AST, MCH, DRK and their failure as new jobs at HW launch

[Welsper59]

The three jobs are fun for what they are. They did a good job of laying out the foundations and, over time, will only make them better. The issues surrounding them and all being under-powered initially is an example of a fault that surrounds many creators of anything. They try to innovate within archaic structuring. Specifically, I'm referring to trying to be different while maintaining a STRICT holy trinity formula. They want jobs to feel different, but they refuse to break the trinity formula. To their credit, in order to do that, it'd require a huge movement to a near total restructuring of the combat system, which isn't exactly feasible at this stage of the game.

When you follow a narrow trinity formula and you base combat difficulty around it, innovation behind what you can do to make jobs feel different gets less and less for the more jobs you design. Eventually, you create an identity crisis like what BRD and MCH had (and will continue to have as time goes on). AST suffered this as well, because devs felt their buffs to be powerful enough to override a need for stronger healing proficiency. Objectively, that implies they thought that in order to be equal in healing to SCH and WHM, AST should do... less... healing... because they get more variety of buffs that don't heal... yeah, good one.

Balance is the name of the game when you have a trinity style format. The more you try to break away from it, the more you fear the potential of things like temporary "support" skills/spells to be overpowered (they really aren't in most cases) and the less you feel said job should do regarding their actual role in the trinity. It's an unfortunate reality when it comes to this, but it always happens, without fail. Balance will come over time, and that's really the main saving grace, as we've all seen by example with the new trio of jobs (which will continue to be further improved upon).