AST is the healers resident “never get attached to this job because they are going to rework it every single expansion”

Right now AST can be described in my mind as “APM for the sake of it”, AST’s burst window is incredibly complex, arguably the single most complex burst window in the game given its length, rigidity and the fact that it’s the only one of the 5 main cluttered burst windows (alongside DNC, GNB, DRK and NIN) where your APM goes even higher because you constantly have to target others to give them cards

Outside of that the class is…….fine, it still suffers from healers boring as sin DPS rotation and the fact healers are drowning in free heals. AST at least has a somewhat cohesive theme to its heals as they are all stellar themed and a lot of them have delayed effects (horoscope, star, exaltation macrocosmos) but it does have a lot of redundant buttons

As for comparison to old iterations AST (alongside SCH) has arguably fallen the furthest of any class compared to its old iteration, in HW and SB rather than cards just being generic damage amplifiers they provided utility buffs such as reducing damage, restoring MP or increasing haste, these buffs weren’t terribly well balanced to be fair but they provided flavour to the class, the old version also used time dilation to increase its buff lengths which was a very well designed way to play into their time mage aesthetic. Before SGE AST also had a stance system where you could make all of its heals give shields instead so it was the flex healer which a lot of people miss

If I were to condense this job AST could functionally lose every skill it’s gained above 70 (except maybe macrocosmos), the cards should be returned to a utility focus (but without one card that was damage oriented), royal road should come back and honestly minor arcana should just be deleted

For your bonus point minor arcana has always been weird, in ShB divination’s power relies on the seal system (4% for one unique seal, 5% for 2 6% for 3) but you also had a button called sleeve draw that would guarantee you a unique seal card, this was on top of redraw having 3 charges, minor arcana was used to dump off bad seal cards by buffing the individual damage (4% for wrong class 8% for correct class) of the card you use but in exchange it didn’t offer a seal. This was the best iteration of minor arcana (HW and SB minor arcana was functionally just a single target version of what we have now) but since the seals now only give astrodyne if the ShB system still existed you would just use minor arcana on every card because astrodyne is useless