What does everyone think about those AST buffs?

[Soyre_Monre]

Deployment Tactics is extremely situational & Fairy heal took a hit. Adlo is not what it used to be.

All healer changes should be tested in raid, in normal content everything is useless/situational exept main heals by how stupidly is ff14 normal content.
Most of healer toolkit exist to be used in raids, and there is where you find a place for situational skill.
Deployment is used for raidbuster like jump/cascade (or the old gigaflares for exaples) and works very well. The things is that it's needed only with low gear and low defence. When you get more more gear you need less mitigation, but skills are important when check are tight and you have to tune everything to survive (someone remember 2.4 T11?).
Yeah, a lot of skill are situational, you have less crit and fairy are slightly weaker than before but over the fight they do a very noticeable difference. The fairy is not as weak as scholar today want to say, it's still heavy healing-wise.
The fact is that Astro now has comparable tools to sch and whm, but having good tool doesn't mean that the other one are bad. Astro is better as raw base healing power and those heals costs less because they miss emergency spells aside dignity, have less mana over the fight and they miss support healing tool like fairy or true raw healing.

Maybe things are not so well balanced as they were in 2.55 and still need a bit of work, but for now there is a lot more sinergy between choices (whm/ast, sch/ast, sch/whm) than before.

[AylmerOfFamfrit]

Quick noob question :

Does Nocturnal Aspected Benefic's shield can crit ? I mean, if you crit do you get a double potency shield like SCH's Adlo ?

It can crit but not with sch's double shield advantage.

[Dalvy]

quoted stuff

mm I meant to say dissipation :S Deployment is very frequently used when I heal.

[Miiu]

It really baffles me how people can claim that AST is now stronger than whm/sch, this is wrong on so many levels. AST still has its core problems but due to higher potencies they're just masked a bit better. AST is still a situational pick.

[KarstenS]

He clearly wanted SCH to remain the job you can't give up for raid, while now AST is maybe a possible substitute.

Maybe in some month, when the content got outgeared enough.

But actually the scholar is not replaceable in most parties.

Its not about the shields. Except the case you really need a shield to survive a mechanic (actually didn't saw it in A1S or A2S [we have not done much there. actually wave 6], they are just quality of life and 2 whitemages would be much more comfortable from healing point.

The reason for scholar needing is nothing else than DPS.

Yes, a whitemage has more burst on single- and grouptargets. The AST btw. not. But when it comes to stance dance and MP management, the scholar leave the others far behind.

We've tested it out last evening and whitemage/ast combination resulted in a huge DPS drop.

[AriaEnia]

80 secs the balance given to a dps will make up for the lack of dps that AST has.
Had a neverreap run last night with only about 16 minutes long (finished the dungeon with the protect duration was on 14m) due to the MNK was given the balance and the arrow on all the boss fights.

[MichiKyou]

Anyday now, Selene will get her buff too.

*looks at sad faerie Selene* one day.

[KarstenS]

It doesn't work on me. I tried to heal the person I synastried and it was only healed by that 20% extra that gives synastry.

You have to take a closer look. Heal and synastry effect pop as separate numbers. These get not merged in the flying text. You have to add them together your own.

80 secs the balance given to a dps will make up for the lack of dps that AST has.

A scholar provide way more damage that a balance could give one dd, even it could run the whole fight. And I'm talking about Raid and not the easy 4 man instances.

[Metterschlingel]

On a WHM / AST Combo, let the WHM DPS with tossing some regens in between and placing asylum, because AST is fine with healing now, regen up is like having a fairy. Apart from A2S, SCH and WHM are doing compareable DPS, but even A2S is clearable with ease without a SCH. All Healer comps are viable now. But can't speak for A4S.

[Lastelli]

Maybe in some month, when the content got outgeared enough.

But actually the scholar is not replaceable in most parties.

Of course I agree. As I've previously written, AST is still weaker than WHM in diurnal and much weaker than SCH in nocturnal. Cards are still unreliable, you can draw spires for all the duration of the encounter, AST dps is a joke, it has no emergency heals, it has only one MP free skill so it struggles more than whm/sch with MP, it has no fairy (when compared to SCH), and only has one (very powerful) healing cd that increases its healing throughput (as opposed to WHM who has 2) and causes a LOT of overhealing. People crying OP should just get good and learn what whm/sch are really capable of...or do us all a favor and level their astro so that they can speak without being ignorant.