AST's weakness in end game

[Nekotee]

I did not and still don't like to play as whm (ok no it's so fun in DPS and whm is my favorite spiritbond class)
I come from a SCH background in 2.0

And dispite that I do like diurnal for the huge cast speed and the confort of multiple regen aspected helios + benefic and the tank is fine for 10 sec or more depending of his brain and view of CD
I found it easier to play in diurnal and trickier in nocturnal...
It's harder, mana extensive but you can do great and save so many lazy Ass...

[Kerrigen]

Collective is fine for what it is but its CD is way too long for current endgame fights' pacing (ie it won't be up for every Cascade, let alone every series of six splashes while Soil will), and its range is maybe a tad too short when you take some of the bosses' hitbox into account. It's a common complaint within the JP playerbase.

Nocturnal doesn't compare with SCH at all. Whoever designed AST never thought about what actually makes SCH good and desirable (powerful HoTs on top of shields and mitigation tools that free up a lot of globals for DPSing). It's like AST was designed with stance-dancing in mind (enabling putting up shields when you do need them then going back to the more efficient Diurnal Sect - it's even designed so that HoTs stack while barriers don't, go figure) but they said 'nope' at the very last second.

You said it with your own words but you're right in that AST's main problem during endgame fights is that it needs to spend too many globals healing, which significantly hurts its DPS potential and overall contribution. The cards were probably designed to compensate for your lower DPS but you can't rely on them which doesn't gel well with an endgame where every fight is hard scripted and there's little place for improvisation. Now that would be fine if there was more control over the cards because I feel like AST was somewhat designed for healers who don't like to DPS and it would be a fine niche.

You should check Miunih's thread (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...e-with-WHM-SCH), it's very insightful on why AST has problems in high-end content even though I don't agree with their proposed changes.