Quote Originally Posted by Kabzy View Post
AST, as far as I can remember, haven't really received anything notable except for their Balance nerf.
This is from your prior post. I don't mean to get nit picky but based on what you say there either you forgot about the Spear change (catapulting it from the most useless card in the deck, something agreed upon virtually unanimously, to the second best) or you somehow are of the opinion that the Spear change was not notable.

With those two changes to cards competent ASTs went from sometimes buffing the party a crazy amount to pretty regularly buffing the party for a still meaningful damage increase. Again, I don't mean to be rude bbuthave you seen a BRD with the Spear while Litany is up? To imply this isn't a significant buff to AST is silly.

Quote Originally Posted by Kabzy View Post
Not really, the Spear is good but its main purpose IMO was to eliminate the fishing that ASTs had to constantly do. It makes the card system more fluid. But saying that it gave AST a net gain over losing their old Balance is just silly. That one card gave them a guaranteed spot everywhere and was overpowered as hell. The changes to ASTs card might make the gameplay more fluid, but numbers wise is a flat out nerf. Reminder, the first card was never RNG and would always be the most impactful lining up with everyones buffs/openers.

As for your second point, I'd say that's a subjective argument. Personally I hear about this "speedrun meta mindset" and then things like "kicked for not DPSing as healer" on the forums literally everywhere and have yet to encounter it in game ... ever. Now I'm not directing this at you, but I feel like people who use those arguments for why they weren't picked need to look at themselves before they blame the job they are playing. WHM pre 4.0 had many issues, those have all been addressed bar utility. However, as I said before, giving them utility creates imbalances with other jobs (mainly AST), and then you put AST in a bad position. The balance is still good, there's no need to throw a wrench in it.
The balance is still good for an AST main. Is the balance better than HW? For sure! But just because healers are more balanced than HW doesn't mean they're in a good place. The healer balance in HW was literally nonexistant and I'm glad that wasn't something you experienced personally but it doesn't change the fact that it was true.

The bottom line is this, and I challenge anyone to offer a rebuttal to it. All healers can heal all content. Two healers have raid dps increases. This is not balanced. There is nothing that WHMs can do that will ever equate to even mediocre Balance/Spear/Arrow uptime from an AST or Chain Stratagem from a SCH. This guarantees AST a spot anywhere they want one STILL and has WHM and SCH fighting over the leftovers except for the fact that SCH at least thought to bring a weapon to the fight.

The way I see it the only way to balance these things is to give all healers the same basic toolkit, or buff WHM DPS to the point of meeting AST's contrinution to the raid.