AST Sect Theory

[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?

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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?