Thread: AST changes for 5.1+ feedback

Originally Posted by Doctor-

This is personal opinion and I will only be speaking for the 99% of SCH / WHM / AST.

Nice contradiction.

I'd like another bandaid fix for Sleeve Draw, something that alleviates pressure from the opener. Something like, "When used out of combat, grants Divination Wheel. DW. 15 sec duration. Allows the execution of Divination at full potency and consumes all seals upon use."

Is that a stupid, clunky, awkward fix? Yep. But in my mind it would go pretty far because AST could get Divination out at the proper raid buff window and then start focusing on getting cards out, there'd be a little less pressure to build up Divination in the span of 4 GCDs, since it could go up first, and then cards going out are played to buff players to support their openers instead of fish for seals to finish mine.

Fishing ahead isn't so bad, when there's time to do it. Fishing "backward" to get Divination out NOW is not fun. Not after a death, not at the beginning of a fight.

I don't think this would force a meta. At best an AST can use this ability to turn a couple of cards that would have been seals into Minor Arcana, so a slight buff.

The cards are a hot mess but I think the best compromise I can hope for is that we bring Dhit, Crit, and Speed to the cards. Keep the melee/ranged dichotomy but give the cards 3 different effects. Minor Arcana is still there for the guaranteed balance.

And to get away from the "Bad card" mindset, a couple of abilities that grant seals and use cards outside of Play. Something like a simplified Royal Road, where the current card is burned for a buff that enhances the next Major Arcana played. And another ability that "reinterprets the card in reversed position," turning it into one of two defensive raid buffs--defense or healing received, 2 minute cooldown (only usable in combat). I think having 2 ways to use cards that aren't Play would go a long way toward feeling like I own my deck.

The other fix I really need is to Nocturnal. The problem with the Regen/Shield dichotomy is that AST was meant to flex sects and play nicely with cohealers, Noct for WHM and Diurnal for SCH. Neither of those things actually happened, and they can't, so long as AST has 4 different shields or 4 different regens. It's overkill of all the wrong things and not enough of the right things.

The design goal should not be "two sects that do opposite things" but "two sects that allow the AST to fluidly choose a burst/recovery playstyle when paired with SCH, and mitigate/prevent when paired with WHM."

The sects don't need to mirror each other. They will always be broken unless we take a serious look at what those abilities should be doing, to give AST the tools to complement their partner and make the team feel complete. I would like the sects to be balanced not ability for ability, but total package.

Quick ugly fixes for a class that was broken in the quickest, most ugly way possible. I'm to the point where I'd be grateful for any QoL upgrade.

It's good to look at each healer personal Rdps, but it's not the only data that needs to be looked into.
You can always kind of "cheat" the rdps by going with a healer that does all the healing, and the other one all the dps, which is why its always better to take into consideration the "combined healers damage", and with this you can see that the dps depends a lot on the fight and the intensity of the healing.

On E1S, which requires very little healing, the best healing comp is double WHM, whereas on E2s and E3s, the best comp is AST+SCH, and on E4S it is WHM+SCH.

If you take the combined 4 fights, you see that WHM+SCH and AST+SCH does respectively 98.85 score and 98.27 score, which is the closest you can actualy get in term of balance.
What actualy need a good chunck of balance is the Noct AST to be competitive with the SCH, so the combo AST+WHM could finaly get out of the hole its stuck in since forever...

Are they adjusting ast in 5.1? I thought it was suppose to be the ninja revamp patch.