I found playing AST in Vanaspati the other day more stressful than in TOP, probably because it's a job that is designed for those 1 room, 1 boss encounters and nothing else. The moment there's an uneven number of ranged/melee card buff targets, different synchs on jobs buffing themselves because trash and bosses don't fit into the tight 2 min meta and variable amounts of skill or any amount of forced downtime it just becomes a mess -- My condolences to BRD, which has its 2 min not only tied to its ability to shoot something every 40 sec for its songs but also has to choose to buff either its mage's ballad for all the trash or its wanderer's minuet for the boss and at pace is basically locked into one rotation for the whole dungeon.

AST is at 'Z' with its card system when it was at 'M' before. Sure, balance was the best when you're playing with your Ultimate group but hell if it wasn't convenient (and fun) to load your 4 man dungeon tank up with 55 seconds of 30% bole mitigation and a ton of regens. God help any solo RPG players that latch onto that job if they don't change course.

They do have a tendency to overcorrect issues players have, is my point. Take the ground targeted actions. Largely fixed now, and basically only NIN shukuchi exists anymore; caster lb and healer fields are gargantuan.

I predict they'll finally fix tab targeting now that bosses rarely have adds when there's still a boss that's attackable anymore.

I also worry that things like current SMN are seen as acceptable for a few years of subscription if they've got a direction in mind for it next expansion. Compared to even most ARR jobs or feels like it's missing half of its actions. My very casual anecdotal friend went from loving SMN at 80 to being so bored of it in EW we leveled a fresh job to 90 when he came back to the game finally.