Quote Originally Posted by Prrringles View Post
It's their LB man. Beam with stun and huge dmg, that alone reks groups. AST is meh
High skill players do not generally group up, at all. If they do, they it's when the WHM (or DRG, or whatever) doesn't have LB. Or they have a means in place to counteract that LB (such as Seraph Flight.)

AST is *undeniably* the best healer right now, and it's not even close. Macrocosmos got buffed for some absurd reason and is frankly overpowered right now. You know how people bang on about how Misery did 12k damage in a ~5yd AOE on the target? Macrocosmos does 12k damage in a *20yd radius around the AST* and applies the famous Macro buff that lets AST one-click quit P3S mechanics. Or in this case throw a fat heal on someone that took a bunch of damage and then got their Guard up in time.

In terms of damage output? Double Cast Gravity is 8k+8k damage and applies Heavy and then Bind. Stack Macrocosmos in there and it's *the same damage as WHM LB* on a 30 sec recharge cycle. Wah, WHM LB charges too fast? AST's doesn't *have* a charge time, they can let it rip whenever they feel like it and pay the time cost afterwards. Double cast Malefic is a quick 5k+5k burst cycle and even refunds half the charge timer of the DC charge spend to do it. Double cast Benefic is the best single target healing in the game by a huge margin and they can do it twice in a row if they really need to.

And then AST has an LB that requires no targeting or positioning, just tap the button and congratulations your team wins this engagement if the enemy team is stupid enough to keep trying to have it. Sure, twice the charge time of WHM's, but WHM needs to land a huge money shot for their WHM to have a big impact against high skill players. AST just sits on theirs until they can use it in a place where the enemy team is forced to fight into it (typically a fight over a checkpoint.)

AST is undeniably the best healer right now. I would not call them overpowered or even overtuned (though I think they should revert the Macrocosmos damage buff for sanity's sake), but they are very good. I prefer SCH because AST is a bit micro-heavy for my tastes and I'm way too lazy to keybind Enemy Party Member target functions to properly place Gravity casts, and because I hate the RNG with cards (Balance and Spire are pretty much always good, Ewer is... not, in most cases.) But I won't pretend that AST ain't the best right now.