Possible AST nerf

[Aerowaffle]

Still the matter of nocturnal sect shields > SCH shields that bothers me to no end.

It bothers me too, but I'm willing to try out these changes to see if I like the direction SE is trying to lead us.

SCH might have to give up the title of being "shield healer" and instead be the "emergency healer". Every 45sec (consistently now thank god) we will have 3 charges of AF with really good abilities that use them OGCD. SCH will be the best capable healer of reacting to unexpected damage and expected tank busters with these AF ability buffs. At least until we run out of AF before the CD on the refill is up.

[Volsung]

...
Still the matter of nocturnal sect shields > SCH shields that bothers me to no end. ...

I feel the same way, I was SCH main before HW, and then was AST main. (I wanted corsair card buffs but its a lot different)

I think this is largely steeped in what SE tried to do with the new three jobs. They were all meshes of older jobs. Machinist was a mirror to bard. DRK had a mix of pld and drk. AST could either do hots or shields(but not both at once) like whm and sch. However SE seem to have a hard time balancing them, because in their most basic of places, they all need to heal about the same, and offer other stuff. So SE gave AST better shields because sch offered fairy... but at the same time, they nerfed fairy and increased SCH mp costs on said shield spells. It looks like a kick in scholars face instead of balancing the healing output.

I haven't touched SCH yet in SB, I'm hoping SE can change that But I think much of the problem stems from how the 3 HW jobs were envisioned at launch.

I would have much prefered a new type of healing, more like earthly star or reactive heals, or special types of heals opening when drawing cards etc.

[PharisHanasaki]

AST has COPIES of other healer's basic tools, but better in multiple cases, AND brings buffs to the party neither healer competes with at all. If you don't see a problem, you might be blind. This is ironically the problem they wanted to avoid when AST came out in 3.0 which is why AST potencies were lower across the board back then.

Oh, but I wasn't talking about potencies, or buffs or anything of the sort. The post I quoted talked about stances and how it was weird for AST to have a WHM stance and a SCH stance. DESIGN wise I don't see the problem. Then again, it could have been completely different, but what can you do, it's a healing class so it obviously needs healing of some kind, WHM being the standard.

If you remember SCH shields were far better than AST's in 3.0 as was WHM's healing. Even the buffs didn't save AST from being kicked from raiding. I'm thinking it could be in part due to people sticking with the old and known. SCH brought dps and shields, WHM did all the healing with some decent DPS. AST could neither DPS, shield or heal better than the other 2 jobs. And the buffs were so minimal (5% in AoE) that no one even considered them to be game changing.

SCH was definitely OP. Their heals were good, their DPS godly for a healing class, aetherflow gave instant MP and was not a refresh buff.

And AST buffs are hard to plan unless your co-healer is smart. They were hard to plan BEFORE they removed them from the party list, as other AST wouldn't even bother to look at the party before replacing an AOE balance with TP (for real this happened to me more than once, and one time the other AST even had the nerve to say 'We didn't need your buff anyways did we?'). So it's even harder now that you have no idea what the other AST has down in a PUG. I think they're supposed to re-add them, but again, it didn't help much before.

I'm not sure if I can call the recent changes much of a nerf, but the Balance card is probably the top one buff so in that regards it was.

I repeat, I'm not against a rework. But DESIGN wise I don't see a problem with being a versatile role, who can work with either WHM or SCH on a party.