In the grand scheme of things I’m pretty new to raiding. This is the first tier I’ve run from day 1. I wasn’t running with a super hardcore group so I didn’t clear until week 4. Currently, as of 4.1, I raid with an optimization group focused mainly on pushing for the fastest kills possible and progressing in the Ultimate Coil of Bahamut.

AST is a powerful healer with many skills and abilities to augment a fight and how it plays out. Their main ‘shtick’ is their deck of cards and their ability to buff, heal, refresh and damage throughout the duration of a fight. On top of this, they have the ability to opt into a regen stance similar to that of a WHM, or a shield stance, similar to that of a SCH. I’ll go into more detail about this later in the guide, but for now, welcome to my guide.

Pray that spellcheck did a good job. (Haha SPELLcheck)

~ Ability Overview ~

This guide assumes you have a basic understanding of the job and the spells within it. I’m not going to go into detail on everything and mostly just explain some of the more niche aspects (haha puns) to the job!

Nocturnal Sect vs Diurnal Sect

Astrologian is extremely flexible in the role it can fulfil in a group due to its ability to spec into a shield or regen stance which modifies how some of the job’s spells act. You don’t have the luxury of being able to switch mid pull, but the general rule is you spec shields with a White Mage and regens with a Scholar. Each sect gives you a boost to your healing spells, with Diurnal being 10% and Nocturnal being 15% while also modifying the additional effects of two of your spells.

Aspected Benefic – A single target instant cast heal that also places either a

regen or a shield on the target.

Aspected Helios – An area of effect heal that also either places a shield or

regen on all targets in range.

One very important thing to note is that a WHM and AST can stack their regen effects on a single target and they will receive the effect of both, however a SCH and AST cannot stack their shields and regardless of which has the higher shield value, Galvanize (The SCH shield effect) will always overwrite a Nocturnal Barrier and vise versa.

Both sects are completely viable and you should always adjust and adapt based on the party and fight!

Draw and Arcanum Priorities

One of the most influential parts of playing Astrologian is the ability to feed cards to your party. Your focus (in 8 man content at least) should always be to have a AoE royal road even if that means holding a card and delaying its use.

Assuming you have an AoE Royal Road, your card priority should be;

The Balance > The Spear > The Arrow.

There are a few situations where the gain from Arrow outweighs that of Spear, but it’s a pretty safe bet with most jobs leaning towards crit heavy builds.

However, there are some situations, such as after the use of sleeve draw, where you may be put in a position where your sleeve is occupied and you’re presented with a single target card that has to be used in the next 30 seconds. So, who do you play the card to? Use the table below as a general guide.

Card Drawn	Royal Road	Target Priority
The Balance	None / 150% Potency	1 – Any DPS or WAR in their “Burst Window” (Wildfire, Trick Attack, Inner Release etc) 2 – Any other DPS
The Balance	200% Duration	DPS with consistent outgoing damage (SMN/BLM)
The Spear	Any	1 – BRD2 – MNK3 – Other DPS
The Arrow	Any	1 – NIN / BLM / SAM2 – Most other DPS3 – DRG

The Ewer and The Spire should be Royal Roaded for the 50% AoE buff, and if you already have one, Minor Arcana it. The Bole is too unpredictable to be used as a proper CD for your tanks and should almost always be Minor Arcana fodder unless you happen to pull one at the perfect time, don’t have an AoE Royal Road and feel like it will have more of an impact than a Lord or Lady.

Minor Arcana

Minor Arcana is pretty cool, and saves us from the issue of “oh boy my 6th AoE spire this pull, how should I use this?”. It basically turns the card in your draw slot into a DPS card or a Heal Card. The heal is pretty meh, it’s nice in some cases but most of the time you’ll be hoping for the Lord of Crowns. 300 potency is a lot of damage, nearly 1.5 times as strong as our main DPS spell and oGCD. Ideally you pull nothing but AoE balances over the course of a fight, but at least there’s a silver lining now when you pull your 6th bole of the night.

Celestial Opposition & Time Dilation

Celestial Opposition and Time Dilation are two really cool and unique abilities that an AST has available to them. Celestial Opposition extends all buffs that you cast on nearby party members by 10s, this includes cards, regens, shields and even buffs like Synastry. Time Dilation does that same thing to a single target other than yourself with a 15 second modifier.

Celestial Opposition however has the unique effect of also effecting you. In other words, ANY buffs you use that effect your character will be extended by 10 seconds, food, pots, cards, Role Actions like Largesse, Lucid Dreaming, and Cleric Stance can all be extended by Celestial Opposition for unique ways to handle situations.

Cross Role Skills

Your choice of cross role skills has a little leeway for personal preference and fight progression.

You will almost always take Swiftcast, Largesse and Lucid Dreaming.

When it comes to the last 2 slots, they’re partially situational and partially preferential.

Protect – One thing some people don’t know is that protect can be used and

then swapped out for something else if you’re confident that you won’t need to reapply it during the fight. It’s probably a good idea to keep it as a skill if you’re progging a fight and there’s a good chance there will be multiple deaths.

Esuna – If there are unavoidable status effects that can be cleansed it might be

worth taking this but 90% of the time it will be useless in end game content.

Rescue – Useful for both trolling and optimizing melee uptime in a speedrun

Scenario. It can also be used with extremely quick reactions to save someone who is flying to their death.

Cleric – A small DPS boost for those who want to really push out every last point

Stance of damage. Really only important in a speedkill scenario as the modifier is

so small that it makes such a minute difference over the course of a fight. Take it if you don’t need anything else.

Surecast – Super situational. Used to negate the knockback effects in some end

game content. I’d only really take this in Exdeath (Not Neo) and Shinryu Extreme currently.

~ Gear, Melds and Stat Priorities ~

The true “Best in Slot” for healers is a little up in the air, and one thing to remember is that substats for healers don’t make as much of an impact as they do for other roles.

The thing with this game is, healing is already broken, the tools we have to heal a fight are insane and overpowered when used correctly, so itemizing for stronger heals is a waste. Instead, we itemize for progression with Vit melds in our right side, or we itemize for DPS once Vit becomes unnecessary.

Personally, as with most other healers, I prefer to max out Crit and meld Direct Hit where Crit is maxed out. The reason I choose to prioritize Crit is I dislike high SpS builds on Astrologian due to our already horrible animations causing clipping, and I feel like Crit makes a much more substantial difference than Determination does.

One other important thing to note is that Crit becomes more valuable the more you have as both the rate and damage increase with every point, so investing heavily into it is better than only investing a little.

You can take a look at my build here. I’ll explain some of my choices below.

Crafted Bracelet vs Genji Bracelet vs Lost Allagan Bracelet

This is pretty simple, the substats on both of the i340 pieces of gear are trash once you’re out of prog. The idea is there is that a large amount of substats outweigh the lower main stat. In this case, 113 Crit, 113 Direct Hit and 79 Determination is more valuable to me than 14 Mind and 117 Determination. Pentamelding can be expensive, so if I had to choose between the two i340 pieces, I’d go with the Genji one as Det > Spell Speed.

Crafted Belt vs Lost Allagan belt

This one is a little more up in the air, unlike the bracelet, the Lost Allagan belt has Crit on it, on top of that, as the belt is a left side piece it not only decreases decreases your main stat, it also decreases your Vitality. Out of prog this isn’t really an issue because once your other pieces are fully i340/i345 you have more than enough HP to play around with. At the end of the day it comes down to personal preference. I use the Allagan belt with a +35 crit meld because of the way the crit tiers map out but the difference in effective damage increase is pretty miniscule.

Crafted Earring vs Genji Earring

Finally, one of the other debated pieces of gear that could potentially be swapped out is the earring. My personal reason for choosing the Genji earring is it has a “main” substat of Crit (meaning there is 117 crit and only 82 Piety), whereas the Lost Allagan Belt has a “main” substat of Piety (117 Piety vs 82 Crit). If you were to use the crafted accessory meld it with 2 Direct Hit VI’s and 3 Crit V’s.

~ Healing as an AST ~

General Tips

I’m going to put this out there from the beginning – I can’t tell you how to heal. Every pull of every fight will be different, even when you’re doing optimization and everything is meticulously planned out, the boss can still crit, people can mess up and get hit by things, and so by far your most important skill as a healer is the ability to adjust and adapt.

Once you are comfortable with a fight and the job, you should make it a priority to optimize your healing so you only heal when necessary. This doesn’t mean putting the entire healing burden on your co-healer, but rather finding ways to cut out unnecessary healing of your own. Overhealing (when you heal someone past their Max HP and essentially “waste” part of the heal) is not only inefficient, but also a waste of MP. Realistically, overheal happens, mostly due to regens and the insane potency of Earthly Star, but you want to try and keep yours under 30% as a general rule.

As of 4.0, AST has become somewhat similar to SCH in the sense that it excels when a fight can be planned out mostly due to the way Earthly Star works.

Earthly Star creates a large zone, roughly 15y in diameter (The same as the distance from your character to a max range helios) and gives the player who casts it a buff counting down from 10 called “Earthly Dominance”. The ability can be activated at any time to manually detonate the star, healing everyone within the explosion radius and also damaging all enemies. If the star is left to “mature” for 10 seconds the buff will be replaced with another 10 second buff called “Giant Dominance” and during this 10 second window the heal is increased by nearly 50% and the damage by 25%.

So what does all this mean? Let’s use O1S as an example. Throughout the fight Alte Roite will cast an ability called “Charybdis” which will reduce everyone’s HP to <100, shortly after he does this for the first time, he casts “Roar” which does significant damage to the entire raid. By planning this out, we can place our star down around the boss roughly 10 seconds before the cast of Charybdis and detonate a 720 potency heal on every member instantly before the Roar hits. To put that into perspective, 720 potency is about the same as 2.5 Helios and it doesn’t even require you to use a GCD, which means more time for pumping out DPS.

It’s important to note that this buff can be extended using Celestial Opposition but only to a maximum of 10 seconds, so technically you can place your Earthly Star nearly 30 seconds before the actual damage comes out if you refresh the buff at 1-2 seconds.

Essential Dignity is one of the best spells in the game, it’s off the Global Cooldown which means you can weave it, and it has a super low cooldown. It heals for more HP based on how low the party member is, in other words, make em sweat ~

Synastry lets you heal 2 targets at once, however the shield and regen effects aren’t applied to the second member. This can also be used to heal one target for a LOT in a small amount of time if you heal the party member with the buff.

Collective Unconscious is a mix between Asylum and Sacred Soil but requires you to sit in place to keep it active. This ability is based on server ticks, which means you may sometimes need to keep it active for 2-3 seconds before the regen effect will be applied. The regen from this ability is insane, the same as giving every party member inside a single target Aspected Benefic while also reducing damage while the bubble is active. Super useful for when there is high incoming damage over a period of time. NOTE: The regen is applied regardless of which sect you are in, so even if you are in Nocturnal Sect, you can still use this regen to help out your co-healer during those particularly stressful points.

Healing with a WHM

99% of the time if you’re healing with a WHM, you’ll be in Nocturnal Sect. Your job is to use the shield version of Aspected Benefic and Aspected Helios to lessen the incoming damage over the course of the fight.

One of the important things to think about is your co-healer’s regens. If everyone is at 80% HP and there’s no damage coming out, let the regens top everyone off and start throwing out some DPS, casting a helios would be a waste.

Another thing to think about is when the damage is going to happen throughout the fight. Your shields last 30 seconds, which is a lot longer than you’d think, but if no one takes any damage and they just fall off, then you just wasted a massive 60% of your cast. Knowing when to shield and when to let the regens do the work is a huge part of playing Nocturnal AST to its highest potential.

Healing with a SCH

If you’re healing with a SCH, you’ll want to be in Diurnal Sect. Your job is to make use of your regens when necessary to ensure the party has enough HP to survive the various attacks that will be thrown at it. This doesn’t mean everyone needs to be at 100% HP all the time, especially if there is a lot of downtime where your regens can really shine.

Think of it like this, Helios is your standard AoE heal. It has 300 potency. A Diurnal Aspected Helios has an initial 200 potency, but also applies a regen for 30 seconds. When you add all of this up Aspected Helios has a total potency of 700.

The same concept can be applied to Benefic and Aspected Benefic. Regular Benefic is 450 potency but the regen from Aspected Benefic makes for a total potency of 1040. Keeping a regen up on the tank while he’s taking auto attacks will handle a lot of the incoming damage from the fight.

Trust in your regens, let them do most of the work and start slinging those offensive spells at the enemy.

~ Opener, Rotation and DPS ~

Now we get to the fun part. DPS. Learning how to DPS as a healer is probably one of the most important things you can learn. Remember earlier when I said that optimizing healing is important, this is what you’ll be doing in your spare time.

First, let’s talk about clipping. Clipping is a term used to describe when you perform an action that is off the global cooldown, while the global cooldown is available. You should always aim to avoid clipping where possible, but unfortunately AST has a LOT of oGCD abilities and only one instant cast DPS spell. We can get around this in the opener by using Lightspeed but sometimes that’s not feasible because you’ll need it in the fight before it will be back off cooldown. I’ll go into more detail later.

DPSing as an AST is super simple. You have one DoT, Combust II, that should have near 100% uptime. If Combust II is up, you spam Malefic III over and over again until it’s time to re-apply Combust II. Simple, right? Sure! But then you have to factor in card micromanagement on top of this so it can get a little bit overwhelming at times.

The opener for AST changes a lot based on what cards you have available pre-pull. The ideal scenario would be you with a Held Balance, a drawn balance, a 50% AoE Royal Road, and a Lord of Crowns. Unless you’re doing speedkills, you probably won’t have the luxury of sitting around and waiting for the perfect hand, so I’ll also include modified versions of the opener based on what you do and don’t have available to you.

PREPULL (This is the same regardless of opener)

-5s > >

-3s (Precast)

Opener 1

The Double Balance Opener (Held Balance + Drawn Balance + AoE + Lord)

(PREPULL) > Drawn Balance > Combust II > Lord > Swiftcast > Malefic III > Celestial Opposition > Sleeve Draw > Malefic III > Lord > Refresh Combust II as it falls off > Malefic III until Balance falls off > Held Balance if AoE > Malefic III > Time Dilation

Opener 2

The Single Balance Opener (Held Balance + Any Card + AoE + Lord)

(PREPULL) > Held Balance > Combust II > Lord > Swiftcast > Malefic III > Celestial Opposition > Malefic III > Minor Arcana > Malefic III > Lord > Malefic III > Sleeve Draw > Malefic III > Lord > Malefic III Spam > Refresh Combust II as it falls off > Held Card on Best suited target > Malefic III > Time Dilation

Opener 3

Lightspeed (Held Balance + Any Card + AoE + Lord)

(PREPULL) > Drawn / Held Balance > Combust II > Lord > Lightspeed > Malefic III > Celestial Opposition > Malefic III > Minor Arcana > Malefic III > Toggle Lightspeed Off > Lord > Sleeve Draw > Malefic III > Lord (Adapt based on Sleeve Draw and held card) > Refresh Combust as it falls off > Time Dilation

Based on your Sleeve Draw you should Redraw and or Royal Road in hopes of ending up with an AoE for your held Balance. You can minor arcana anything else if you get the 50% Royal Road and if you don’t get lucky, play the card you’re given on the target best suited to it (As mentioned earlier in the guide) and if it’s a Bole, Minor Arcana it and pray for a Lord.

Using Lightspeed in your opener is super Min-Max stuff because it reduces your Malefic III damage by 25%, so you have to be sure you can make up that damage with reduced clipping.

~ Helpful Macros ~

Thanks to a change in 4.1 we can Discard cards using macros again. You can manually do this by right clicking the buff, or you can macro it so that you can easily hit the button even while mid cast.

Undraw – Removes the currently drawn card

/micon “Undraw”
/merror off
/statusoff “Arrow Drawn”
/statusoff “Balance Drawn”
/statusoff “Spire Drawn”
/statusoff “Bole Drawn”
/statusoff “Ewer Drawn”
/statusoff “Spear Drawn”

Undraw Spread – Discards the card currently held in your spread.

/micon “Undraw Spread”
/merror off
/statusoff “Arrow Held”
/statusoff “Balance Held”
/statusoff “Spire Held”
/statusoff “Bole Held”
/statusoff “Ewer Held”
/statusoff “Spear Held”

Empty Road – Removes the current Royal Road Effect

/micon “Empty Road”
/merror off
/statusoff “Expanded Royal Road”
/statusoff “Enhanced Royal Road”
/statusoff “Extended Royal Road”

Protect Macro – Swaps Protect in, casts it, and then removes it from your Role Actions

/macrolock

/macroicon Protect

/aaction Swiftcast off

/aaction Protect on

/ac Protect <wait.3>

/aaction Protect off

/aaction Swiftcast on

Mouseover Rescue – Casts Rescue on the target you are mousing over. Good for adapting on the fly

/micon Rescue

/ac Rescue <mo>

~ Summary and Goodbye ~

In the end, I can’t make you heal a certain way, and I can’t force you to DPS if you don’t want to, but that’s fine. Everyone plays the job differently, I just wanted to share my thoughts and give a little insight into the job I love. I hope you learned something from this, and I’d appreciate feedback because I’ve never done anything like this before.

If you want to contact me my Discord is Elise#1420 and my IGN is Elise Belle on Sargatanas. Don’t hesitate to message me if you have any questions or think anything in this guide can be improved.

Thanks for taking the time to read what I’ve written and may the RNG gods be with you always~

~ Introduction ~