Does having AST cancel the possibility to have Time Mage?

[MintnHoney]

Personally, I never thought that AST would take the place of a Time Mage or vice versa: even when AST had its full suite of time-related abilities, AST's "specialization" was in celestial-themed magic and divining. Therefore, there is always room for someone who specializes in Time Magic. It's like saying that RDM couldn't exist in its current iteration because BLM has fire/lightning magic, and CNJ has/had earth/wind magic.

[Shurrikhan]

Personally, I never thought that AST would take the place of a Time Mage or vice versa: even when AST had its full suite of time-related abilities, AST's "specialization" was in celestial-themed magic and divining. Therefore, there is always room for someone who specializes in Time Magic. It's like saying that RDM couldn't exist in its current iteration because BLM has fire/lightning magic, and CNJ has/had earth/wind magic.

It mostly just depends on whether AST, in being "celestial", is supposed to be the time-space caster (even if among other things). Celestial magics may also include a more Divination (though that is, in most systems, a sub-set of space-time magic, just as gravitational magics are another subset), but you don't usually get Haste, Slow (Heavy), Gravity, Levity, and Time Dilation magics, as AST launched with, without being deeply invested into time-space magics. Gameplay wise, sure, someone else could take that from AST, but not without cannibalizing its former lore and gameplay, even if the devs has since gutted most of that area in the name of accessibility.

Unless you want to spend every GCD lightening and then immediately heavying DRGs' jumps, lightening enemy attacks while heavying your allies', time-compressing your team's DoTs while time-dilating the enemies, ad nauseum, no job is going to be just Time Magics and Time Magics alone. There's going to need to be a larger aesthetic umbrella of skills and motifs into which they'll fit to give it a functioning toolkit, to host Time Magic cohesively but usefully. And I can't imagine a better host for that than AST. Time-, Space-, Bless-, Curse-, and Divination-based magics make for a pretty great package.