This just seems another bubblegum repair to me. It will break the balance even worse eventually if they keep making lazy fixes like just upping the potencies sky high rather than actually fixing AST toolkit. They designed AST to be sub-SCH and sub-WHM and now they want it to be par with them both, that seems wrong to me. They could have make AST powerful in its own aspect but well now its just horrible hybrid mess that is impossible to balance well with other 2 healers. Hybrid healer works well only in the dreams of SE.
Hopefully they will change AST to the non-hybrid direction in next expansion...