There was and will never be a completely balanced game ever since the birth of games that has multiple classes or races. Or even in fighting games with a roster of characters, there will never be a time that all of those characters are of equal strength. There will always be imbalance. How unfortunate that the Astrologian, one of the cooler classes in FFXIV, is the one to suffer this lack of balance.
An Astrologian: Balance Suggestion
Here is the first part of a post which provides good analysis why FFXIV needs rebalancing.
DISCLAIMER: Tl;dr at the bottom. AST has been discussed before, but the issues still persist, meaning the discussion to improve it must.
So with 3.4 around the corner and possible new class adjustments on the way given the new raid content, alongside SE stating that they examine healer balance each and every patch, I’d like to discuss healer balance currently and for the future.
Currently, based on current math and statistics collected from FFlogs, we know that:
- SCH is hilariously overpowered; even moreso than WAR is for tanks.
- People barely take AST and, AST, in both Diurnal Sect and Nocturnal Sect, is still horridly underpowered compared to their WHM and SCH counterpart.
We know this when we examine the data primarily gathered through data logs regarding clears and party compositions through FF logs. Square primarily takes into account which jobs are and aren’t taken into parties for Savage content when balancing them. If we examine the current clears for A8S, we find:
- Almost all ~500Party compisitions included a Scholar. A very few extreme minority (only 6) included an AST over a SCH.
- Of these ~500party compsitions, around 440 included a WHM. Only 60 of these included an AST in Diurnal.
This data clearly shows that there is a favoritism for healers like Warriors for tanks. Frankly, this sort of stuff shouldn’t even last for 2 weeks unlike the months it’s been that Astrologians have been completely ignored by Squeenix.
A lot of folks have been looking forward to the new classes and they all come up short compared to the other vanilla jobs. If this continues, I truly fear for any upcoming new classes on the horizon.
Then again, I somewhat understand as to why Squeenix is careful this time around due to what essentially happened with the Ninja job. If none of you remember or haven’t played yet during that time, Ninja’s were just too OP, being capable of pretty much everything any other dps could do and more.
It’s a very real fear that, if they buff the Astrologian even further, it could prove a bigger problem that it being underpowered instead. However, they should still make an effort to close the power gap between jobs as much as possible. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to put out a few small patches every few weeks just to keep tweaking the AST until it’s good enough to compete with SCH and WHM.
Perhaps, one day, but today isn’t that day. There are a lot more things to mull over in these Astrologian suggestions, so watch out for the next write up!
