Thread: 3.1 : Astrologian "adjustments''

Originally Posted by Ghishlain

I figure I'll just put my two cents on the table since it's talked about so much in these last few pages.

• [*Freecure is what gives WHM the longevity and power that surpasses AST and nothing can take that away from WHM. Anyone advocating Enhanced Benefic should equal Freecure needs to realize if you do that, you're stripping one of the most potent tools available to the WHM repertoire.

Freecure, looking at healing and throughput, ranges from 663 to 884 in mana (either replaces 1.5 cures or 1 Cure 2). Though Freecure (and Enhanced Medica) as a trait somewhat equalises AST's lower manacosts.

But it's fairly obvious Diurnal is in an okay spot. Even if it is behind in practice compared to WHM, it isn't that far. Minor things are the amount of annoyances in card drawing (Getting baited into using Royal Road/Spread, Shuffle giving the same card, cards coming in streaks that are utterly useless, Spire being close to useless) and how healing is in savage. The real problem is WHM + AST still being shunned largely because Nocturnal AST isn't anywhere close near SCH, which makes Nocturnal Sect as useless as Repose in savage. Might as well rename the ability and have it call down a full moon to hit the enemy for 200 potency after 72 hours.

And it makes even less sense since there are way more WHM than either of the other two healers, according to SE's data. So why would you have AST compete with WHM when the SCH side of the equation is in demand, and not the other way around?

Originally Posted by NamoNanamo

Anw, Can we talk about fflogs on this forum ?

It would be like talking about ACT - talk about it at your own discretion.

Originally Posted by AzureFlare

Freecure, looking at healing and throughput, ranges from 663 to 884 in mana (either replaces 1.5 cures or 1 Cure 2). Though Freecure (and Enhanced Medica) as a trait somewhat equalises AST's lower manacosts.

But it's fairly obvious Diurnal is in an okay spot. Even if it is behind in practice compared to WHM, it isn't that far. Minor things are the amount of annoyances in card drawing (Getting baited into using Royal Road/Spread, Shuffle giving the same card, cards coming in streaks that are utterly useless, Spire being close to useless) and how healing is in savage. The real problem is WHM + AST still being shunned largely because Nocturnal AST isn't anywhere close near SCH, which makes Nocturnal Sect as useless as Repose in savage. Might as well rename the ability and have it call down a full moon to hit the enemy for 200 potency after 72 hours.

And it makes even less sense since there are way more WHM than either of the other two healers, according to SE's data. So why would you have AST compete with WHM when the SCH side of the equation is in demand, and not the other way around?

Yeah, I for one am okay with Dirunal sect and I wish more posters would realize they're more equal than they would think. There are certain flaws that push one healer into more favour than the other but the divide isn't the massive gulf that it was when AST was first implemented.

I do agree the issue is adjusting Nocturnal to match SCH. The difficulty is doing this without breaking either job over the barrel. Make Noct too good and everyone won't bother with SCH and there aren't a lot of Noct AST's ATM because the toolkit is just too limited compared to what Diurnal can bring to the table.

They almost need to rework AST entirely. As another poster has indicated in the past - make a healing sect and a buff sect and to add my own comment to this - just forgo trying to have AST match SCH.

[EDIT]

Originally Posted by Lilith_Merquise

Disable is a joke, sure it can help with a massive AoE, but it's right up there with MCH Dismantle.... rarely ever used, and on a CD too long to be considered very effective, the same goes for Virus. It's not a bad ability, just has such a niche use it's hardly worth mentioning.

Diurnal doesn't effect standard spells, it only applies an effect when using Aspected spells, and on top of that Diurnal only gives an increase to attack sped by 5% making your GCD reset faster, but Nocturnal effects potency.... Which is so useless IMO, would much rather it give -5% MP cost.

As for comparing it to Tetra or Bene, I was just going down the list but that is a fair point being that it is more similar to Tetra. But the main point I'm illustrating is that WHM has 2 big cures where as AST has 1.

I agree CU can do more for a party if used right then Asylum, on top of its damage reduction which is great, but the differnce is that you have to plant yourself, where as WHM's can drop and forgt about it, both having their own beneficial use which is why I made it more of a draw, but I would say that I lean more towards CU.

And frankly I don't feel the trait comparison is not fair, what isn't fair is you look at how many of our traits increase potency and decrease timers, but then you look at WHM and SCH, and their traits actually augment the usefulness of prexisting abilities. Sure they have some cast or potency buffs, but AST has far too many of them as opposed to the other healers.

I'm not here to say that we deserve exactly what WHM has or SCH has, I'm again supporting equal but unique, if we can't heal as hard, we should be able to buff harder to reduce the necessity of healing as much. I'm not asking for WHM's traits and abilities, I even listed what I wanted for this class a while back in this thread which doesn't steal from the other 2 classes. The main point was to say "No, AST Will not be replacing a WHM or SCH any time soon"

I can appreciate what you're trying to do in the least. I'm just adding my comments to at least balance the argument because some of your facts are flawed and I wanted to straighten out any misconceptions.

For example, you claim Diurnal only affects the Aspected spells and that's false. Try it right now. Get on AST, and before you activate Diurnal, look to see what your cast and recast time of your spells are. Then activate Diurnal and try again. You'll see that 5% applied to all spells in your repertoire.

In terms of Disable, well, I admit I sometime don't use it often outside of niche things but it has its uses. It's 50% less power reduction than Supervirus at 50% less recast so it balances out, kinda. It's nothing to ride home about but for the sake of your compassion, you should at least include it because you're trying to compare tool kits here and can help reduce the healing requirement of a fight - for example Disable on Splash in A3S is fairly potent as you're reducing the raid damage by 10% for those 6 seconds.

I do agree that the traits are more interesting on WHM than they are on AST. I made a comment a awhile ago that Enhanced Benefic should be affected by Sect you're in and modified as such. For example it should give a HoT effect in Diurnal and either a potency buff or MP reduction in Noct. That could be just one way to make the traits more interesting.

I think AST is better than many give credit to, when comparing Diurnal AST to WHM. Now Nocturnal AST to SCH... well, that's a whole other story.

Originally Posted by Mibgestalt

Pretty much this.
It's supposed to be half and half in terms of competition.

I don't think anyone in this thread has said that AST's healing in Diurnal needs a buff, it's where it needs to be, which is weaker than WHM, but capable of healing encounters. It's just that the card system in general needs an adjustment to reduce the chances of it being useless in any given encounter.

What I hope people understand is that, properly balanced, the benefit from cards and AST's DPS and healing providing DPS opportunities for the off-healer needs to be an equal bit stronger than a WHM's if it's going to have a weaker, more unsafe healing kit. And this is taking into account ALL of the healing kit, not how much raw single target a class can push out.

Raiding is about progressively optimizing and getting better and improving on a given encounter until you beat it, and an unreliable utility kit is pretty much the antithesis of that. An RNG element isn't a bad thing, crits exist, but for something so central to AST's kit, it needs to be an RNG element that is mitigated by player skill and strategy.

As for an AST filling in a SCH spot? Good luck. I don't even know where to start with that, because SCH has so many unmatched strongpoints in their kit compared to Nocturnal. It's not even about the healing.

A flawed argument. It is weaker in aoe scenarios by roughly 4% but stronger single target so to say that white mage is still on top is no longer the case. Duirnal being the goto sect for 99% of content in this game is a flaw that does need to be fixed but buffing nocturnal stance in any shape and form destroys all form of balance in this game. According to the leader board on the reddit forums astrologian job is starting to over take white mages as the main partner with scholars in raids. Do anything to nocturnal stance in form of buffs along with buffing our strong utility any more and you will see the paradigm shift even more.

Before nocturnal can be looked at or anything else the astrologian cannot receive any more pure potency buffs or buffs to the bonuses of duirnal and nocturnal. Alot of things will have to be redone to get the astrologian correct. Putting our potency spells back a bit in duirnal stance will most likely happen to prevent us from making white mage obsolete any more.

^^ Oh I agree no doubt, I'm not here saying that the class is garbage like some make it out to be, and when it comes to roulettes or older content and Extreme fights, I can rock an AST like it's going out of style, even put other healers to shame. But to content that really pushes the limits of a healer and separates the bad players from the skilled like Savage Alex, it just falls short. Diurnal is a great over all stance, and it's most comfortable because it favors AoE and can maintain single cures well, where as Nocturnal is much more pigeon holed for single target curing a tank and maybe mitigating a single wide AoE (great example would be first boss Fractal).

But my big gripe with it is that Nocturnal has such an amazing passive with that buff to healing, but faster attack speed is just sort of lame to me. It would be far better served as -5% MP cost, namely because if you're in Diurnal the intention is that you will b spamming off more AoE cures which cost more then regular cures, so being able to reduce that cost would be extremely beneficial making it not as good as the free whm cures, but still great for the long run in conservation.

What SE needs to do is double down on the buff aspect of AST, the whole reason why AST had weaker healing was in fear of the buffs being too overkill on top of the healing, but it isn't even close. If they are going to give us essentially half of a a healers kit, then they need to make the buffs so strong that they make the lack of healing kit balanced. Buffs so good that the lack of MP efficiency doesn't matter because like WAR as a tank, it pushes phases to balance it's lack of damage mitigation. Like these devs have done this sort of Equal but Unique approach, they're just scared of creating the "RDM" of 14 like it was in 11 that was just dominating the healer game.