Please do not nerf Astrologian instead buff WHM/SCH

[loreleidiangelo]

snipperooni

This is a pretty big wall to respond to, so my solution is to respond with an equally as long wall because I just can't shut up when prompted:


1.) I don't care if you've had a streak of bad RNG where you never see a single Balance, there are plenty of ASTs that are seeing plenty of Balances in the content that they do, and this is reflected on things like FFLogs everywhere. There is a 16% chance to draw it outright, then a 20% chance to draw it after that, THEN a chance you can STILL get it if you're willing to sack Sleeve Draw at level 70. I assure you, Astrologians are not struggling to AOE Balance nearly as much as you're trying to claim. Consider that it takes at least 60 seconds to set up, but LASTS for a whopping 30. (40 if you blow Celestial Opposition every 2 minutes.) We'll be generous and assume it takes you that two minutes to set up AOE B - that's 40 seconds of 10% AOE DPS uptime out of two minutes - or 33% uptime. And from personal experience, that's being pretty generous - I'd say I can set up an AOE Balance reliably every 1.5 minutes on average now that Spread works better and Redraw is on the same cooldown timer as Draw. Ninja's Trick Attack, which was used as a comparison earlier in this thread, is 10 seconds every 60, or 16.67% uptime, and Trick Attack is already being discussed by the DPS community as a fundamentally problematic skill that makes Ninja a highly desirable DPS choice for raids.

I think a lot of people are falsely conflating me disliking Balance with me wanting to ruin the card system as a whole, and that's not the case. I'm just tired of Balance being the only desired card in my deck, and I think the community's general response and reaction to it should be a CLEAR indicator that the skill is not well-designed in regards to the rest of AST's kit. I'd love to see cards like Bole, Arrow, Spear see more use, instead of just being Royal Road or Minor Arcana fodder. Sure, we COULD try to buff those cards to ridiculous values to make them "as good as" Balance, which is what people in this thread seem to think is the solution to everything, but that's just not fundamentally possible by design (except with the exception of Arrow, obviously, which could be buffed to be a bigger DPS increase than Balance at the cost of TP/MP hits). As you said, all the community GAFs about is DPS increases, so the best way unfortunately to make the other cards have value is to make NONE of them DPS increases.

The kneejerk reaction to this suggestion seems to be, "but then no one would take an AST to raid anymore", but that just doesn't make sense to me. SCH and WHM didn't have DPS increases in 3.0 and yet they were taken over AST - AST had lackluster healing and Balance wasn't as easy to get in 3.0 as it is now (2 minute Shuffle cooldown lmao and it could still give you the same garbage card you were trying to get rid of). AST now has similar healing, BUT AOE Balance is also insanely easy to get, so my suggestion is pretty much to either nerf their healing again (hard to tune) or just get rid of Balance so that all three healers pretty much heal the same (theoretically; SCH isn't doing so hot right now and definitely needs buffs) but none of them bring a 10% raid-wide DPS increase anymore either.

I'm not really sure why I'm bothering explaining my position, tbh. I'll never get clingy AST mains to agree that their favorite toy needs to be taken away. At this point I'm just gonna wait and see what the developers decide is the best choice of action - if they feel like my OP ez mode class is fine the way it is, I certainly won't complain haha.

2.) In regards to a rework, I want the devs to keep the card system (aside from Balance's ironic broken-ness, I think the cards are pretty well-designed overall and the interactivity and fluidity of using them is great) but scrap the stupid hybrid "can be a SCH or a WHM" healing system and give ASTs something new. I could type a whole diatribe on what could be done (and have in other threads in the healer subforum, in fact), but I won't make this post any longer than it is by going into at length here. But the short of it is that I think AST being able to slot into the WHM or SCH spot, with all of their inherent strengths BUT a massively OP raid utility that the other healers can't emulate (without basically giving them a raid-wide 10% DPS increase cooldown) is a serious design flaw and should be rectified ASAP. AST SHOULD have drawbacks, possibly more drawbacks than WHM or SCH have, because of their super-good card utility. I DON'T think the solution is to give all the healers "similar raid utility" because short of homogenization nothing can really compare to AOE Balance, and if it can than we're looking at some pretty awful power creep overall that I don't think this game needs. I think AST should just have more defined weaknesses as an actual healer (NOT just talking about straight potency nerfs a la 3.0 AST), and the easiest way to give it those weaknesses is to have it heal in some way that isn't a "WHM or SCH" way.

There are a lot of possible healing avenues that haven't really been explored yet, and it's been a pretty big disappointment of mine that AST was created to basically copy two healing avenues we'd already trodden, rather than shirking the trend and trying to be something new. Time/space just SCREAMED "HoT-based healer!!!111" to me, but with that spot being bizarrely given to WHM instead of WHM being a bursty mana-hungry healer like I envisioned from old-school FF games, the devs probably would have had to try something different. Still, just about anything would have sufficed, and hopefully have made AST different enough where their strengths would be better suited to some encounters while WHM and SCH strengths would be better suited to others. Right now I'd actually argue that all three healers have such similar throughput (or did pre-4.0 at least) that it's so easy to compare them and see which ones just plain aren't cutting it when it comes time to form up for raids.

Compared to my ideas of nerfing Balance though, I actually think a lot of people playing healers at the top ends of play are in favor of AST being completely re-done at this point. Similar suggestions have gained decent traction both in the healer subforum here and on the FFXIV Reddit. Those obviously aren't the be-all/end-all of the playerbase, but I just thought I'd put it out there that AST's hybrid design doesn't seem to be as well-liked or conceptualized as people might think. It's also a nightmare to balance, for what it's worth, and we've been seeing the endless tug-of-war in relation to that since 3.0.



EDIT: Upon further reading, I realize that a lot of my phrasing is pretty harsh, and I apologize, since that wasn't my intention. I just get a little frustrated at the illogical approach of "buff everything! nerf nothing!" because in a development environment that's just not feasible, I'm sorry to say. I can't say I AGREE with Square's nerfs to SCH this expac, but I can respect and understand that they probably NEEDED a few donks with the bat for balance's sake. I think that AST if nothing else didn't need the ridiculous buffs it got, but now that they're here I can only reasonably suggest that they get tweaked in other areas too. Tbh, I think 3.2 AST was a pretty solid case of balance (except with Nocturnal Sect), but for some reason the dev team just took it a step farther and I just don't even.