WHM new skill ideas!

[Assirra]

To be fair, I wouldn't be surprised if those buffs get entirely reworked a second time come Stormblood. My working theory has always been the buffs to Astro were never intended to be a permanent fixture, but a means of incentivizing people to give it a try. Frankly, I hope they focus more on de-homogenizing jobs. By supplying White Mage with a slew of new mitigation tools, they effective make it a slightly varied Scholar or Astro. It's among the reasons I advocate Monk getting a flat potency increase over utility buffs. Let them all have a somewhat unique niche.

On that note, they could actually weaken Astro's healing. The idea being a Scholar/Astro comp can handle healing, but will severely struggle-- perhaps even forcing the use of properly timed Mantra, Second Wind and other DPS self heals. Comparatively, bringing a White Mage will ease healing considerably, but you'll give up the DPS and mitigation buffs. That is more the direction I want to see them go. It gives each job a proper identity.

That is what they started with and it failed spectaculary.
A healer is worth nothing if he/she can't heal right.

[Rennies]

That is what they started with and it failed spectaculary.
A healer is worth nothing if he/she can't heal right.

Exactly. Healers should all be equally powerful at their role, and have unique powers to separate from each other.

[Tint]

That is what they started with and it failed spectaculary.
A healer is worth nothing if he/she can't heal right.

healing potency of AST was fine all the time. the increased potency leads to nothing more than more healer dps uptime. the problem was the utility AST offered was not good enough at release to compensate for the lower healing / dps uptime. today we have 2 healers in raid, one almost all the time in cleric, one most time healing, some cleric uptime. but why? because tight dps checks have made it necessary in alex savage. so they had to buff AST healing for more dps uptime. that's a DD problem, not a healer problem, but instead of fixing the DD problem they have destroyed the healer meta, because they have followed the community with their healer-dps obsession.

AST was not bad because of lower healing. AST was bad because lower healing leads to lower party-dps.
so... should they really balance healers around dps? but that's on you community: you have established the healer-dps meta.

[Assirra]

healing potency of AST was fine all the time. the increased potency leads to nothing more than more healer dps uptime. the problem was the utility AST offered was not good enough at release to compensate for the lower healing / dps uptime. today we have 2 healers in raid, one almost all the time in cleric, one most time healing, some cleric uptime. but why? because tight dps checks have made it necessary in alex savage. so they had to buff AST healing for more dps uptime. that's a DD problem, not a healer problem, but instead of fixing the DD problem they have destroyed the healer meta, because they have followed the community with their healer-dps obsession.

AST was not bad because of lower healing. AST was bad because lower healing leads to lower party-dps.
so... should they really balance healers around dps? but that's on you community: you have established the healer-dps meta.

They were bad for numerous things actually.
Low healing (they had lower potency on their standard heals), cards barely did anything, and all around a worse healing toolkit compared to the other 2.
The issue was not raids or savage or something. The issue was that even in "standard" content AST was struggling with the damage where you cannot have someone else working harder cause you have worse healing. hence they got buffed.

[technole]

They were bad for numerous things actually.
Low healing (they had lower potency on their standard heals), cards barely did anything, and all around a worse healing toolkit compared to the other 2.
The issue was not raids or savage or something. The issue was that even in "standard" content AST was struggling with the damage where you cannot have someone else working harder cause you have worse healing. hence they got buffed.

Diurnal was fine was after the first Gordias buff to bring pure healing potencies up, and it hadn't changed ever since. Gear certainly helped over time though with having higher MP pools. Aether and aggro management got buffed for Midas and at that point it was already ahead of White Mage in MP refresh. It's been Noct, card buff QoL since then.

So from a healing standpoint it had been fine for awhile in Diurnal. I still remember players like myself and Staris getting slammed in this forum by White Mages telling us how of a crutch we were in Gordias Savage. That our SCHs was probably doing more work, etc. Of course they hadn't had the AST experience on the floor themselves and we were clearing A1S-A3S weekly at the time. Melee appreciated spire cards in A2S, and A3S any damage increase with balance and arrow was like a godsend. Staris went on to be our server first A4S and they were AST/SCH.

[Ghishlain]

Diurnal was fine was after the first Gordias buff to bring pure healing potencies up, and it hadn't changed ever since. Gear certainly helped over time though with having higher MP pools. Aether and aggro management got buffed for Midas and at that point it was already ahead of White Mage in MP refresh. It's been Noct, card buff QoL since then.

So from a healing standpoint it had been fine for awhile in Diurnal. I still remember players like myself and Staris getting slammed in this forum by White Mages telling us how of a crutch we were in Gordias Savage. That our SCHs was probably doing more work, etc. Of course they hadn't had the AST experience on the floor themselves and we were clearing A1S-A3S weekly at the time. Melee appreciated spire cards in A2S, and A3S any damage increase with balance and arrow was like a godsend. Staris went on to be our server first A4S and they were AST/SCH.

I will admit I was one of those people in the 3.0 era that indicated AST, was pretty weak compared to their WHM within the same boundaries. Not to say it won't work but it certainly felt like a lot more effort than necessary too.

With the 3.07 I changed my tune since I felt that put AST in a good spot. I did feel it was weaker than WHM but not weak to the point where it would be a hindrance like it was at 3.0 inception. I've been fairly disappointed in how S-E's been heavy handing the AST buffs since then. While enmity was certainly a concern I never felt it was justified to give AST the MP tools it has to this day. Ah well, that's how the cookie crumbles too.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

That is what they started with and it failed spectaculary.
A healer is worth nothing if he/she can't heal right.

As others have said, Astro was ill-favoured because its support structure was garbage at release. Nonetheless, the devs need to come up with some sort of niche, otherwise we'll either see White Mage fade into obscurity or all the healers homogenized to basically do the same thing except with slightly varied effects.

No need to nerf AST when it's on par with SCH. Just fix WHM's MP costs, it's the outlier in healer balance at the moment.

Ironically, that could actually bump Scholar out of the meta. Astro's buffs are far too valuable to lose and the only reason White Mage doesn't out parse Scholar is MP management efficiency or lack thereof. If that's rectified, then what reason would people have not to default to WHM/AST?