I keep running into Astro running Shields in Farm PTs as a SCH. (Why?)

[Maltothoris]

The ogcds with aetherflow as well.(Indom,energy drain,bane,excog, lustrate,). Don't forget the other things the fairy can do well. Fey covenant for the magic defense up(which decreases damage by 8-9 percent in total) and fey illumination for increased healing and fey union when there's autos or a bleed going out on one person. The main weakness for the sch is sustained aoe healing given that indom is a 30 sec cd gated by aetherflow and emergency is 20 seconds but it can easily be covered by the other healer. The utility with ogcds, their personal damage, chain strat, and the fairy and its abilities put it ahead of the bigger shields and the rng nature of the cards that noct astro can do.

[Terkhev]

AST players like the one you encountered are fairly regularly around, only it seems to stem that whatever stance they are will be the exact same one that their Co-healer has if it's a SCH/WHM as if to show "look, i'm better than they are at their job".

According to Balance Discord, regens are always the way to go for AST, even with WHM cohealer. You only use shields when they are needed to survive mechanics. So I guess some of those might not have bad intentions.

But yeah, if there is Noct AST in party with SCH then he is either stupid or an asshole.

[Paruza]

If they want to overheal and free your gcd's then cool, just do more damage instead?

[AmeliaVerves]

Going double HoT with WHM+AST is perfectly viable if the fight doesn't have hard Raidbuster you need shields for to survive. Potencywise HoTs are always stronger and shields are always inferior, except you need the effective HP increase.
But this also means: going double shields as SCH+AST is just overly useless in so many ways... I would guess those people are actively trolling or don't know it better/have wrong information. Maybe you can just try and explain to them why they are in the "wrong" stance, or you just shrug and move on/find another party.
:/

Anyways, if unsure about the fight ASTs are always safe choosing the "opposite" stance according to their Co-Heal.

[Culfinrandir]

As a SCH I see this all the time. I don't know why SE made AST shields more 'desirable' than those of a Scholar given that it is one of the reasons SCH exists. It would be best if Noct stance was unavailable unless a second AST or WHM was in the party.

[Maltothoris]

As a SCH I see this all the time. I don't know why SE made AST shields more 'desirable' than those of a Scholar given that it is one of the reasons SCH exists. It would be best if Noct stance was unavailable unless a second AST or WHM was in the party.

It was a quick fix back all the way in 3.3 and 3.4. You had hundreds of clears of A8s with whm/sch and sch/ast but only like 8-9 clears with whm/ast. They needed to do something to make it better than sch and since the cards were rng and not as strong back then as for bole anyway. So in patch 3.3 they made aspected helips noct stance better and then in 3.4 full blown with buffs to noct sect and in 4.0 some adjustments.

[Rubiss]

Any AST who stays in Noct Sect with a SCH as their co-healer is terrible. Don't put any stock in what they say. They are just wasting GCDs. You'll find stupid at every levels of play sadly.

[Nitro-Jasper-onyx]

So why is the default response here to the OP's question, "anyone who does this is an idiot" its not like there is ANYTHING in game to tell you healer shields don't play nice together, considering regen effects seem to stack. I'm a new AST almost at 70 and I would have never known that my shields would mess with a scholar's shields, or that my shields weren't as powerful and I should want to swap to my regen affects instead.

Is it so hard to just quickly explain the problem to the other healer? I mean if he ignores you then yeah maybe he is an idiot.

How buffs interact with one another and support each other in some cases in this game is not part of any in-game tutorial. If you aren't reading the right guides you could easily not know this type of stuff.

I'm sure most of the player base isn't active in Reddit, or this forum or a discord where a better understanding of play mechanics is more common. Shouldn't this be part of the grouping tutorials?

[Kurando]

Actually I just had this happen in Duty Finder (a12 raid) so it's not just PF.

We had a SCH and AST, with the latter being well geared having Tsukuyomi weap and plenty of 370 gear. About a third of the way through I noticed the AST was using Aspec Helios but nothing was happening no Regens or Shields so I mentioned they should be in a sect to be more effective, (otherwise using any Aspec really is a waste of MP without a sect). Naturally they went straight in to Nocturnal Sect and said it didn't matter which one when I said Diurnal would of been better. Got no further response after that and the poor SCH had to deal with barely using any Shields for risk of being overwritten.

I mean if you accidentally go in to Noct even though there is SCH present then yeah it's fine if you try your best to work around it and not overwrite too much, but when you clearly do it on purpose and try to maximize your own Shield uptime over the SCH, then that's not exactly good team work.

[ManuelBravo]

Problem is most people don't like being told how to play and many are just plain ignorant -.-/ same happens on any multiple raid snd even same jobs. Some work well others are just annoying. Then again as long as people are not wiping it's fine..to bad they lack common sense to manage MP that way -.-/