I want to preface this by stating this is not a complaint thread. I enjoy playing ast more than whm and sch, and I think with the recent patch it is in a pretty good place. However, it's not really the class I imagined when I first heard of it, and I do wish that it was less of a hybrid between the two healers.

How I wished they had originally designed ast was by making it the "blm" of healers. Basically by making the stances similar to a blm's astral fire/ice stances.

So for example, in Diurnal stance you would fire off fast, smaller heals with a stacking HoT that starts off weak but ends relatively strong for a HoT (balanced by having a short duration). Basically yours casts in general are more HoT like, but they leave a residual effect. Every basic heal you would gain a stack of "Diurnal" (or whatever) which would give you a casting speed bonus (ala greased lightning) that would stack up to 5 times (with a 15 sec duration or so). You can maintain this stance for as long as you want, but should you use a specific skill, ideally a redesigned Celestial Opposition, you would do a sect specific AE heal that would consume the stacks and switch stances. The potency of CO would be dependant on how many stacks were consumed. For Diurnal, I was thinking the obvious choice would be an A.Helios/Medica II type effect that would heal for peanuts at 1 stack, but relatively powerful at 5.

Switching to Noct stance would put you in a much more supportive type of playstyle. Personally, I like the idea of keeping it similar to blm where you burn a lot of your mana in diurnal, then switch to noct to refresh your mana. Though the refresh is not nearly as quick as blm. Noct heals would be a bit more standard in design, except that they would add a stacking buff that adds 3% dmg mitigation per stack (up to five) on the target of your heals. The heals themselves would be more potent than the initial heal of a Diurnal heal (though less than a whm's), but they would also be slower. Diurnal would definitely be the definitive HPS stance for ast. Each heal would also give you a stack of "Nocturnal" that was a refresh, which would get more potent with each stack. Then when you use CO in this stance, I think a burst AE heal with an extended version of the mitigation proportionate to how many stacks are consumed would be ideal.

For the AE heals, I think simply making helios be a Medica II in Diurnal, and Medica in Nocturnal, with potencies that reflect how many stacks you have up would be the easiest option.

Many of the other current ast skills would have to be changed around and some even removed (aspected bene/helios wouldn't be necessary for example). Though one problem I would foresee is that there would be too few spells, and adding more might make it too powerful. Though less spells in general might not be a bad thing.

I also think that this class should focus on healing almost exclusively over dps. It should still have Malefic I/II Gravity, etc of course (many for soloing or phases with no incoming dmg), but I really think it's "dps" should come through cards (kinda like how it is now), and the ast themselves should be focusing on keeping stacks/buffs up.

Now, with that said, I think the bole card should be switched with another dps oriented card, since the effect of the current bole would be coming from Noct on a more reliable basis. I was thinking a damage reflect card would be good. Like maybe 10% of all dmg done to the target gets reflected back at the attacker. It wouldn't reduce that damage, just cause the mob(s) to take damage. So if you put it on your tank and then a mob did a 10k dmg hit, your tank would still take 10k dmg, but the mob would get hit by a 1k dmg attack too. This could be a great way to help both with dps and tank threat.

I'm no game developer though. So everything I listed would have to run through a balance team to come up with numbers that work. I'm sure there is a lot of refinement and changes that could be done too. I'm also not expecting this to ever actually be implemented (it's way too late for that). It's just something I've always envisioned how ast could have been, and just wanted to share and hear other people's take on it.