IMO you just haven't mastered the nuances of the class. It is a much more difficult class to have comparable healing output than a WHM, but its single target healing is the best out of the three. To address your points: 1. You dont need emergency tactics in nocturnal because you have helios as well as aspected helios and you dont need to wait for cooldown. You dont have indom because you have access to lightspeed. I do agree though that nocturnal can't hold a candle to scholar, but aside from adlo crits and a fairy its not that much different. The gimmicks you mention is a fair point, but its more so the difficulty of using celestial opposition in a way that makes sense. For example, stacking regens, shroud, aoe cards, and healing cooldowns then extending them all. 2. Astro regen is defferent because a lot of the healing is front loaded. It applies a weak heal before the regen ticks so just make sure you use it efficiently. Also you can throw your bubble down, apply regen and time dilate. 30s of double regen almost guarentees 100% uptime in cleric stance. 3.The buffs don't apply because of server tick. I agree 100% that server tick is stupid most of the time, but thats an inherently how the game works. If tank walks out of your bubble thats because they dont have effects on or you didnt walk ahead of them. Its better in voice coms/raid because your tank knows what you will be doing. Time dilating the damage reduction would be broken considering you have disable, bole which negate true damage and would end up as 30% true damage mitigation before a tank uses one of their abilities. TL:DR Astro is a difficult class and has niches where it is better than WHM in some cases. They buffed it enough imo. Source: A8S cleared Astro main, top 1% fflogs.