Quote Originally Posted by Jirah View Post
The game has been suspiciously getting easier to the point of giving Gamefreak’s Pokemon a run for its money. Easy difficulty is conveniently easier to devolve for. Tanks no longer worry about Aggro, DPS/Healer no longer need To worry about stealing eminity under regular circumstances.
Facilitating the function of a job's primary role makes the job easier to play; this doesn't necessarily translate to the game being easier. There's a big distinction there.

In order for the game (encounters) to be easier, things like DPS checks have to become more lenient, hard enrages removed, longer cast times for boss abilities, more telegraphs, less out going damage, etc. In this regard, the game hasn't got any easier at all. In fact, just the opposite as the devs are stacking more and more mechanics in normal mode encounters because the playerbase is consistently getting better at handling them. Which you can add to the reasons on how a game gets easier over time. But I digress.

As to the topic, AST is just fine as simply a healer, but this is easily accomplished with the game's healing requirements. It suffers a bit with MP regeneration and still lacks a solid skill to restore MP quickly, but other than that the majority of the complaints all gravitate towards its card mechanic. Which is a mess. Has always been a mess. And will continue to be a mess because a mechanic that heavily utilizes RNG isn't going to work. Even after stripping most those layers away with ShB, the little RNG that is left is still creating a lot of grief with this job. Not necessarily because the RNG makes getting a desired (seal) difficult, but because the RNG aspect of this mechanic has forced all of its cards into a single buff.

This job has an incredibly high APM, and a incredulously low feeling of reward even if doing it all optimally. They are what I call the catapult loaders. They do the brunt of the work, but the person launching the catapult gets to have all the fun. I hope that makes sense.