Things I'm starting to hate on AST

[SovereignAegis]

tl;dr: Make AST cards better. This is the core mechanic of the class taking up numerous skills of their job... make them better.

Full:

I need to agree with this.

I have leveled AST at the same time as I leveled whm. However it is GLARINGLY OBVIOUS already that dungeon queues on average take 4-5 minutes longer on AST.
From what I have gathered, when I leveled WHM I could easily heal off almost anything and just spam stone to great effect. On the opposing end of things AST's HoT spell is heavily front loaded however at the cost to an even shorter duration than regen and lower healing potency overall causing the AST to have to leave cleric stance more often. This is further obvious when WHM can supplement their regen with asylum (A skill I hold as very useful) and AST lacks that same capability.

The cards feel nice when PERFECTLY executed. Like I mean the doubled duration / doubled potency arrow cards on the highest DPS. Anything less feels terrible.

Spear? Why even bother? Unless you are in a pre-planned group this card feels nearly useless. Maybe I just haven't explored into it much but at present all I can see it being useful for is pre-planned events (RNG though, gets in the way of this outright!) or for reduction in other ast abilities like celestial opposition. (Actually while we're on that WHY would we want to even do that?!?!?! CE without a card out is just a basic stun... something WHM gets to spam on Holy!)

I find Spire to be almost irritating to draw. Balance is nice but is it really THAT nice? It doesn't feel to me like it's doing much more than the Scholar's guaranteed Selene buff. (Actually if we very seriously compare SCH's Selene buff to a spread arrow buff... that took the AST a lot of luck AND planning and cooldowns just to get 15s of a marginally better buff out there?! It is CLEARLY inefficient in comparison!)

Now don't get me wrong, I love AST and seriously find the playstyle interesting... but at present the card system feels trivialized and leaves me sitting here asking myself why even bother with it? AST's heals are clearly lower than WHM. AST's damage migration is poor at best because WHM can cross class virus and e4e which are two essential damage mitigation tools and overall I just feel like AST trades in SO MUCH for what...? For what? Card system that is heavily based in RNG and non-guarantees that are ALSO weak in effect? It isn't really worth it.

It's like they watered down WHM and watered down scholar and put it into AST. That's the only way I can describe it, it obviously has WAY more direct healing power than Scholar but way less tools to migate damage like dome, e4e, virus, etc. It feels like a slap to the face after playing SCH and WHM to go to AST and have most of these damage control abilities stolen from us.