Quote Originally Posted by Rubiss View Post
Are you implying AST was anything but garbage until the buffs? Because what you had with an early AST was a crappier WHM with card buffs that did very little, took forever to draw and lasted barely any time or you'd have that plus a Scholar with weaker barriers and no fairy.

If you wanted a limited and gimped healer, AST was great in 3.0 and 3.1
SE had to reduce the AST's skill curve just to get people to play it because it wasn't friendly to use to a large group of people. AST shone on players that were solid healers that knew what you were doing- anything less and it showed quite starkly.

Even after the first round of buffs, a startlingly large amount of people were still unwilling to bring ASTs into content, despite being just as good as a WHM even then and shielding better than a SCH even then. Then 3.4 came and the buffs were just overkill and finally people started to take them.

So no, it's not about wanting a gimped healer, just sadly anything different gets shot down by the community.