Healers, then and now:

[ForsakenRoe]

You know, I didn't realize it till now, but Old Spear (the 'use stuff under the effect of Spear, get shorter CDs) would be REAL NICE now. If everything auto-aligns for 2min windows, having a card that reduces the CD on those raidbuffs (though it'd have to be tweaked to a flat value rather than a %) would be real interesting. 'Oh if we get one AOE Spear instead of a Balance, we actually gain a raidbuff window, which is more damage increase than the Balance would give us', stuff like that

They were somewhat unbalanced to be fair. Celestial Opposition didn't just extend normal damage buffs by 10 seconds, it extended Lucid Dreaming, your potion, Lightspeed, HoTs, Shields, your Earthly Star and probably something else that I forgot about. It didn't just make Ast an rDPS powerhouse but allowed it to run almost no piety and pump out healing so powerful it made Whitemages cry in a corner.

Some things to note from my memory, AST's MP economy was not great at the start (HW). It wasn't a case of 'you can extend Luminiferous Aether', it was more 'you HAVE to extend Luminiferous, or you're running out of MP'. Skills didn't work the same back then either, CO wasn't a regen (it extended), CU wasn't 'sticky', it only applied it's effect while you channeled it, Star didn't exist in HW, so most of the healing was still being done by GCDs, which meant MP costs. I assume the devs were expecting the AST player would use Ewer on themselves to maintain their MP pool, too. As such, the HPS of the AST seemed (at least to me) more tuned around the idea that you'd put up the HOTs, and extend them to make up for the fact you had less HPS than the WHM by default. Extending shields doesn't increase their strength, only how long they last, so that's not much use. Extending Star just means it either takes 10s more to auto-detonate (who cares), or take 10s more to grow to full size (actually a detriment). Potion extension was the weird one, that could have been fixed if SE had used one braincell to change it from 'extend AST buffs' to 'extend AST buffs applied by abilities and spells'. Extending Sprint was funny but also a meme (where were you going to need a 30s sprint in a raid, that a 20s sprint wasn't going to be enough for?)

It was the additions in SB that turned AST into the 'imbalanced god' it became, which would be fine IF WHM wasn't a dumpsterfire with it's new lily system (the bad one). Don't blame the powerful class, blame the devs for making the trash one, trash. They reworked WAR in 4.2, they did a sweeping changelist to DRK in 4.3, there is NO REASON they could not have done SOMEthing to WHM throughout the patches, beyond 'oh yeh we changed PI so you get the stacks from AOE skills now instead of single target skills', great, you wanna address the fact that by the time you have enough stacks built for PI to do anything worth a damn, you've already fully healed the team? 'No, see you in 5.0, also don't forget to buy the new mogstation item'

This argument holds 0 water when they changed the cards once. Got feed back before 5.0 went live. Told the AST community to try it and still haven't done a single thing to improve it. They COULD have made the Seals system a proper buffing system like was asked in Shb and which I used as an example in my post. They didn't for w/e reason.

They already tried the "either you like it or don't" approach. Guess which is one of the least played healers in the game... and is also getting a Card rework after 2 expansions of the dev's failure to hammer it in... hmm.

I think it's telling that, since it's release, AST has had:

3.0: release
4.0: received additions that built upon 3.0's baseline
5.0: cards reworked, divination, seals
6.0: divination reworked, seals reworked, astrodyne
7.0: hell knows, but we know something is changing

So, ever since the 5.0 bludgeoning the class got, they've had a 'rework' of sorts to the cards, the 'aoe damage buff' method, the extraneous system that enforces the player to actually play other cards than just 'whatever you get lmao', and we're in for another come 7.0. How can anyone look at this history, and say 'yeh the old cards were the biggest issue'? Anyone with any common sense should look at this litany of failures, and see the painfully obvious truth: The issues with AST gameplay started when they kneecapped the card system in 5.0. Ever since, they've been unable to find a 'satisfying' way to make the cards and buffing work, without it feeling hamfisted. Astrodyne has got to be the absolute worst example of this, it's laughably weak, to the point where you can almost ignore it entirely and still get a higher parse than someone else who's playing into it (cos crit variance), it applies three buffs with one effect each, instead of one buff that has several effects based on seal count (so you hit the buffcap), it doesn't fit the aesthetic and feels more like something that was originally designed for WHM (but they couldn't figure out where to tie it into the WHM kit)