AST's weakness in end game

[AzureFlare]

You can also see that WAR/SCH can't replace PLD/WHM as well as DRK/AST, simply because the last two were designed as main-tanks/healers. If you ignore their DPS toolkit and just focus on their healing spells/skills, you can see that WAR/SCH doesn't have a complete toolkit to main heal. They can, but it takes considerable effort to do it. In my opinion, that's not a problem, and I bet our next tank/healing job will compete for the off-spot of the meta. We just have to give it time. Until then, we can use PLD-WAR/WHM-AST for heavy damage fights where no DPS check is tight, since they offer the safest mitigation/HP restoration combo.

EDIT: another thing that I just remembered: in SCoB, the meta for lots of the fights excluded an off-tank, as lots of groups (even in the beginning) took only one tank to T8-T9. The chosen tank was PLD.

My problem is that from a "bare bones" point of view, SCH and Nocturnal AST are both made to at least fulfill their basic requirements, being able to contribute enough healing (with a partner in 8man/alliance setup) and that SE largely ignored the extras both of them bring, nocturnal AST being the one to have the short end of the stick and having a completely different design mentality than SCH for some unknown reason ('Arcanist iz hard to balance guise, SCH fairy fundamental 'cuz no regen'). Just talking about healers, it feels like SCH was allowed to keep the 2.0 flaws because 'it's strengths don't matter for the barebones design' (high near-mana neutral DPS), or in the fairy's case it is 'too fundamental' to the job, with 3.0 fixes to make it fit more with the barebones design (apparently it was lacking AoE healing). Meanwhile, WHM never had those design flaws coming from a pure healer class and only lacked healing flaws (quick direct heals) while AST also wasn't designed with those inherit flaws. And because nocturnal AST was meant to replicate most of the healing part of SCH, without breaking too much into its flavor (strong mitigation and pet), it doesn't have anywhere near the 'non-healer' strengths of SCH.

And for the same reason I don't see WHM-N.AST becoming a really favorable match-up at all. At most WHM/N.AST will become on par with D.AST/SCH-WHM/SCH if the SCH has to focus on doing a lot of healing and spending waaaaay less globals on DPS than it does now (which honestly is good enough). Unless they make a complete oversight (wouldn't surprise me) where stacking regens becomes obscenely powerful, in which case WHM-D.AST would be the king comp.