I'm surprised that they buffed the AST potencies to pretty much match WHM/SCH potencies...

I wish SE would stop persisting with the silly RNG on card draws, though. 30 second Balance is nice, but with a 17% Draw rate it's still kinda ehhhhh. Note that I'm not advocating for complete freedom on Draw, but not even buffing Shuffle to eliminate your chance if drawing the same card you shuffled is kind of annoying.

I actually think it'll be a nice raid QoL for Bole, though. It's basically a 30-second Virus on a mob, which will stack with a tank's other mitigation. Spear not receiving the duration buff is frankly bizarre to me. Considering it's niche use, would buffing the duration really have been seen as OP?

Noct Sect changes are good but still kinda disappounting. SCH's shields integrate so much better with their toolkit; it's pretty obvious more thought went into designing AST around Diurnal. Celestial Opposition is still very flashy, pretty crap. Unconscious buff is good but would rather they changed it to a ground target lol. Still, it'll be a nice prep for raid busters assuming you can get in position in time.

Synastry buff is sexy. No complaints there.

I think these were good fixes to AST's throughput issues, though on a personal level I'm sad the cards are just fun flavor without any meaningful impact. I wish the buffing system had been implemented better, and thought that this patch might be SE's chance to fix it, but they seemed more concerned about bringing healing in line (note that I'm not saying this is a BAD thing, just that my preference would have been more powerful buffs that offset their lower healing).

This has been discussed to death in the healer subforums already, though. Time to log in and test for myself in-game!