Thread: 3.4 Healer Rebalancing Thread

Some of these sound like sensible suggestions to me.

20% Bole is the only way to make it a desirable card. Right now, Bole is for all intents and purposes a bad card with a meh RR effect, and a DPS loss every time it's being drawn. AoE Bole is as negligible as Rend Mind in terms of mitigation. It's not absolutely terrible but it hardly makes a difference, and AST's cards need to make a difference. 20% makes a lot of sense for a healer that should have a wide array of mitigation tools on top of its healing. I'd also take 10% mitigation + 10% healing/shields received to mix it up a little bit.

Honestly, being able to swap sects midfight would only serve to strenghten WHM + AST (and WHM as a result) as the barriers don't stack with Galvanize. Having a second set of HoTs available might be a good enough incentive to run WHM + AST as an alternative to WHM + SCH, which is what pretty much everyone wants. At worst it'd make AST the go to solo heal job when barriers are required but is it really a bad thing? Especially when current fights are mostly tuned around two healers and when we'll be on the last leg of 3.x so the devs will have a lot of control over balance.

Lastly, Collective probably needs to be reworked but I don't see it happening before 4.0. It's the only channeled ability in the game, yet it's on a long cooldown (vs Soil that has a much shorter cooldown and is much more lenient in terms of positioning at the cost of an Aetherflow). It's decent for current content but pretty bland and being a channeled skill is unwarranted for what it does vs its analogue skills.
In other MMOs, channeled abilities are usually spells that drain your resource as long as they're being channeled. It would be pretty cool if Collective was a toggled skill that slowly drained your MP over time. It'd still require strict positioning and channeling but essentially being on-demand would largely make up for it. They'd need to re-tune its HoT effect so that it doesn't completely replace the Helios line but that'd make it a definitive staple of AST's kit.

To everyone complaining about AST being "too strong" with suggested buffs: wake up. It's still the least used healing job by a pretty large margin despite being very much loved by the community. It's a combination of residual stigma, still not being strong enough in one of the healer combinations, while not bringing a lot of uniqueness to the table and they need to work around this. 3.4 is their last chance before 4.0 hits and it's already been one year since the job has been released. If they're feeling lazy they can just add a ton of AOE Darkness damage every minute in the last tier of Alexander but that's not what I want from them.

From what I've read over the JP forums they're also taking and considering feedback about Benefic II's proc, which is largely worthless.