While I don't agree with the OP about WHM dying out due to these patches and I /do/ think AST needed a buff to make them competitive with the other healers, I admit I don't necessarily agree with how it was done. At launch they were more or less played off as a class that could chose to be a watered down WHM or a water down SCH depending on the needs of the party and the cards would be their main differentiating quality. Unfortunately the RNG and other issues with the cards sorta didn't play out and make it significant enough to encourage anyone to pick them over the other two established healers. I feel as if buffs to AST should be to make their cards viable enough to the party that they are chosen on that basis. As it stands it feels like they buffed the WHM aspect of them and more or less put them on par or close to with WHM in healing capacity.

Will it kill the class? No. Do I feel like WHM should have something of their own? Yes. That is the point of balance. As said above, a lot of our best qualities and moves are given away. I don't necessarily feel that saying our dps is higher should be the defining trait of a healer. It should be secondary. Even the mana regen is...well frankly I hardly need it unless the party is inflicted with the dreaded 'WHAT MEAN DODGE' and constantly makes me raise/heal them. Its nice to be able to carry people through like that but I'm not even sure we are the undisputed AoE healers now since what I understand from the patch notes seems like they more or less have medica II. Cure III is highly situational and while Assize is nice I don't know that its enough to call it 'our thing'.

Long story short, healers should be different. Scholar should be best at mitigation, WHM should be best at raw healing and AST should be best at buffs and it should be by a noticeable margin. They should be buffing what is unique about AST and if they need more heals, adding that capacity to their cards in some fashion. Not making their WHM stance more powerful. If this is the direction its going, WHM sorta feels like they are slowly losing ground on their niche market. We aren't dead but we are becoming the short kid in the marching band. Are we doing our job? Yes. Will you take notice of us? Probably not. Just my piece on this going by the initial look over. I'm going to level my AST now to see how I feel after that.