Question from a new player - can AST change back to what it was before ?

[TankHunter678]

You misunderstand me.
Of course their effects were beneficial, but relying on RNG to access them was not. We now have Celestial Intersection, and a more effective Lucid Dreaming.
Potencies could do with tweaking still, that's ASTs main problem now across the board, but the reliability of these skills is much better than hoping you draw a Bole or a Ewer.

There is really no effective difference to choosing between ranged/melee or crit/speed.

If you had a BRD/MNK/NIN, then you're giving them Crit.
If you had SAM/BLM, then you're giving them Speed.
The rest? Doesn't really matter, redraw for a chance at a Balance or just use Spear/Arrow on them anyway.
There's no superior decision making taking place. The effects of increase Crit/Speed might have 'felt' better, but for entirely irrational reasons, you weren't the one receiving the boost.

All of this "choosing between ranged/melee is trash" is utterly disingenuous, salty overdramatisation. It's just different targets, that's all.

It is not over dramatization when you realize that you could just change the current cards into their seals and remove the melee/ranged split you reduce the cards from 6 to 3, if you removed the seals and split it drops down to 1, it also feels like crap when you get all ranged for DPS or all melee for DPS and half of your cards become worthless when with the old system none of your cards became worthless.

Even your idea is the same. You could just turn the cards into their seals and remove the melee/ranged split resulting in you reducing the cards to just 3. The only benefit your idea has is at least each seal has its own effect. Unless the cards were brought down to 3 though you still suffer the issue of half your cards becoming worthless just due to party composition.

And sorry but Celestial Intersection is nice and all but it does not hold a candle to the amount of effective damage reduction that Bole gave which made the effective healing of regen effects or the effective durability of shields much better not to mention Celestial Intersection having weak potencies for its cooldown making it worse then an aspected benefic. Even with the current more effective lucid dreaming AST remains as the worst of the healers when it comes to MP management if it dares attempt to use Noct. Thanks to use having no access to a secondary source of MP recovery unlike the other two healers.