AST's weakness in end game

[Ghishlain]

I'm sorry to say that, but your calculations don't make much sense. You're adding theorycraft to something that's situational and you didn't cover some basic things that AST brings to the table, like 10% AoE damage mitigation by using CU, which will also add a very powerful regen and doesn't cost any MP; also, you're ignoring Disable, which reduces damage by 10% and can stack with Virus/cover the damage when SCH's Virus is on cooldowm; you're also assuming that the AST will keep Aspected Benefic up 100% of the time, which is not necessary due to the initial burst healing/lower cooldowm on Essential Dignity, which reduces a lot of the healing burden on AST. And I didn't even mention the fact that any Bole used on the tank/party can reduce damage taken. It was a nice effort, but the playstyle you describe for AST is not that of an AST, it's that of a WHM. If you behave as WHM when playing AST, you'll always lose.
Even for WHM, which uses Cure III a lot in that fight. I don't think the metric you used is good for any conclusion about what you're trying to analyze. But again, nice effort.

Any suggestion on when to use CU and Disable? I could normalize Disable over the course of the fight though you'd obviously want to save it for Cascades if possible. The CU mitigation isn't exactly easy to push into the equation since it disables the AST for a period of time and CU is slightly weaker compared to Asylum (something I also forgot) if you only CU on one tick. I don't think you'd CU more than three ticks per use when I think about it. I can probably normalize Bole (3 draws on MT throughout the course of the fight).

Aspected Benefic is still the most MP efficient spell in the Diurnal's AST toolkit and should be maintained 100% for MP longevity's sake. You'll just need to heal less frequently on occasion because of the added spike it provides. If I don't 100% uptime Aspected Benefic, AST would end up consuming more MP.

Essential Dignity should be included and I'll add that when I get to editting it. Tetragrammaton will balance that but the favour is still towards AST in terms of instant heals.

I intentionally left out Cure III on my analysis though I can probably split it 50/50 just for completions sake tomorrow.

In terms of "behavior", the intent was to see if AST maintains better MP efficiency if it attempts to fulfill the niche WHM does. As soon as you shift your focus away from that, any discussion you have regarding MP efficiency becomes moot because you're pushing some responsibility off from the AST. If you're going to compare MP efficiency, battle conditions need to be exactly the same which unfortunately skews results and on top of that the fight dynamic will change depending on composition. It's also why I'm intentionally ignoring the 3% MND bonus AST may not have if you got AST/SCH composition and that somewhat balances out the lack of mitigation in my math.

Things to note since it was brought up in previous semantics:

-Even though LA + CO gives about as much MP as Assize's free Medica, you can Assize much more frequently than LA (4 Assize for every 3 LAs). which pushes Assize to be more efficient.
-Freecure should still push MP efficiency towards WHM favour. Even though AST spells cost less, AST needs to expend more MP for Benefic II to stay on equal potency footing as WHM.

I'll get to editting sometime tomorrow afternoon and see where the numbers stand then. I still feel WHM has better MP longevity though.

[EDIT] I'll probably end up pushing CU as an AoE heal and Aslyum as 50% AoE 50% Tank heal and use Tetra at 750 Potency (healing tank at 50% HP) when I get to the edit. Bole's will be normalized over the course of the fight (10% for 30s over the course of 3 minutes) and I'll probably add Virus to WHM's mitigation package for physical single target to contrast Disable's AoE damage reduction on Cascade (and normalize AoE damage to suit).

Don't discount so easily - even if we can't build it to be exact due to variables outside of our control, we can still build what I feel is a fair facsimile just to see the end result.