Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

So I've been leveling Astrologian slowly. Whenever the mood strikes me. Pre-50 I've really enjoyed the class. The skills are all strong, the regen spell is dope, it lacks AOEs completely but whatever.

I used it in Palace of The Dead the other day, so of course I got to experience its post 50 skills. Nocturnal Sect was disappointing. It's not that the shields are weak, it's just that versus the regens and the increased action speed from Diurnal Sect, the Shields would only really be useful if they were needed for a fight mechanic. I mean, the instant cast single target shield is pretty nice. It's as strong, and well actually, slightly stronger than a non-crit adloquium. The same thing goes for the AOE Aspected Helios shields. They're stronger than Succor shields, even the crit ones, because the shields for AST, rather than having their power amplified by a crit(which actually only applies to adlo), they have an inset modifier of x1.3 amount healed and x1.2 amount healed respectively. That means that when I put up an AOE shield on everyone, and heal for 600, they get a shield that's worth 720. The multiplier affects crits as well, so if I crit the party for 880 or whatever, they get shields for 1100+(of course it won't crit everyone). For general use though, I found what every other AST has found, and that's that Diurnal sect pretty much completely trumps Noct Sect. You cast 5% faster, and all your aspected stuff gets regens. The regens are comparable to WHM's, albeit slightly weaker. It's still world's more healing than Noct Sect, so more healing per MP used.

Ok, so that's kind of whatever. I'll only use Noct Sect if I'm in 8 man and there's a WHM or another AST. Whatever. Well, ok the other 50 skill, Synastry. Read the tooltip, it sounds useful... sort of. Whoever you put the buff on gets 40% of the SINGLE TARGET heals you put onto someone else. So you put Synastry on a problem DPS I guess, or a DPS that you know will need heals, and then can heal the tank instead? Helps with crunches like that, I suppose. Nothing really groundbreaking though.

Level 52 skill, Gravity. Think Null Element Flare. Gravity + Lightspeed = Love. Nothing to complain about, other than it requires a target, and is only as strong as WHM's Holy(doesn't require a target AND stuns for 4 seconds if it's the initial stun).

Can't remember the order of the skills from 54 to 58, but the skills were...

Malefic II, your best single target DPS spell. Super sexy. Looks like you're dropping a bomb on them. Nothing to complain about I guess.

Then I think it was... Time Dilation. Increase the duration of active buffs on a party member by 15 seconds. So any beneficial effects someone has, you can elongate them by 15 seconds. Regens, card buffs, shields, etc. Pretty much an, "Oh that's nice." skill, but again, nothing ground breaking. Nothing that makes AST really shine.

Then Collective Unconscious. It's the AST bubble. It gives a strong Regen and Damage Taken reduction to everyone who enters the bubble, and keeps applying the effect until the bubble ends. The bubble will end when you move, act, or are hit. If you aren't going to be hit, you can keep the bubble up for quite some time. It's pretty nice. Thing that sucks about it is, people have to be inside of it to get the effect. You can't do any actions while you are using it. You can't set it down and move, so any mechanics that do a lot of damage, but require you to move, means using it in hairy situations will probably get you killed. It's nice, but I've got my gripes with it.

But nothing... nothing else pisses me off more than this next skill.

AST's level 60 skill is called Celestial Opposition. What a bad *** name! What a bad *** looking icon! Can you guess what it does? Instant off global AOE stun, 4 second stun... whoopie... It doesn't do anything else. It doesn't give me MP, it doesn't bypass stun resistance, it doesn't do damage, it doesn't heal, and it only effects things within a 2 yalm radius of the caster. Meaning you have to be pretty much point blank for it to work at all. Oh... and it extends buffs by 5 seconds. Again, whoopie.

So with all that into consideration, AST lacks an instant AOE heal(WHM has Assize, Scholar has Indomiability). It has no AOE DOTs(SCH has Bane, WHM has Aero III). Its maximum shield capability is lower than Scholar's maximum shield capability(a crit Adlo can change the course of a fight, a crit adlo deployed even more so). The 2 AOE heals it does have, have a shorter radius than WHM and SCHs. It doesn't have anything like Cure III. It can't use Eye for an Eye. It doesn't even have normal Virus. It has 3 useful cards, one of which is arguably useless, or at the very least outshined by what other healers bring to the table.

Like, you can make AST work still. My old raid group beat AS3 pre-nerf, pre-echo with an AST main healer. But I can't believe they were worried about it being OP with the things that they gave the other healers. Scholar and White Mage have so many more useful abilities. Like, yeah, AST has cards, and the cards can do wonderful things for your group, especially if your AST is main healer and not spending a considerable amount of time DPSIng, but the fact is, is that the cards eat up 4 of AST's skills that it learns. They're all for manipulating Card RNG. You can burn a bad card for a buff to the next one. You can store a good card for later or store a "bad one" for just in case or to just get it out of the way of the draw timer faster. You can redraw if you draw yet another bad card, but damn. The good cards do not outweigh the flaws inherent in AST's skillset when compared to the other two healers.

Having now played all of the Heavensward classes to their fullest extent, I have to say that Square Enix really Square Enixed on this one. They say that the Heavensward classes were going to be harder to play, because they were designed to be better than the old classes, but only if you played them correctly. They were also designed to be more complex/take more effort, and that was supposed to justify them being better. Instead, even playing them to their maximum capabilities, even after buffs to all of them(except DRK, to my knowledge DRK has not been given a general buff they got a small PVP one) they all still fall short of their older counterparts(WAR > DRK, WHM + SCH > AST, BRD + other DPS > MCH). Granted, MCH displaced BRD for a hot minute after Hypercharge got buffed, but they just buffed BRD back up so that the two are interchangeable or BRD is better etc.

It kind of makes me wonder if Square Enix understands how people play the game, and also how their game's battle mechanics actually work. Like when they play through their dungeons, and do their own boss fights, are they playing with the average player's latency? Do they realize that what they intend for classes isn't generally seen as useful/good etc?

And it makes me wonder about the future jobs. Are the next jobs going to be super easy to play powerhouses that have to be nerfed, or are they going to be complex and intricate, but not really, and then require buffs? Also, what are they going to give the next healer? How are they going to balance the next jobs versus current jobs? I mean, they can't make the next healer weaker than AST, it has to be at or above AST. It probably won't have card bfufs like AST, so they'll probably give it more healing power... which probably means in 4.0, AST is going to get ***on lol.