Quote Originally Posted by IceBlueNinja View Post
Am so confused. All of a sudden people is asking about giving ast back duel sects? People use to gripe about ast being a wannabe whm / sch and thats gone and ast is no longer abused, now sage faving old ast abuse. Ast itself too dont have identity no more too if there as to be bias most spells is copy whm things which is just cheaper and better lol. Nah delete all healers and let blue mage be a full time healer and maybe all be happy. The sage hate really stem off noct hate is what it is. Ast and Sage are copies of whm and sch and have slighty unique things but not much. Sage aint going no where no matter how many hates on it , let it be for the few who actually has no issue with it and stay with your overated sch please.
From as early as HW, a major complaint is that the sect system felt lazy and restrictive. Rather than allow AST to have its own unique approach to healing, it was decided that it should just either be a budget WHM or a budget SCH rather than just be its own thing. People wanted it to drop both sects and do something different, like be a delayed healing healer, or a healer that sets up detonates heals. Maybe that’s what inspired Earthly Star.

Additionally, Noct has always been the inferior form. Noct barriers don’t stack, but diurnal regents do. Extending the duration of regens was possible with time dilation/celestial opposition, but extending barriers is worthless. Even after the removal of buff extension, diurnal would just out perform nocturnal significantly side barriers were largely unnecessary in content. Why bother when you’ll get exponentially more value out of regens? The concept of removing nocturnal still remained, but under the implication that diurnal would also be removed and AST would do its own thing.

Fast forward to now and the pure/barrier binary has been enforced, though the actual lines between them are hazy at best. But if we’re going to flesh out this dynamic, then the removal of nocturnal ends up being silly. Why take away the jobs ability to flex between these spots just to have an even number of pure and barrier healers when we’re just going to cross that bridge anyway when a 5th healer is added?

Ultimately, while the pure/barrier system has left a lot to be desired, most people are willing to work with it if it can become something other than a joke.