AST buffs in 3.4 Changes to Barries and Cards.

[Teraluna]

Gurl please

At least we have some fun and challenge beside a mindless cure-spammer and an angry fairy enslaver !

If rng is your main concern about ast then you didn't even open your eyes on this royal class road
Whm shall fear for their Ass <3

...

Ok i admit that RNGesus is favorably blessing my Ass because i always had the card i want/need what i have to have it xP

As I play all three, then the whm 'ass fearing' is immaterial.
If I was concerned about the other healer classes being somehow threatened by the Ast, then I'd not be campaigning to make it better.

It's not royal road, spread, shuffle etc, it's the fact that they've introduced rng into the selection of a class's skills. This is a gimmick. Selection of skills should be down to the player, not a roll the dice rng, ooh look what I got mechanic.
That pot luck is bad enough in ftp games with lockboxes, and has no place in a structured mmo class.

To me they looked at the Ast and tried to go for either a Whm lite or Sch lite. This was a missed opportunity to introduce a truly different type of healer.
But that chance has gone unless there is a major re-imagining of the class, unlikely.

What can be done are revisions to the Nocturnal sect, which needs a good looking at.
The devs tried to combine both pre-emptive and re-active healing in this class with the two sects - and have ended up with a lop-sided bias.

They've also painted themselves into a corner in making this third healer a me too ranged class with little real differentiation. It's now a very fine balancing act to get players to use all three.
Playing this class purely out of boredom with the others doesn't give you that much of a change to be honest, particularly compared to the whm which you have referenced.

Hopefully the next healer class will have real differentiation - a battle cleric or similar. An in depth re-working of the Nocturnal sect could go this way, but I fear any changes will just be tinkering with the class.