Help with beginner Ast

[OcieKo]

Guess some of the bulk of it was touched. But for your MP regen abilities consider using them earlier rather than later to keep high MP. For example use Lucid Dreaming at around 60% rather than 30%. For cards, try picking your hold card BEFORE your Royal Road card do you can make use of more cards you draw as opposed to throwing cards away to prevent wasting Expand. If your phishing for Balance for example more often than not youll get a Ewer/Spire first, if you use those for MP/TP maintenance as opposed to insta expand you may be able to toss out say a Bole on the Tank and an Arrow on the BLM while your searching for Balance to Expand.

Like the other poster mentioned ABene isnt fantastic for DPS maintenace in general, but a side caveat to that would be when they are guaranteed to be taking a few hits during the duration. First example I think of is the random target multi hits raid bosses get like on Alex Gordias 1 where you know after the first theyre going to eat a few more hits. Once you get to use Aspected Helios most of your DPS maintenace will be covered by that.

Side note on Essential Dignity it was changed awhile back to be a less gradual healing buff, now it just leaps at 50%/25%, it no longer heals for more at say 5/10% hp than it does 20/25%. So while its still true just less extreme on the conditions.

[Ghishlain]

Gear level can attribute some of your difficulty, especially if you haven't upgraded your weapon in a long time as Magic Damage is a huge stat for any damage or healing related numbers. If you can upgrade your weapon, do so.

In terms of actual play, are you making use of Lucid Dreaming? As mentioned earlier in the thread, you should be aiming to use that earlier in the fight so it's consumed and ready to come back out for more MP earlier in the fight for you.

The other thing I have to ask is are you using the Benefic II proc a bit much? Unlike WHM Freecure proc, ASTs Enhanced Benefic proc makes Benefic II a guaranteed critical. You mentioned in the opening post that you are...:

using using Benefic over Benefic II unless I get the buff for Benefic II to be free.

The comment leads me to believe that you have mistakenly thought that Freecure procs and Enhanced Benefic procs are the same when they aren't. And if you're using Benefic II every time the proc is up thinking it costs 0 MP, I can see where some of your MP issues are stemming from.

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Also going to randomly comment about another post:

Side note on Essential Dignity it was changed awhile back to be a less gradual healing buff, now it just leaps at 50%/25%, it no longer heals for more at say 5/10% hp than it does 20/25%. So while its still true just less extreme on the conditions.

Do you have any patch notes and/or research on this particular change? I don't recall ever reading about any changes since this research was done back in June 2015.

[Aikeiko]

I actually don't have Lucid Dreaming since it says it affects Emnity (I thought that was Agro? Still learning a lot of the terms in the game) I didn't know it could help with MP so I'll swap out Swiftcast for it for now. ANd yea, I was thinking it was a 0 cost >_<.

I will get this, I really love the idea of Ast and it feels fun, just got to get the MP thing down =)

[OcieKo]

I actually don't have Lucid Dreaming since it says it affects Emnity (I thought that was Agro? Still learning a lot of the terms in the game) I didn't know it could help with MP so I'll swap out Swiftcast for it for now. ANd yea, I was thinking it was a 0 cost >_<.

I will get this, I really love the idea of Ast and it feels fun, just got to get the MP thing down =)

Yes, Lucid Dreaming also affects Enmity which is aggro. In this case it reduces enmity, I wanna say its halves current, or did it take the reduces generated from the original AST skill for it.

Do you have any patch notes and/or research on this particular change? I don't recall ever reading about any changes since this research was done back in June 2015.

I'll try to find the right patch note for it. Can't remember if it's in late 3.X or the 4.X series.
Will take more time looking for it, so grain of salt for now. Nearly positive they brought up where it caps out at above 1% like it originally was, worst comes to worst ill just have to manually run the test.

[Rongway]

Yes, Lucid Dreaming also affects Enmity which is aggro. In this case it reduces enmity, I wanna say its halves current, or did it take the reduces generated from the original AST skill for it.

It's drops your enmity down to ever so slightly above half.
Unimportant in practice, it drops you to 50%, but then adds a small fixed amount of enmity like any action that grants a self buff.

The deleted pre-Stormblood ability Luminiferous Aether was an enmity suppressor instead.