Quote Originally Posted by Serilda View Post
It's obvious that cross class skills already weaken class identity when you see the adjustments they made a while back with Stoneskin and Protect to bring all of the healers in line with one another because balancing them all around the traited versions was impossible. The fact that Eye for an Eye comes from ACN is largely irrelevant when I'm throwing it around on another job in every fight and haven't used ACN since I unlocked SCH and SMN. The fact that a bunch of the key MCH abilities are actually BRD abilities just makes the similarities between those two jobs even more obvious, and it's a mess having all of your spells spread over three separate tabs in the abilities list. Hardly anyone ever changes from the 'optimal' cross class choices anyway because the rest are filler nobody wants to use.
It's obvious you don't understand the reason behind the ProShell and Stoneskin changes. If WHM was the only job to have ProShell then it would be a required job to have in end game resulting in WHM/SCH or WHM/AST combo only, completely negating AST/SCH combo. Stoneskin was changed because of the hp inflation we got in HW. Just look at how NPC's work in a quest with you, their HP is so high that casting SS on them becomes completely OP. Both of these needed to change in order to 1, prevent making one specific healer required 100% of the time, and 2, to prevent an ability that worked fine in 2.X content from being OP in 3.X content.

Without said changes, in the current meta, AST would have no place at all in end game raids. SCH/WHM combo would comprise the majority of statics due to how powerful it would be.