Quote Originally Posted by Seraphor View Post
AST cards were not perfect.

Their goal this expac was to better balance the three healer kits. The problem here is that AST had a pretty decent mitigation tool within it's RNG card buff system.
They couldn't balance for the possibility of having the Bole available.

Additionally, large scale Crit and Speed buffs are hard to balance, not least because of how Crit scales making it progressively more powerful the further into the current expansion we are. This is why BRD lost it's crit procs, and partly why Wildfire was changed so as not to double up on crits.

Overall the buffs were scaled back to reduce the amount of burst rdps AST kicks out, and make it a bit more consistent.

NINs Trick Attack got a similar treatment.
the bole was fine. on aoe it was the same as sacred soil which scholar can put out every 30 seconds or fey covenant too, and on single target its basically pld's intervention.

besides bole really only shone in prog and almost everyone progged with white mage, to the point whm was called the prog healer.

the old systems weakness was its unreliability and the huge disparity between buffs, mostly that balance was overtuned. there was also the issue that if you wanted to use the utility cards, you had to sacrifice your royal road you might've been saving for balance/spear.

but instead of finding ways to increase consistency, to make other cards more usable and the balance not straight up broken, they just made everything the most boring iteration possible next to PvP cards.