Just ask any Scholar how much fun it was to heal Titan HM with another Scholar. Heck, Turn 13 would be impossible to do without a Scholar, and taking an AST instead of a WHM would make the fight way more difficult.

I'm asking people to test the effectiveness of this theory, rather than just saying it won't work without any solid testing to back it up. Yes, we already know that doubling up on SCH or WHM is better than taking an AST.

Look, pointing out that 2x SCH is more effective than SCH+AST pair isn't helping either for, or against, my theory. We already know what the AST is lacking in when compared to the other healers. I'm asking people to stop looking at the AST as a WHM replacement when paired with a SCH, or a SCH replacement when paired with a WHM, and instead to have them act as an augmentation to the SCH or WHM as if there were another SCH or WHM with them. The AST has the toolkit to support its co-healer. I've done it in everything but Coil and Alex, the only place left to try the AST to see if my theory works.

I don't think I'm asking for anything outrageous. I'm asking people with more resources (FCs and statics) to queue up for a little bit of their time, and test the theory of allowing an AST to enhance the healing capabilities the WHM and SCH already have. If people come back with "It didn't work" then it didn't work and no ones really any worse off.

[Dyvid]

WHM + AST/Diurnal = good
WHM + AST/Noct = Meh but good
SCH + AST/Diurnal = good
SCH + AST/Noct = BAD. SCH is always going to over write Noct because he has a higher cure potency, even with the 5% boost that Noct gives. Also you don't need to save the SCH mp because they don't have mana issues and AST do.

[GideonHighmourn]

Not really seeing how this would be effective or more effective than AST (Diurnal)+SCH. SCH+AST (Noct) is just awful, and in every way inferior to SCHx2 or AST (Diurnal) + SCH. At least in SCHx2, your shields just don't stack; in SCH+AST (Noct), AST's smaller, less effective shields will overwrite SCH's larger, more effective shields. AST (Noct) also bring far less in terms of emergency healing, and with SCH's new abilities, stacking two SCH's really isn't all that awful if you communicate.

The only possible benefit I see is stacking SS and CU, which isn't worth the trade off of constantly wasting healing potential by overwriting shields.

[Yumi_umi]

Imo
Any decent ast with a brain will tell u
- Ast + sch =\= automatic dirunial sect
- ast + whm =\= automatic noct sect
You have to assess party and what instance ur doing.
I go noct always on rav ex as my noct aspected benefic really helps ease off the tank busting moves. Having the sch try to shield before tht buster is like so ur gonna hard cast while party is getting hit with atma linga lol. Also if ppl get burned before prelude to liberation purple aoe, 9/10 times my aspected noct benefic will make them survive.

Also i really like it during bismark ex during p3 add phase as it helps shielding the tank with the 3 adds before the island slam.