4 Paired Threads: AST - How do you feel about it?

[IceBlueNinja]

I'm not entirely sure it would break the game, to be honest. Having two stacking shields on demand would trivialize mitigation checks, yes, but it comes at the cost of throughput from easily accessible, zero CD Regen effects, and the pure throughput of something like Cure3. If those things that you're losing out on, are not enough to cause issues by being missing (or, the SCH/SGE combo can handle 'pure healing checks' just fine with their own kits), then that's not 'shields stacking would be OP', thats 'the devs did not design the fights to actually test the pure healing output enough'. It's part of the evidence of why the split is a failure in it's current state. SCH SGE can heal everything still, WHM AST can't do jack in raids until they vastly overgear it to make up for the missing mitigations.

I also miss Sleeve Draw. I'd bring it back in an AST rework too, as a button to 'force the RNG to favor you' in regards to the strength of the card effects. After all, if it's named after the idea of having an 'ace up your sleeve', I think that it'd be fairly fitting for it's effect to be 'sneakily swap out your weaker 'dud' card for the cheaty Ace you sleeved earlier' right? This does require that cards have an actual hierarchy to them (ie, you are able to draw any of 54 cards from the deck of 60, not just Lord/Lady of Crowns), but that's for SE to work on with their 'sorry we had to delay the rework' rework

You know it makes me wonder if its a bad thing to consider that they should reduce the ogcs potencies of sage/sch because they are literally as or more powerful than the pure healers gcd heals, its really strange, since sge/sch is to be proactive and ast/whm reactive, so whatever damage is left over to heal would be on the pure healer part after shield ones apply as must mit they can push out.

[ForsakenRoe]

You know it makes me wonder if its a bad thing to consider that they should reduce the ogcs potencies of sage/sch because they are literally as or more powerful than the pure healers gcd heals, its really strange, since sge/sch is to be proactive and ast/whm reactive, so whatever damage is left over to heal would be on the pure healer part after shield ones apply as must mit they can push out.

You know, maybe that's the issue that's causing the feeling of 'we don't have enough to heal', it's cos we're getting the 'leftovers', the 'crumbs' that fall from the barrier healer's table /s

Well, mostly /s, but if you look at logs now that the site considers mitigated damage as 'effective HPS' on the meters, you'll often see the shield healer doing way more 'healing' than the pure healer

[IceBlueNinja]

You know, maybe that's the issue that's causing the feeling of 'we don't have enough to heal', it's cos we're getting the 'leftovers', the 'crumbs' that fall from the barrier healer's table /s

Well, mostly /s, but if you look at logs now that the site considers mitigated damage as 'effective HPS' on the meters, you'll often see the shield healer doing way more 'healing' than the pure healer

This indeed. Sheesh FFXIV healers in a nutshell

[Raikai]

I stand with everyone saying that AST's APM should not be lowered, but instead just redistributed. The issue isn't that it takes higher APM than other healers. It's that all of it's APM is crammed into one tiny 15s window. Look back to Stormblood, we had to play a card every 30s, be that actually 'Play' or 'Royal Road', and that includes Redrawing it to try and get the fabled Balance. Because it was every 30s we did this, the APM complaints were not as high. There were some issues at the time of course, Sleeve Draw functioned as our 2min and should have been reworked to be less janky (sure love getting Spire in my Spread thanks Yoshi). But the general idea, of playing a card every 30s instead of pooling everything for the 2min window, feels like the obvious solution.

Interesting, I think you made me realize that my dissatisfaction with AST's apm is not the ethos of a busy apm job, but a busy job in a tight space of time. That by itself wouldn't really be a problem, because I have funp playing DNC and NIN, two jobs with really busy 2min burst windows. I think that becomes egregious for AST because this apm is stacked with the fact that the game offers no mouseover funcionality, adding to the stress of target swapping. That adds also with looking at the screen to figure out mechanics and actual healing, in case damage goes out during the burst phase.

I hope they do strike it there with the rework. I really think pressing cards as they come by is insanely more fun than hoarding the charges for the 2min window, that goes so fast and makes the 'oomph' of using a card at the right target really not noticeable.

[Shurrikhan]

I'm not entirely sure it would break the game, to be honest. Having two stacking shields on demand would trivialize mitigation checks.

Random thought:

...What if barriers simply degraded linearly over 30 seconds? Throw up a barrier 15s before it's actually needed and it'd be half gone. (Or soften it so they drain by just X% per second or so.) Might help against pure heals feeling quite so scrap-eater, at least.

Meanwhile, maybe we allow any number of barriers to stack as long as there's (A) only one of each type or even (B) only one of each type per healer, but only one barrier is used per attack against the target, with the largest of course being consumed first. (The remaining damage goes through, rather than being met by the next barrier, making stacked barriers less able to cheese OHKO eHP checks.)

(If NPC multi-hit attacks like Dream Within a Dream ever come into play [again], could go either way with having them all snapshot against the same barrier only or can be checked individually so that stacked barriers have a comparative advantage against them.)

[Marxam]

I still say it was a missed opportunity for AST/SCH to be dual stance healers while WHM and SGE represented the opposite ends of the spectrum.

With regards to barrier heals, I think they missed an opportunity with SGE to be either a shield barrier like TBN with no heal or just a standard heal. Eukrasian Diagnosis should have just been like a 15% HP barrier. You can just use ogcds to supplement actual healing. Eukrasia could have been the "heal or shield" button. Standard Diagnosis is just a potency cure. It was honestly an easy way to simulate dual stance healing while not actually stance dancing. It would also allow it to stack with SCH who would still function as it currently does. However, I feel this would make SGE op in a burst mitigation meta where you only need to mitigate the raid wides. Unless HH is more common.