Astrologian IMO

[Kayleen]

Alright.. I feel like ive played enough of AST to finally put in my 2 cents... Here goes!

First off, ive cleared A1s twice now, I have roughly 7 years of hardcore/endgame raiding experience as a healer in numerous games such as WoW, Rift, DDO, FFXIV etc..
I pride myself on clearing most if not all endgame content and therefore consider myself an above average healer if not a great healer. These are my opinions! not saying everyone must feel the same.. but hopefully this data will make it to SE.

Like most healers who play this game, I was extremely excited when they announced and released the AST class. On launch I was up at 3 in the morning to log on and power level what I thought would be my new "main" in this expansion.
Once I got AST to 50 I started to notice some concerning issues however I pressed on and managed to reach 60. For the purpose of this "review" I'm mainly going to be using A1S as an example.

Here are AST's biggest flaws in my honest opinion.

-The class is designed as half whm & half sch. However half of the class is unplayable in progression. Yes i'm talking about Nocturnal. The potency increase from it does not make up for the loss of the regens from Diurnal and the bubbles are absolutely abysmal. I found myself burning through mp that much quicker in this sect, trying to get bubbles up before each raid wide hit.

-The lack of healing/mitigation cooldowns makes it almost impossible to recover from a mistake and it puts an insane amount of strain on your co healer to get people topped off before and after massive blows. Getting tanks topped off before tank busters and keeping prey targets alive as well as tanks. (Synastry is convenient to help with Prey but not nearly enough to make it reliable).

-Cards & MP... Where do I start with these... In theory I love the card idea. On fights like BisEX and RavEX I found myself using cards to buff the party and even though they werent AMAZING, every little bit did help.
However... In A1S that's a whole different story. MP is a huge limitation on what this class can potentially do and in a fight like AS1 I found myself using cards solely on myself. (ie a potency increased Ewer to help me not go oom by the first jump).
Even with the help of buffed up Ewers and extending my LA with CO.. It still wasnt enough cast to helios or aspected helios more than a handful of times. Cards take a huge amount of time and planning to get set up to be used optimally... and the payout is just not worth it.

Due to concerns I had about the class prior to Normal Alex being released, I decided to level up SCH as a plan B.
My static and I obviously proceeded to clear A1-3 normal with minimal effort with me as AST. Once we reached A4 even though healing wasnt the reason we were wiping it certainly was not helping. (We kept losing people in the last phase whether it was due to orbs or just raid damage. I'm not if it's relevant but my co healer was a whm and I was in diurnal).
Out of curiosity I decided to try one pull as sch... and this ladies and gents is when I realized just how awful AST is. Needless to say we killed it immediately after I switched.

From that point on I put AST up on a shelf. All was fine and dandy for the next 3 weeks. I wasnt looking back..
I got my first AS1 clear on my SCH. I had no intentions of picking up AST again until balances were made. Unfortunately due to a series of events my static fell apart.
I decided to trial for a new static as an AST since they already had a SCH.
Last night was my first night of trialling...
Id like to think I came prepared. I had re-educated myself with the recent changes to AST cards, lightspeed etc.. I watched a couple AS1 kill videos from an AST pov. I ran a few A1-4 to get comfortable again with my keybinds.
I was nervous about raid.. but I was confident that I would be able to pull through and that this group was competent enough to make AST work. Boy was I wrong...

NEVER in all 7 years of raiding.. have I felt such defeat. (note I was using HQ pots and food)

Pull 1, I attempted to solo heal up until split so that the sch could dps. With the help up her faerie (granted she was using Selene) I still wasnt able to keep everyone alive.

Pull 2, She attempted to solo heal up until split while I dps'd. This was a huge improvement but due to the fact she was receiving no additional help from me it was too inconsistent and we'd occasionally lose someone to prey or a tank.
At this point we were probably 35 minutes into our raid night and we had only seen phase 2 a handful of times. We both decided this strat wasnt working and we'd simply both have to heal in p1 and hope our dps was high enough for enrage.
This worked well and we consistently got to p2.

Now for anyone who's done this fight you know that p2 consists of raid wide damage followed by prey followed by tank buster.
I originally thought id be able to keep my designated tank and prey target alive with Synastry. This unfortunately doesnt work if I get prey... and it's hard enough keeping one person (ie the tank) topped off that when prey was introduced... it was just too much.

So the sch and I went back to the drawing board and decided that she would focus on both preys + the raid.. and my job would be to keep both tanks alive and help out if I could on raid. So once again we made slight progress and got through prey easier but still wouldnt make it past the first jump consistently. Both of us were burning through our mp trying to keep up... it was just a disaster. We kept pulling and kept trying until our first 90mins timer ran out.... so naturally I decided that running with 2 schs would still be better than what I was providing on AST.. so I switched and we saw 10% on our first pull. 1% a couple of pulls later and then finally,
roughly 4 pulls later the boss fell over with both healers over 85% mp and no deaths.

I passed my trial and we'll be running two schs instead of sch/ast.
Based on my hour and a half of attempts on AS2 (we got to wave 8) i'm confident AST will have a much easier time with this one as the healing requirement isnt nearly as high. That being said the lack of healer dps might still be an issue.

The verdict of this post is that AST can infact do 90% of the games content with relative ease. (I got my BisEX and RavEX clears/farms as an AST) Yes they can even clear savage.. but compared to both other healers they fall short. I'm a raider who wants to bring as much as I can to the table.. I want to make the lives of the 7 other people as enjoyable as possible... There's no doubt in my mind we would have eventually cleared AS1 with AST/SCH... but it just wasnt worth the headache.
AST has the most amazing spell visuals, weapon model and their artifact gear is yet another reason all of this is so incredibly disappointing.

So If you managed to get to the end of this massive wall of text.. thank you for taking the time and I hope ive shed a little more light on what's going on with this class.