What does everyone think about those AST buffs?

[RichardButte]

I came here to say something similar to this. After playing ast all day yesterday, my final opinion is that whm/sch are still better, but ast is damn close now. The only thing holding ast back from being exactly on par with the others is their rng/overall dps output (and group mnd bonus). I know I mentioned rng earlier and it seemed I was the unpopular opinion, but it's really true. Sch can fey wind and SS, and keep those buffs up consistently on CD while dpsing. Ast has to rely on luck, which may cause them to never even pull an arrow/balance, and this really is an issue.

I know others in the thread liked to say I'm shit at the class if I can't adapt to the cards I draw. Well not only is that not true, but it's completely missing the point. If you're on a raid boss, and that said raid boss is a dps check, why would your raid bring a class that might boost dps well, but also might not at all? Well, they wouldn't. They would bring the ones that can consistently bring higher dps. And atm that's whm and sch combo. Since the whm/sch combo can still heal better overall than ast/anything combos too, that still leaves ast on the sidelines for any group that's min/maxing in progression.

With that said, I'm not saying the sky is falling for ast, or that it's a joke and will never get used. These buffs made ast a good class. It's just that any group that says "we should take the classes that are best suited for the job" will rarely ever pick ast until they either remove the rng aspect, or somehow make the cards more homogeneous (which I would hate to see the latter).

Having played a ton of SCH and AST, I must agree.

SCH has so much mana to burn that DPSing come easily, and effectively, thanks to Bane and two AoE DoTs. My experience has been that, if I DPS on my AST, there's a very, VERY real chance of being punished for doing so if anything goes wrong and a lot of healing is suddenly needed.

If the cards are good, the run afoul of the overall design... if they are poor... then they are useless.

There's a risk v. reward element in the AST's playstyle. The healing potency should ideally be ~80-90% of that of a SCH/WHM, with the cards occasionally making up the difference for that last 20%, even pushing the AST's effectiveness into 110%, but RNG balances it.

The buffs need to not be crap, and they're finally about where they should be. Giving a tank 1 minute of 10% damage reduc or the whole party 30 sec of 5% damage increase is VERY significant and might actually be able to give the AST its own "meta", that being where you win by keeping the party alive until the end of the encounter by bringing about an end to the encounter more quickly.

SCH and WHM may still be better for this, though, as AST's ailing mana means that it still generally lacks its own real DPS output while I know for a fact that SCH at least can drop those deeps without much issue.