Originally Posted by
Mibgestalt
Pretty much this.
It's supposed to be half and half in terms of competition.
I don't think anyone in this thread has said that AST's healing in Diurnal needs a buff, it's where it needs to be, which is weaker than WHM, but capable of healing encounters. It's just that the card system in general needs an adjustment to reduce the chances of it being useless in any given encounter.
What I hope people understand is that, properly balanced, the benefit from cards and AST's DPS and healing providing DPS opportunities for the off-healer needs to be an equal bit stronger than a WHM's if it's going to have a weaker, more unsafe healing kit. And this is taking into account ALL of the healing kit, not how much raw single target a class can push out.
Raiding is about progressively optimizing and getting better and improving on a given encounter until you beat it, and an unreliable utility kit is pretty much the antithesis of that. An RNG element isn't a bad thing, crits exist, but for something so central to AST's kit, it needs to be an RNG element that is mitigated by player skill and strategy.
As for an AST filling in a SCH spot? Good luck. I don't even know where to start with that, because SCH has so many unmatched strongpoints in their kit compared to Nocturnal. It's not even about the healing.