AST: What it means to be a "hybrid"...

[Alahra]

-snip-

I'm not necessarily on board with the changes in the OP, either. They're probably all too much, even individually. I don't think numerically doubling the cards would even really address the majority of issues anyway. The better solution, in my opinion, is to make all the cards worthwhile. Two of them are useful in nearly all situations, and this should be the case for all six of them.

Spire and Ewer are too limited in use. Unlike Balance and Arrow, they don't actually provide an increase in output for the target in most situations. No one is going to change their skill rotation because they are using less TP or MP now--they're already using their abilities in the most optimal way (or at least, they should be, in progression content). Ewer has some utility for healer mana conservation, but SCH and WHM have plenty of mana control. That leaves only AST that can really make use of Ewer for healing efficiency (but that's more of a problem of AST relative to the other two healers than it is a problem with Ewer).

Spear is only significantly impactful in coordinated burst situations for progression/static groups, when you can work out in advance when people will be using a large number of off-global cooldowns. Given that it requires planning to have a noticeable impact, it is thereby usually very difficult to use, since you can't often plan to have a Spear (unless you save it with Spread, anyway--but it's probably more efficient in most cases to save a Balance or Arrow for a burst phase).

Bole is middle-of-the-road. By itself, it does allow for more healer DPS, theoretically, since it should result in less healing needed on the tank. For ASTs, at least, though, I've never managed to get more than another cast or two out of it.

Of course, all four of the less useful cards can be used for Royal Road, though this runs the risk of actually reducing the impact your cards have over time even further, since you don't know if you'll get a Balance or Arrow on your next draw, and the only Royal Road option that actually makes cutting yourself from 2 cards a minute to 1 card a minute is Extended (since it doubles the effect). Expanded can double the effect in 8 man situations as well, if you can manage to catch all four DPS with it (which isn't easy given the 15y radius of the effect).

Given that you only have a 1/3 chance of drawing a card to use that Royal Road benefit on on your next card, though, tossing a card to Royal Road is generally only going to reduce your efficiency even further.

If every card draw had impact the way that say, SCH's 3 Aetherflow charges do (roughly one charge per 20 seconds, not incomparable), things would be a different story. That's not even including something like Fey Wind, which although weaker than individual card buffs, has the incredibly valuable strength of consistency on its side, something that's of great value especially in progression settings.