I was doing A1S yesterday as WHM/AST and things went really well. Better than when I was playing SCH. I used Diurnal, and the extra Regen was amazing, since that fight doesn't require heavy shielding. The WHM dpsed before the second boss came out and we handled healing just fine after (there's no need to DPS when both oppressors are out, according to videos). There was this one time my WHM partner died from a lag spike and I raised him and solo healed until he got his MP back; we hit enrage, so it was a full recovery, with no consequent wipe (DPS check wasn't affected by the death, so...). The cards actually helped a lot. I used some on my MNK and at the end his oppressor had 10% less HP than the other. That shows that the cards are not underwhelming and that they can make a difference. I think that if they allowed AST to change stances during fights, a lot of the problems would go away.