AST Wishlist for 5.0

[Airym]

If you take away shields you'll break the viability of WHM/AST groups on a lot of Savage content (which is already a rare combo, but is totally viable) and you'll make ultimate basically impossible since the boss will just kill everyone without heavy party mitigation management, which pugs will be really hard pressed to handle. Having cards handle debuffs is not gonna help because it's RNG.

Direct heals also tend to be GCDs , and the over reliance on GCDs is a big part of the reason why WHM is ignored in meta. It would be extremely interesting though to replace benefic/helios with weaker insta-cast oGCDs that you could weave using some kind of resource (or we run into even worse mana problems than we already have) , so you'd really be speedy in responding to damage. They could get the trait from ED that increases the potency the lower the target's HP is so there is incentive to AST always being the first to respond.

Resource generation could be tied to your card play so you don't just hold stuff forever, like the faster you deal with the card the more you build kinda thing, and using Minor Arcana on it could punish you by generating less of this resource that you need to cast insta-heals.

[Gemina]

If you take away shields you'll break the viability of WHM/AST groups on a lot of Savage content (which is already a rare combo, but is totally viable) and you'll make ultimate basically impossible since the boss will just kill everyone without heavy party mitigation management, which pugs will be really hard pressed to handle. Having cards handle debuffs is not gonna help because it's RNG.

Mitigation doesn't always have to come via shields. Both AST and WHM can be given abilities that weaken the boss to reduce their outgoing damage for lethal AoE, and also increase the physical/magical defense of the raid for the coming attack. This in turn allows these mitigation tools to be stacked on top of SCH shields, or each other in the case of AST/WHM. I would imagine mitigation coming from two sources would be heavily favored for EX, Savage and Ultimate.

All jobs themselves can also be given tools to mitigate their own damage as a third source to reduce damage even further, and many already do to my knowledge. I feel that mitigation should definitely be a team effort, and the devs should come up with more way than just shields to achieve it.

[KDSilver]

Mitigation doesn't always have to come via shields. Both AST and WHM can be given abilities that weaken the boss to reduce their outgoing damage for lethal AoE.

They used to have some.
Disable for AST and the unenhanced version of Virus, but they took it away from healers...

[Maltothoris]

Mitigation doesn't always have to come via shields. Both AST and WHM can be given abilities that weaken the boss to reduce their outgoing damage for lethal AoE, and also increase the physical/magical defense of the raid for the coming attack. This in turn allows these mitigation tools to be stacked on top of SCH shields, or each other in the case of AST/WHM. I would imagine mitigation coming from two sources would be heavily favored for EX, Savage and Ultimate.

All jobs themselves can also be given tools to mitigate their own damage as a third source to reduce damage even further, and many already do to my knowledge. I feel that mitigation should definitely be a team effort, and the devs should come up with more way than just shields to achieve it.

THe problem is that back in HW when healers did have other tools, it made AST/SCH way too strong. Astros had the 6 second disable and Collective and Sch has the supervirus which lowered both magic and physical where whm could only get the untraited virus which lowered physical, deploy, fey covenant, 20 percent fey illumination and the 2 min e4e back when the duration was 30 seconds and the debuff on bosses lated 20 instead of 10, and then there other factors too. But again we have to remember their design philosophy with healers and in particular whm. Whm is just a "pure" healer class which means just healing spells with the only exceptions being stoneskin and divine bension, no debuffs or other thing which I do think needs to change.

Edit: Take for example UCOB final phase, Morn Afah does somewhere between 400-420k damage where just simply stacking and shields doesn't work. You need to specifically plan our your cds. SCH has a huge advantage over noct ast because sacred soil is a 30 cd and morn afah goes 0>50>30>50>50 with how they are spread apart in seconds. Collective is 90 seconds so it goes up for 1 3 and 5 leaving 4 and 5 needing extra attention. It also limits the composition since you would NEED a paladin for divine veil and passage of arms and a magic caster for addle(groups could get away with brd/mch like the WF did). There have to be a good amount of work to figure this out.