Every time I decide to play Ast, I find a thread that destroys my enthusiasm.

[BunnyHop]

People reactions are based on passing off false information as facts.

I started the "complaints" part of my comment with "My Complaints" and "In my opinion". So I gave my own pov and where I had issues with this class.

It still doesnt give you a good reason to be hostile...


Lastly, what research does need to be done if I already understood Refresh as something that had to do with Enmity reducement??

I understood Benefic and Benefic 2 as Cure and Cure 2 and didn't research it any further. Same applies for LA, I thought that it had only to do with Enmity and didn't research.

Little bit of research goes a long way, especially in a thread where the OP is unsure about AST

I already said that this is my favourite class and I am enjoying every bits of it. I also said that I am determined to make this class work.

Isn't it obvious from those statements already that this class is more than worth to try??

[Velox]

But thank you both for being so hostile though. It sure encourages people to post their own pov on the class.
You both seem to have missed that I enjoy this class the most and it is my main currently.

I am not hostile, my friend, I am merely blunt. I learned a long time ago that if you sugar-coat things, people won't listen. So I just tell things as they are both online and in real life.
I'm merely clearing up misunderstandings. You're fine to have an opinion on something, I'm just making sure you have all the facts. An opinion based off false information is not an opinion at all

I'm glad you're enjoying the job. I play on my cousin's AST all the time in Savage Alex and love the job. Definitely a powerful main healer when coupled with a SCH. I'm sure WHM will get some buffs in coming patches to bring it back up to par with the other two.

[AskaRay]

Remember when HW was brand new and everyone and their mom said things like "Man Bard is awful now and it's destroyed, will never recover" blah blah etc.
You know what I did, as a BRD main?

...kept playing the job I like the most.

TLDR Just play what you want. Unless you're in one of the three, four FC raiding groups that goes for World First clears on Day One you don't have to worry much about party composition.

[416to305]

I think the bad rap that AST got was in the beginning, because back then it WAS bad. Spells were just plain weaker, things like Disable were a joke (seriously, I'm going to predict when an enemy is about to cast something and then hit Disable first like a mind reader!?). All base heals are the same as WHM now, plus you can play in Noc if you want to do shielding (which is how I prefer to play. I enter an instance with another AST and immediately pop into Noc before they can lol). LA is a bit weird in that from what I understand it only reduces new enemity generation, not existing the way the WHM one does, forget if it's Shroud or Divine Seal, haven't played my WHM in awhile. My suggestion if you're having MP issues is when you draw a Ewer card, Spread it and hold onto it just in case for that extra. It also helps to put Ether potions on your hotbar just in case. At first I did have MP issues with AST but they are non-existent now.

Biggest tip I have for you is don't take this forum too too seriously. It's great if you have a specific question you want answered (like what does Refresh mean), but in terms of play style and so on everyone is different and as mentioned, most are referring to Savage content where the smallest things matter.

Remember too you can boost LA with your cards! When you get a Spear that's the best time to pop that on yourself and then LA, or if you have Enhanced or Extended royal roaded and then pop Spear and then LA, it will speed up when you can do LA again big time. You can even pop Celestial Opposition once you have LA up to extend it by 5 seconds more which is something like 1000 more MP for free! I try to always pop a Spear before LA or Collective Unconscious just to get it up quicker. It's the one thing I miss playing SCH, I always want to use a Spear card before popping Aetherflow before remembering there's no way to speed it up lol.

Btw I have 2 bunnies, Mr Worldwide and Hoppity Rabbits are the best!!!!

[TatoRazzino]

I think the bad rap that AST got was in the beginning, because back then it WAS bad. Spells were just plain weaker, things like Disable were a joke (seriously, I'm going to predict when an enemy is about to cast something and then hit Disable first like a mind reader!?).

1) Some AST spells got a 10 potency increase. That's less than 100 HP healed, in case you don't know that, so potency was never an issue for AST and that was stated over and over in the forums. In fact, Diurnal Aspected Helios lost 40 overall potency and the ticks from Collective Unconscious also were reduced from 200 to 150. The only noticeable potency increase was the one applied to Diurnal Aspected Benefic, because people wanted it to look more like Regen (which I believe it wasn't intended when the job was released). If potency was an issue, Nocturnal would have been more popular back then in terms of single target HPS;
2) You weren't supposed to guess when the boss was going to use an attack, you were supposed to use Focus Target and watch it's cast bar to see when the boss was using a buster;
3) AST got a bad reputation because it wasn't being used properly healingwise (so SE made it easier), some spells were too situational and didn't offer a good trade-off (Synastry and Collective Unconscious), and because the card buffs were not as good as they are now (the developers were afraid to release it with more power since that can break the game). Potency and Disable were nowhere near the list of reasons AST was underpowered at launch.

[416to305]

snip

1) All I know is I played AST from the day it was released and gave up around level 51 because I just could not keep up with the damage the tank would be taking in the level 50+ dungeons even though I was using good gear I'd obtained from it when playing it as WHM. Doing the same dungeons as WHM was a breeze. When I came back after 3.1 not even knowing the potency was increased, I was surprised at how much easier it was to play and how it felt like WHM now. I hadn't even touched it in forever, then just did Dusk Vigil and it was completely different. Maybe it was because others were better and the dungeons weren't as new but I actually went online specifically looking to see if they upped the potency because it was like night and day and I knew something must have changed. By the way where did I say that a potency increase to healing spells was the ONLY change they made? I said they increased potency, so spells, cards, whatever. Pick my post apart as much as you want but at the end of the day they improved the class at 3.1 because everyone hated it and since then you literally have to hunt on here to find a "Why AST sucks" post when they were every other one pre 3.1.

2) Do some research, this was revised as everyone on here said the same thing that you couldn't do it while the cast bar was up. One of the first results for "ffxiv disable" on Google (http://ffxiv.gamerescape.com/wiki/Disable) still even says "Reduces the potency of the target's NEXT action by 10%." Whether it always has done it while the cast bar is up is not relevant, do a search on this forum and you'll find tons of people asking the same thing. So even if it wasn't changed, it clearly was confusing as otherwise they wouldn't have changed the tool tip to say "Reduces the potency of the target's ACTIONS by 10%". Note that "next" has been removed. If you're already casting an attack then that's your CURRENT attack not NEXT, hence the confusion and the change.

3) My post was about LA and MP management, with a mention of a couple reasons AST got a bad rap at the start. Obviously the weak cards were there as well, but I'm not going to list 50 different reasons for why people non stop would post here about how bad it was and what made that change when my post was about MP.

[TatoRazzino]

1) All I know is I played AST from the day it was released and gave up around level 51 because I just could not keep up with the damage the tank would be taking in the level 50+ dungeons even though I was using good gear I'd obtained from it when playing it as WHM. Doing the same dungeons as WHM was a breeze. When I came back after 3.1 not even knowing the potency was increased, I was surprised at how much easier it was to play and how it felt like WHM now. I hadn't even touched it in forever, then just did Dusk Vigil and it was completely different. Maybe it was because others were better and the dungeons weren't as new but I actually went online specifically looking to see if they upped the potency because it was like night and day and I knew something must have changed. By the way where did I say that a potency increase to healing spells was the ONLY change they made? I said they increased potency, so spells, cards, whatever. Pick my post apart as much as you want but at the end of the day they improved the class at 3.1 because everyone hated it and since then you literally have to hunt on here to find a "Why AST sucks" post when they were every other one pre 3.1.

2) Do some research, this was revised as everyone on here said the same thing that you couldn't do it while the cast bar was up. One of the first results for "ffxiv disable" on Google (http://ffxiv.gamerescape.com/wiki/Disable) still even says "Reduces the potency of the target's NEXT action by 10%." Whether it always has done it while the cast bar is up is not relevant, do a search on this forum and you'll find tons of people asking the same thing. So even if it wasn't changed, it clearly was confusing as otherwise they wouldn't have changed the tool tip to say "Reduces the potency of the target's ACTIONS by 10%". Note that "next" has been removed. If you're already casting an attack then that's your CURRENT attack not NEXT, hence the confusion and the change.

3) My post was about LA and MP management, with a mention of a couple reasons AST got a bad rap at the start. Obviously the weak cards were there as well, but I'm not going to list 50 different reasons for why people non stop would post here about how bad it was and what made that change when my post was about MP.

This covers what I said about the job not being played properly. People cleared A1S and A2S on week 1 as AST, so not being able to heal Dusk Vigil is on you, not on the job. I did it just fine and so did others. The reason why you couldn't do it back then is because you were behaving as a WHM and believed in the misconception that Diurnal AST is a WHM with cards; it's not, and in end game content this is patent. You're being successful in healing now because SE made adjustments so this difference is not as noticeable in lower level/ilvl content.
Disable falls in the same problem and even Virus won't work if used too late when the cast bar is there. People had timing problems. The skill changed now and it works like Virus. However, it was possible to use it before with skill.

The job was buffed on August/September, not in 3.1. In November there were still threads bashing AST for being bad with the same arguments you used ("I can't heal dungeons"). People said all ASTs were being carried through content, that they were a liability and so on. This stopped when Ghishlain posted a link to an AST solo healing A3S; people still suck at the job, but they lost the nerve to come here to cry about it since it's crystal clear that there's nothing wrong with it. We get an occasional cry baby every now and then, but those threads die quickly now.

[416to305]

This covers what I said about the job not being played properly. People cleared A1S and A2S on week 1 as AST, so not being able to heal Dusk Vigil is on you, not on the job.

Naw actually it doesn't at all quite the opposite but nice try! That's wonderful that hardcore people like yourself that live in the game were able to clear it in week one. It's one thing to be hardcore into the game (as most people on here are based on the specs they throw around like you'd think they invented the game or something), but most people are casual players. So congratulations to the select few that cleared A1S in the first week. That accounts for probably less than 1% of all AST players at that time. You just admitted yourself that since they made the changes all the negative posts have mostly died out, so clearly the changes were needed AND that they fixed the majority of the issues the average player was experiencing.

[TatoRazzino]

1/12/16 - the day in which expecting a healer to watch their MP bar and know how to interpret the tooltip became an elitist practice. Let us all remember that in the future.

[VanilleFang]

No body is saying you can't use it or that it is a bad idea. If I am right about which thread(s) you are referring to.. they are just discussions and nit-picking. No one is saying AST is useless or unusuable, just that it is lacking in some aspects (mostly compared to SCH).