Healers Exist for DPS fun only?

[Sebazy]

Here is a historical overview of AST:

A couple of small corrections.

Regarding Heavensward:

Gravity was fine, I'm honestly not sure why you're hating on it so much? It's main downfall vs WHM and SCH aoe was actually the need to target a monster to cast it. It was pretty common to lose a GCD or two to your target mob getting killed right before the gravity cast went off if your group was stomping trash particularly quickly. Weaving with it really wasn't that big a deal, in dungeons you'd generally get the best results just pounding the trash to dust and then dealing with cards whilst running, you'd spam aero/combust/cards as much as you could whilst moving and then just mash Gravity once the Tank positioned things. Also note that Gravity was and still is at somewhat of an advantage vs trash pulls with lots of ground marker spam, the 4th trash pull in The Twinning is a great example of this where Holying through AoEs was particularly risky.

Regen works in the same way as dots in that it's potency snapshots depending on your buffs when you cast it. Dropping a regen on a tank and then hitting cleric stance had your regen continuing to heal for it's full amount. If I'm remembering it correctly, Earthly Star also healed it's full amount irrespective of if you had Cleric stance up or not.

Aero was 100% worth using on the condition that it was going to run it's full duration, 180 potency total over 18 seconds for one GCD. Stacking dots on everything you could was always fundamental to doing good healer damage irrespective of single or multi target. Also just incase it's not clear, Combust I and II both stacked. As an AST you'd use all 3 dots on a single target if you were trying to maximise your damage (assuming it wasn't going to die or go immune before the full dot duration that is). As a fun bit of bonus trivia, back in 2.0 WHM also had access to Thunder which was also well worth using.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLGUMzl2cV0 - Some Heavensward AST gameplay of mine in an A12S PF for reference.

Moving onto Stormblood:

You're mostly on point, light speed was primarily a mobility and MP conservation tool at this point. One fairly major point that is worth noting is that AST actually out AoE'd SCH by quite a significant margin in 4.0 initially. WHM was ahead of AST by a modest margin with SCH an insultingly distant 3rd through a perfect storm of nerfs to it's AoE kit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ35BP-PEaI - Stormblood gameplay running Seiryu on AST again in a PF.

Not to mention that AST up until Shb had no access to AoE for any content in ARR. Their AoE was available at level 52. I would have probably never queued for leveling roulette. Can you imagine? Running Keeper of the Lake and not being able to AoE anything. The suffering must have been unfathomable. What else can you do besides AoE-ing? Circle your unspreadable DoTs? Give me a break. That gameplay was terrible.

Yep, AST's dungeon gameplay pre Gravity was absolutely horrible. Do you know the best part about this? Stormblood saw this exact issue being dumped on SCHs at the level cap. If there was ever a smoking gun that clearly demonstrated that SE's battle system team put zero effort into healers. 4.0 SCH was it.

Basically Shb AST with old card system with probably serious clip problems and terrible AoE.

Note that the cast time change for AST came partway through Stormblood with patch 4.3. I'd argue that this era was peak AST if you discount the 20% balance times during 3.4.

It is not completely accurate to say that DoTs were removed for AST.

It is 100% accurate to say that DoTs were removed for all 3 healers, AST included. AST used to roll with 3 dots in HW as can be seen in my replay that I've linked. Having dots with different cast mechanics and durations added an extra layer of complexity particularly if you were really trying to min max your efficiency.

There was no worth in taking any INT on healers that I can ever remember since you wouldn't see any benefit from it when Cleric was up, nor was it really worth spending GCDs on damage without Cleric stance going by the time you were level 50. If you were really chasing that last bit of damage you'd be cane/book slapping and throwing PPPs.

Lastly, it's fair to say that AST has lost the least depending on where you stand with the new vs old cards. Things don't look so peachy if you compare how SCH has been handled over the years though. And that's without mentioning the raid utility we've lost over time such as Eye for an Eye and Virus.