[Request] AST MP cost reductions please

[BillyKaplan]

Most of what people have said so far still rings like it needs to burn too many cooldowns just to maintain my mp. Lightspeed is an emergency button in my book and the mp cost cut on it ties in with what it should be used for, but it feels wrong to use it just for the sake of MP management. Burning Essential Dignity to get the cooldown on it down feels wasteful as well.
And nothing brought up in this thread negates the main point that AST's mp management is still locked heavily behind RNG, and many points brought up here are basically 'well if you get lucky it will all work out well'.

At the end of the day, the reality of the matter is that when I run BLM, it's the ASTs I have to Mana Shift before any other healer (used to be SCHs, but they changed them since), and that's in dungeons, raids, or the extremes I go into.

[Vaer]

Most of what people have said so far still rings like it needs to burn too many cooldowns just to maintain my mp. Lightspeed is an emergency button in my book and the mp cost cut on it ties in with what it should be used for, but it feels wrong to use it just for the sake of MP management. Burning Essential Dignity to get the cooldown on it down feels wasteful as well.
And nothing brought up in this thread negates the main point that AST's mp management is still locked heavily behind RNG, and many points brought up here are basically 'well if you get lucky it will all work out well'.

Thing is if you get the full benefit from it when you use it, it's not really wasting it. Wasting it is holding onto it thinking you'll need it later then never use it. (I see a lot of players do that) If you hold LD for 2 full minutes you could have used it twice and got twice the amount of MP from that one skill.

LDream is only 2 minutes and it gives a lot of MP. Not to mention with proper use of Earthly Star (insane amount of healing that costs 0 MP, only 1 min cooldown, instead of spamming helios you can just use this for stack markers and save a lot of MP and Dignity which also costs no MP which has a low cooldown can be used to manage MP. If you end up flipping the arcana (because you don't need either card you draw) into the healing card that is another MP free heal.

Usually when I see healers run out of MP it's usually:
A) People dying like crazy (this isn't the specific job's fault, people just need to stop dying)
B) Overhealing (healers that keep regens/spamming shields when there is going to be no damage at all, wasting MP)
C) Not using Lucid Dreaming until they are completely out of MP (Bad idea, unless you are churning through MP so fast that you unintentionally dump everything in 2 minutes after using LD in which case you might want to check what you're doing)
D) Aggressive DPS (Using too many Holy/Gravity/Miasma II and bottoming out but usually they'll just pop LD and get all their MP back by the next pull so no problem there)
E) Tank is undergeared af/no cooldown and pulls to the wall causing perma Cure II/Benefic II and Adlo spam.

[MoroMurasaki]

At the end of the day, the reality of the matter is that when I run BLM, it's the ASTs I have to Mana Shift before any other healer (used to be SCHs, but they changed them since), and that's in dungeons, raids, or the extremes I go into.

It sounds kind of like you just don't want to have to think about MP when you're healing. You use your cooldowns and oGCD abilities on any healer (WHM included) to manage your MP while keeping the party up. It's not like WHM's have a stronger mp regen tick or anything, it's all just a combination of oGCDs and CDs.

If someone sat on CDs on WHM the way you advocate for sitting on them for AST I bet they would see some MP issues as well... because they wouldn't be managing their MP.

At the end of the day if you want to feel like you have near-infinite MP play WHM. If you want the utility of cards play AST. You don't get both.

I love a couple AST mains on this forum but some of y'all are just greedy.

[Snow_Princess]

Most of what people have said so far still rings like it needs to burn too many cooldowns just to maintain my mp. Lightspeed is anemergency button in my book and the mp cost cut on it ties in with what it should be used for, but it feels wrong to use it just for the sake of MP management. Burning Essential Dignity to get the cooldown on it down feels wasteful as well.
And nothing brought up in this thread negates the main point that AST's mp management is still locked heavily behind RNG, and many points brought up here are basically 'well if you get lucky it will all work out well'.

At the end of the day, the reality of the matter is that when I run BLM, it's the ASTs I have to Mana Shift before any other healer (used to be SCHs, but they changed them since), and that's in dungeons, raids, or the extremes I go into.

It depends .. if you are talking about a 2 healer setup and need to mana shift an ast, who is using CDs and such, it means they are HARD CARRYING and you should be doing that regardless. (or people are dying repeatedly) I also did run a DF once where a whm never used assize, so yeah it is CD management. I been in many situations where I am the only one raising people, sometimes the one doing most of the healing + raises while the other healer is being a DPS bot mostly.

[Cenerae]

Most of what people have said so far still rings like it needs to burn too many cooldowns just to maintain my mp. Lightspeed is an emergency button in my book and the mp cost cut on it ties in with what it should be used for, but it feels wrong to use it just for the sake of MP management. Burning Essential Dignity to get the cooldown on it down feels wasteful as well.
And nothing brought up in this thread negates the main point that AST's mp management is still locked heavily behind RNG, and many points brought up here are basically 'well if you get lucky it will all work out well'.

At the end of the day, the reality of the matter is that when I run BLM, it's the ASTs I have to Mana Shift before any other healer (used to be SCHs, but they changed them since), and that's in dungeons, raids, or the extremes I go into.

Everything that restores mana for a healer has a cooldown.

Assize and Thin Air for WHM have cooldowns.
Aetherflow has a cooldown, and by extension, so does energy drain
Lightspeed has a cooldown, as does Ewer since it's locked behind draw/sleeve draw.

Now, I don't raid savage (but you already had a reply from a savage raiding AST), but the only times I feel pinched for mana is when I'm going Gravity trigger happy, or if my group is derping and I have to resurrect several people over the course of a fight. Lucid Dreaming plus Celestial Opposition gives you such a huge amount of mp back that I've never had problems, and that's completely ignoring the existence of Ewer.

And this is coming from the point of view of someone who can and will constantly cast Aspected Helios in Nocturnal sect in 8 man content just to ensure we have a bubble shield for every big aoe, even though we don't really need them. You can't judge a job's mana management by how often you're mana shifting them as a DPS, because all that shows is which healer is actually casting spells and which one is sitting there twiddling their thumbs (for example: any healer that queues into o2 normal and is not of the 'I should DPS' persuasion)

Don't think of your cooldowns as tools of last resort. They're tools to be used, same as every other cooldown in the game. If you're not making full use of your tools, then you're not making full use of the class. I would generally consider AST to not have the same sort of mana tools as WHM (who have absurdly cheap regens, and Thin Air to save absolutely massive amounts of mana), but it's hardly suffering. Feel bad instead for the SCH, because while they have free fairy healing, they only have Aetherflow to recover mana with outside of the shared tool of Lucid Dreaming, unless they want to burn charges on Energy Drain (which means less uses of their most important spells).