5.3 AST Changes

[ForteNightshade]

But I expect for Savage and Ultimate, MP could be s hindrance for AST players? Not sure how much of a difference it makes there as not taken mine there.

It's brutal if you're aggressively DPSing, have to raise or even misalign your Lucid Dreaming casts. Basically, Astro will bottom out no matter what you do unless the fight has ample enough downtime to make up for it. Dying just makes you want to die again. The big issue is Astro has absolutely no way to recover. Both White Mage and Scholar can effectively relegate Lucid to their backup spell whereas Astro clings to it for dear life. It doesn't help that prior to the forthcoming change, Lightspeed was used for Sleeve Draw because of the sheer amount of weaving you have to do.

Now if you aren't as aggressive DPS wise, it's a bit easier to handle. Raising still hurts far too much relative to the other healers. Personally, I actually wouldn't mind more emphasise put back into resource management but at the moment, it's not fair only one healer has to deal with it while the other two don't.

If WHM had the same mobility and weaving capability as AST, the balance of healers would be completely thrown out the window. There would need to be potency reductions across the board for WHM to even consider it.
You also can’t compare WHM and BLM, as Shadowbringers displayed clear DPS favoritism from a development perspective.

Take a step back and think about balance rationally, and not just what you personally think is best. It’s the community spouting ludicrous ideas like yours that got healers into the homogenized mess we are currently in.

You're really overstating how powerful White Mage actually is. At optimal levels, you'll barely lose a single cast due to movement issues. Even if there was a discrepancy, lowered potency for better movement tools would be a far superior design choice. Clipping is not fun gameplay hence why they've made so many additions to Black Mage's kit. It had nothing to do with DPS favoritism but other people's dislike towards their design. Well, that and Black Mages so readily eating mechanics to avoid moving.

And lets be honest with ourselves here. The homogenization occurred because the dev team keeps trying to cater towards the lowest common denominator. And because they still think we heal through GCDs and need to consider our casts instead of how we actually play, which is to spam Glare/Malefic/Broil 70-90% of the time.