AST's weakness in end game

[TatoRazzino]

Spear is too situational , jesus christ do u even savage as ast?? Or are u one of these forum pricks who want to be that special snow flake and argue it out because u want to be right and wont refuse solid facts??

"Solid facts"? Ok, game on! TL;DR: the Arrow is way more powerful than Selene.

EDIT: There was some miscalculations pointed out by Ghishlain in the original version, so I'm editing it now with his/her adjustments. The problems did not interfere too much with the overall comparison, since it lowered the benefit from both Selene and The Arrow in the same degree, but I don't like to see mistakes in things I write so I decided to redo the whole thing.

Selene, for instance, adds 3% AoE haste for 30s, but the skill has a 60s cooldown, which means that you can only keep it up for about half of the fight. Regular GCD time is 2.5, and even with a lot of skill/spell speed you can only reduce it to around 2.35; take 3% out of that and you have 2.28, which means that Selene reduces a regular GCD by 0.07s. Let's see how this goes for a 30s duration, shall we?

30/2.35 = 12.7 GCDs
30/2.28 = 13.15 GCDs

You basically added a 0.45 GCD total from your Selene buff, which allowed you to squeeze that extra GCD within the 30s treshhold; in the longrun, that’s not too important though, because the buff falls off right after it and by the end of the encounter any GCD delays will be nullified. The only thing that really matters is how many cooldowns the buff adds by the end of the fight. If you manage to use that 10 times in a fight (considering an average of 10 minutes per encounter), the reduction will end up adding 4.45, which is rounded to 4 since having 45% of a GCD to spare is not relevant. Also, this means that you need to use Selene’s buff three times in order to add a complete GCD to anyone’s rotation.

Now let's try it with 5% from an AST AoE Arrow, which reduces the 2.35 to 2.23:

30/2.35 = 12.7 GCDs
30/2.23 = 13.45

A 0.75 GCD difference. If you're lucky and manage to do that 6 times in a fight, you'll end up adding the same 4 complete GCDs Selene added. Also, you only need to do it twice to add a complete GCD, and doing it three times will add 2 complete GCDs.

However, let's not ignore the fact that Attack Speed doesn't work the same way for every job in the game. SMNs, for example, don't need that much attack speed since their burst damage comes from off-GCD skills and their base damage comes from DoTs, which are not affected by attack speed (they're affected by spell speed); adding attack speed to a SMN only makes them burst more Ruins, which is not a big DPS increase. Tanks, Melee DPS and Physical Ranged DPS may have TP problems if you keep haste on them for long, which means that you may get more value from attack speed by concentrating it on the job that benefits the most from it: BLM. Add a 10% Arrow to our calculation and we'll have

30/2.35 = 12.7 CGDs
30/2.11 = 14.22 GCDs

A 1.52 difference, which means that not only we squeezed that extra 13rd GCD in the 30s but we also managed to add a 14th move. Now let's try using Time Dilation and raising that to 45s:

45/2.35 = 19.15
45/2.11 = 21.33

A 2.18 difference. Let's enhance it for 5 more seconds by using Celestial Opposition combined with Time Dilation:

50/2.35 = 21.28
50/2.11 = 23.7

A 2.43 difference. One card with the two combined cooldowns did for a BLM what Selene would require 6 casts to do. And that's not even a card with Royal Road. Let's imagine we could set up an Enhanced Arrow (15%, which generates a 2s GCD) and extended it by 20s with Time Dilation + Celestial Opposition:
50/2.35 = 21.28
50/2 = 25

A 3.72 difference, which is almost the same as Selene can do for a BLM in an entire fight. Setting card openers before the pull is quite simple and if you can set up that combo for the BLM opener, with Ley Lines and all other cooldowns, your BLM’s DPS will be higher than it would be if you only had Selene; and that just with a single card.

If you Draw three regular Arrows in a 10 minute fight (you can Draw 18 cards if you're fast with them, so there’s a high chance you’ll see those three Arrows in a fight), you’ll add 4.56 GCDs to those 3.72 you previously added, result in in a 8.28 GCD increase; 8 more spells for a BLM, which means we could have some extra Fire IVs in the encounter. We've reached the same as what Selene can do for two party members.
If you manage to set up those Arrows we mentioned as Enhanced or Extended Arrows, or if you just use Time Dilation and Celestial Opposition, the benefit you'll get just from buffing your BLM can reach more overall DPS than Selene would while buffing the whole party, without any risk of messing up with TP management.

This is a solid fact that you can test at any time in an actual fight.

So my answer is: no, I'm not a forum prick who want to be that special snow flake and argue it out because I want to be right and refuse solid facts; I just know how to play my job right.