balance through Balance

[Ilenya]

u all confusing potency with ast....

DIURNAL SECT (regen stance)
200 potency on aspect benefic

NOCTURNAL SECT (shield stance)
140 potency on aspect benefic

Do all of us a favor. Take a picture of the tool tip and post it, please. Actually, if anyone could, that would be great.

[NamoNanamo]

Do all of us a favor. Take a picture of the tool tip and post it, please. Actually, if anyone could, that would be great.

[IMG][/IMG]
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[MsTanya]

The 140 potency is for the regen effect in diurnal. The base heal is 200 potency in both sects. Please learn your tooltips and thank you Namo for screencapping it.

[Ghishlain]

@Yhisa - While I can appreciate your passion for the job as you have shown in the past back in the 3.0 days, you should really brush up on what has changed and try not to spread incorrect information. (ie. Aspected Benefic only healing for 140 potency, Nocturnal only giving 10% healing bonus)

[edit] oops, beaten, heh.

[WayofTime]

Stepping back from the numbers for heals...

I think that changing The Balance so that it is 10% or 15% instead of 20% would be a good idea. Should it be removed? No. Is it the central identity of the class? Also no, it's the cards that are the central identity. If you remove The Balance, you need to replace it with another effect. Honestly, I am not sure where people are coming from when they say that The Balance should be removed.

If we have a 10% Balance, then we can safely use The Arrow as a useful card (compared to fishing for Balances). At this potency, they'd have roughly the same effect. I'd argue that, barring TP and MP issues, Arrow would be better situationally because it means you can both buff healing at the same time as well as fit more GCDs into the same attack window. Heck, I'd argue that the values for The Arrow and The Balance could be swapped. Mainly because The Arrow with a high attack speed potency would cause TP/MP issues unless your party comp has good self-sustain.

So yeah, 10%-15% Balance would be something I would be willing to have as an Astrologian main.

Edit: If they wanted to make an interesting effect, they could make a card that would instead increase the healing potency of all healing magic cast by the target, or maybe cast on the target. Would be a nice pairing if we wanted, say, an AST/(WHM or SCH) party, where the AST could directly increase the healing potency of the mage with stronger healing spells. That said, it would also be highly situational, but I feel I'd prefer that over The Spear.

[MoroMurasaki]

Stepping back from the numbers for heals...

If we have a 10% Balance, then we can safely use The Arrow as a useful card (compared to fishing for Balances). At this potency, they'd have roughly the same effect. I'd argue that, barring TP and MP issues, Arrow would be better situationally because it means you can both buff healing at the same time as well as fit more GCDs into the same attack window. Heck, I'd argue that the values for The Arrow and The Balance could be swapped. Mainly because The Arrow with a high attack speed potency would cause TP/MP issues unless your party comp has good self-sustain

Thank you for getting back on topic!

I love all these ideas. Personally I don't think 15% from 20% is enough, it really needs to be reduced to 10% at most. Basically the damage gained by Balance would need to be something that a strong player of another healing class could conceivably output on top of that AST's personal DPS.

The end result of this conversation is basically summed up in a few points.

All healers must be able to heal all content with all party compositions assuming sufficent player skill.

AST is just as (if not more in terms of their comparison to SCH) capable of healing anything in the game right now.

AST brings the most DPS to the table with Balance, more at this point than either other healer could generate even with max DPS uptime.

AST can perform the same essential function that WHM/SCH do but then has this buff ON TOP OF THAT.

There is no change necessary to the rest of AST's kit at this point. If they're having trouble healing without the quicker clears brought on by Balance then tune their kits up but I don't think that should be necessary aside from perhaps some care around their MP management. Either way the changes need to start at Balance.

Edit: I want to play AST. I am leveling it right now. The thing that keeps me from fully enjoying myself is the idea that I am just keeping everyone up while fishing for Balance. I want to use the whole kit and I don't want to feel like a poor player just because RNG didn't give me my one viable card.

[MintnHoney]

one viable card.

I assume avoiding this feeling is the reason why they removed the AST cards from player view.
Honestly, I've never felt this pressure. I've only received one complaint, and it was from a DPS who was unhappy that I hadn't used a card on him specifically (it was a series of ewers, spears, and a single bole that run).
I believe that, if you're just fishing for the Balance, you're wasting your party's potential, and you're failing to perform a function that an Astrologian can perform really well: helping jobs feel special. Especially as of this expansion, each job has a card or two that's really useful to them. For Samurai, it's the Balance. For Bards, the Arrow (shocking, right?). For Summoners, the Spear (surprise, Bahamut likes these).
I would say, just try to emphasize each job's individuality, and avoid thinking only about "efficiency," because, in the end, DPS is not supposed to need you to succeed anyway.

[Caduagm]

They ARE NOT nerfing balance, otherwise it would be gordias/midas again; where nobody used AST. For God's sake stop trying to take our identity off from us. Stop afking as healer and dps a bit as whm. AST rotation was NERFED TO THE GROUND and it's the most boring rotation of all the 3 healers. So pls... Can this topic be closed now?

[Ilenya]

They ARE NOT nerfing balance, otherwise it would be gordias/midas again; where nobody used AST. For God's sake stop trying to take our identity off from us. Stop faking as healer and dps a bit as whm. AST rotation was NERFED TO THE GROUND and it's the most boring rotation of all the 3 healers. So pls... Can this topic be closed now?

If Balance is the only thing that makes people want to bring AST, then AST by definition is not balanced and would need to be adjusted, so Balance would have to be nerfed to even out the power of the job.

[loreleidiangelo]

If Balance is the only thing that makes people want to bring AST, then AST by definition is not balanced and would need to be adjusted, so Balance would have to be nerfed to even out the power of the job.

It's like people forget that Astrologian had an entire history of issues that made it undesirable for raids, and not just "omg we couldn't get Balance a lot so that makes our state now completely justified". To wit, the problems with 3.0 AST were as follows:

-Noct Sect was garbage, and could in no way compete with SCH. I'd argue that it was because SCH was also a little OP and needed some nerfs, but some might say it was just that Noct Sect needed a buff. Either way, upon AST's inception it was a terrible stance that pretty much no one used except out of dual AST parties in DF where one had to begrudgingly take it because AST regens didn't stack.

-Initial heal potencies were about 20 lower across the board. Their MP costs were lower to compensate, and truth be told I never actually felt like the BASE heal potencies were an issue, but this really stuck in people's craw for some reason and led to a perception of the job being weak. (I think had they kept the base heals the same and fixed some of the other issues below they probably would have been fine. Just me, though.)

-They didn't have a throughput cooldown. Seriously, do people forget about this? They didn't have a 30% healing throughput increase like Divine Seal or Fey Illumination at their launch, which meant they really lacked healing "oomph" in cases where their cohealer or party weren't up to par.

-Lightspeed used to reduce the potency of healing magic too. Somebody at SE goofed HARD on that. IIRC it was one of the first aspects of AST that was adjusted.

-Balance was only 10% potency and lasted for 15 seconds. Now before you go, "aha! see! balance HAS to be OP or else we're useless!" bear in mind that this was ALSO in conjunction with the rest of the AST issues I listed above. There are a few other caveats to the card system too which I'll list below that made obtaining and using AOE Balance pretty difficult, if not nigh on impossible for AST at first. So in my opinion the actual STRENGTH of the Balance card wasn't an issue, but its infrequency and AST's lackluster performance in the healing department really didn't make that 5% extra DPS boost worth it for most raid groups. (And since those issues are clearly fixed now, THAT is why I think Balance needs a reduction in its power once more, if not just taken out completely.)

-Shuffle was on a 120 second cooldown, and could give you the SAME card you were trying to get rid of. Compare it to now, where it's basically on the same cooldown as Draw and won't give you the same card anymore (and was hence renamed "Redraw" to reflect that). This gives you essentially a 20% chance of drawing Balance now if you didn't get it on you first draw. It also allows you to SUPER easily get a Spire or Ewer for the AOE Royal Road effect (40% chance to get either of those if you don't get one on the first draw).

-Spread was on a 180 second cooldown. So once you had that almighty Balance, and used it, if you drew another one right after you had to use it on single target. Obviously it was better than getting jack squat, or endless Spears, but you couldn't reliably chain AOE Balance back-to-back like it's theoretically possible to do now. Spread is now on a thirty-second cooldown like Draw, so once you use your Balance from Spread by the time Draw is up again (assuming you drew right as you used the Balance AOE), then you can instantly store another one with a very minor (we're talking 1 second here) delay.

-Collective Unconscious only gave the 10% damage down in Nocturnal, and the regen in Diurnal. Not 100% sure on this but I think the regen was wussier too. So on top of it being stupidly restrictive with the no-movement nonsense, it also didn't do anything special that Asylum or Sacred Soil couldn't do (with less drawbacks). The regen would also cancel when you canceled the Collective effect, so that was a further kick in the teeth.


It's all that COMPOUND crap that made ASTs an undesirable choice for raiding during Gordias, not just the weaker strength of the Balance card at their launch. SE in their infinite wisdom took the buff bat and pretty much launched all of those issues into the stratosphere, INCLUDING buffing the hell out of Balance (now it's 20% damage up and lasts for THIRTY SECONDS WTF), as well as buffing Lumi Aether so that it was miles ahead of Shroud of Saints and upping their base heal potencies to be equal of that of WHM/SCH. Fixing a FEW of the issues (mostly the card stuff and Lightspeed/healing throughput cooldown) would have been enough to make them competitive IMO, but they went completely overboard and now that people are so used to AST's ridiculous ease of use and power the idea of nerfs makes them extremely uncomfortable for whatever reason, instead of determined to increase their personal ability and deal with any adjustments that might come.