How could you do this to AST?

[Jade3173]

It's probably better this way for the game overall, but I do feel bad for ASTs that enjoy noct.

In particular any NOCT ASTs that preferred the pre SHB card system this has got to feel like a one two punch.

always enjoyed shield healing, not so much pets, so N.AST was great for me. Also miss the old cards, very worried what's going to happen to this job (and role) come 6.0

[RyuDragnier]

you need to stop saying this, they've never had a problem balancing it and never said as much.

what they have is a problem with refusing to make it equal to diurnal sect because they keep penalising noct sect users

*looks at join date*
You joined around when the AST buffs occurred in HW's 3.4 patch that brought it up big. Had you been here at HW's launch, you wouldn't be saying such.

[Mahoukenshi]

*looks at join date*
You joined around when the AST buffs occurred in HW's 3.4 patch that brought it up big. Had you been here at HW's launch, you wouldn't be saying such.

The forum join date has absolutely nothing to do with how long someone has been playing the game. These are two seperate dates.

[Recon1o6]

*looks at join date*
You joined around when the AST buffs occurred in HW's 3.4 patch that brought it up big. Had you been here at HW's launch, you wouldn't be saying such.

incorrect, and you shouldn't make such assumptions anyway.

I only joined the forums in 2016

I joined this game on august 23 2013 in the beta. Bought the collectors edition for myself back on the ps3 ended up on adamantoise because all the eu servers were full
I played when stone 1 had a heavy!

I mained whm till 3.0, used it and astro in savage at one point (my group made the mistake of taking me the ast into the infamous A3s...not that it mattered. We killed it eventually killed it as whm first, ast second)
didnt do midas on account of irl but still mained my cards and time fiddling pre buffs. Because it was fun even if it was weak.

Even though I mained astro, I was in horror at what they did to whm and dark knight. two fo my beloved alt jobs butchered.
Come 5.0 I didn't even make it to level 71 before I became disgusted enough with my globe to throw it in my saddlebag.
I used whm again and then ditched it last year after a few months why? because I am sick of healing been treated as an afterthought at best. I want my old healing experiences back. I want to enjoy the game again for more than just story and glamours and that means engaging downtime and interesting healing challenge

[RyuDragnier]

incorrect, and you shouldn't make such assumptions anyway.

I only joined the forums in 2016

I joined this game on august 23 2013 in the beta. Bought the collectors edition for myself back on the ps3 ended up on adamantoise because all the eu servers were full
I played when stone 1 had a heavy!

I mained whm till 3.0, used it and astro in savage at one point (my group made the mistake of taking me the ast into the infamous A3s...not that it mattered. We killed it eventually killed it as whm first, ast second)
didnt do midas on account of irl but still mained my cards and time fiddling pre buffs. Because it was fun even if it was weak.

Even though I mained astro, I was in horror at what they did to whm and dark knight. two fo my beloved alt jobs butchered.
Come 5.0 I didn't even make it to level 71 before I became disgusted enough with my globe to throw it in my saddlebag.
I used whm again and then ditched it last year after a few months why? because I am sick of healing been treated as an afterthought at best. I want my old healing experiences back. I want to enjoy the game again for more than just story and glamours and that means engaging downtime and interesting healing challenge

My apologies, I was unaware of the join date on the forums being different from the actual join date of the game. In terms of HW, after double checking all the patch notes from that expansion, AST had to be buffed a lot during that expansion. I wouldn't call that a balanced class by any means. We all remember what happened during SB, with it basically overtaking the meta for pretty much the entirety of the expansion while WHM was having a harder time. This time around it was back to AST having difficulties, which may have led to the devs deciding, "You know what, let's just have 2 shield healers and 2 pure healers so each healer only has to compete with one other, that should be much easier to balance." Fingers crossed on whether that's the case though.

[ForteNightshade]

Well here's the thing, the AST playerbase complains about how the old cards were taken out. As it was pointed out by you, ALL THOSE CARDS WITH THE EXCEPTION OF 3 WERE SITUATIONAL. You don't want situational, yet you want the old card system back? They changed it to the current one BECAUSE YOU PEOPLE DIDN'T WANT SITUATIONAL. But people want the old one back. Here's the thing... IF YOU WANT THE OLD CARD SYSTEM BACK, YOU'RE GOING TO GET SITUATIONAL CARDS. NOW EITHER YOU WANT THEM BACK, MEANING YOU WANT THE OLD SYSTEM, OR YOU DON'T, MEANING YOU WANT THE CURRENT SYSTEM. THERE IS NO IN BETWEEN!

How about a third option where I want a better system than what we have, but acknowledge the old system wouldn't work in the current landscape. While the old cards were situational, yes. They functioned well enough. That simply wouldn't be the case in longer. We have so much mitigation, Bole is worthless. Sure, you could throw it on the tank during a big pull... where the Warrior has Nascent Flash running and hasn't dipped below 150k once. Likewise, MP is practically a Raise resource and nothing more. This completely devalues Ewer.

And therein lies the issue. Situational cards are fine, if a situation exists where they can be beneficial. That isn't the case anymore. Frankly, I think we have far too many answers and healers as a whole need to be scaled back. But that's a whole different topic.

[Recon1o6]

snip

Apology accepted

ast overtaking the meta 2nd healer spot in SB wasn't just because ast was good, there were multiple reasons, some intentional, others were a result of the dps over all mentality that SE still hasn't addressed.

HW for all that it did right, had quite a few flaws on account of it being rushed. Chief amongst which were the devs putting out job changes and content without playtesting them due to time constraints. This is why we had bowmage, gunmage, paladin and monk vanishing off the face of the planet and a fun but pitiful Astro and Ninja. We also had pepsiman knocking out statics like players knock out rhitatyn, gatherers exhausting themselves en masse with trader's favour and void ark where some of the mechanics didn't even trigger correctly (morbol room for example)

When SE moved into SB...they hadn't quite learned their lessons and instead started pushing out what they think people should play without checking how they play or how they want to play

So the factors that led ast losing noct sect
1. Nobody wanted to play whm in SB. it had no utility, it wasn't fun, its playstyle was reduced to pure healing which as noted everywhere, is not a suitable playstyle for ff14. When shb dropped, its the opposite, nobody wants to play ast or sch because they were butchered and in ast case, potencies were so awful they struggled again with noct sect being functionally worse with the overall shield nerf. Naturally, Astros defaulted to diurnal sect, and it was not uncommon for two astros to both use diurnal sect as noct was so bad
2. Astro's diurnal sect is almost a 1 to 1 whm clone. Thus its easier for whm's who abandoned the job to transition than to sch
3. The devs constantly ignored noct sect's lack of synergy thorughout ast's lifespan instead of fixing it. A whm/diurnal astro can work together, but a sch/noct astro can't as their shields are always overwritten. Fixing this would have made balancing easier.
4. The devs penalised players wanting to be in noct sect. Remember that Nocturnal benefic and nocturnal helios overwrite each other. Diurnal doesn't have that problem. Diurnal doesn't have an mp penalty either.
5. How the playerbase perceives balance is through damage and opportunities to create it, devs look at healing instead until shb. Cue "we want you to heal more" and giving more heal tools. Naturally as hp mechanics don't take into account shields (white hole for example) its another incentive to go diurnal as opposed to noct

SE has led themselves to this decision to further remove things from Astro. We'll have to wait and see what they do, but for now plenty of astros are upset that they lost nocturnal sect instead of fixing these problems, particularly when the healing design direction for years has been more towards getting rid of the heal vs shield style

So while in theory it could work, in practice we will have to wait and see, but given SE history with healers, ast mains and former asts have right to be upset at the present time

[Roel-Nelhah]

Mained Whm in ARR and switched to Ast directly at early Acces 3.0.
I loved Astro for it's card buff range and it time utilitys, but every year they took one thing of their identity away.
Well they did the same for scholar tbh, they killed both jobs. Scholars Fairies and Astros Cards etc.

[Valmaxian]

While I'm not thrilled about the idea of losing Noct shields, what could be cool is if they simply change how stances function. Perhaps Diurnal could be our primary healing stance, while Nocturnal might provide higher damage potencies or extra DPS abilities, but with reduced healing potencies and/or fewer healing options? That would at least give us a choice in how we play the job without sacrificing the sects for lore purposes. Or maybe cards could function differently depending on which sect we are in?

[IceBlueNinja]

Wrong. Fight design makes regens objectively better for almost all content. Conceptually Shields are always more powerful than Regens, because while Regens have greater healing potency, Shields grant temporary HP, allowing for living through things players shouldn't, while also expanding the Healer role's power to influence the Tank's efficacy.

You underestimate me. I know full well that actually optimizing regens is a pain in the ass. That doesn't change its power conceptually. The most powerful regen in the world won't save you from a hit that deals 1 more HP than your HP total. If they wanted to, they could balance fights such that shields are required for every single raid wide, or all non-tanks die. They don't do this in hardly anything.

yup been trying to say this forever. many times noct saved me even with low hp than dirunal when am full hp and still can get 1 hit by certain mechs lol. I burn more mana in dirunal than noct. i seen too much proof on trash pulls when i use dirunal vs noct and most ill use like 1k or 2k mp, while whole dirunal alot more . I even have still throw es more in dirunal where I only use 1 or no es and eith 4k crit atm my shields crit big alot. I respected diruanal more back in storm blood when aspected helios was 30 seconds lasting and aspected benefic regen was 20 seconds(not too sure so correct me). Regens dont be lasting too long enough nore tick fast enough to me to counter the damage being done by 10+ mobs on large pulls. and trying to throw aspect bene dirunal and helios back to back using 1200 no total vs aspect noct and celestial intersection regen with cu auto cancel and maybe a few benefic 1 only if tank gear is not too good else yes I use alot lesser mp in noct than dirunal. Also for those saying sch shields and noct as shields dont work together is not fully but part wrong. Only shields that do not work together is noct field/gal. celestial op shield can stack with galavine and noct field will not cancel out catalize of sch. Dirunal shields ofc intersection/netrual shield can work with gal and cata. I honestly see the main fight with this is they did a bad mistake to make whm and and dirunal ast regens stack with each other should have did what they did with noct ast and sch. Both sec is equally good to me I still fail to see how dirunal passes noct in anyway. sure noct both fields overwrite each other but its the same concept of succor/alqo of sch.