Why the difference in duration?

[Lone-wolfe-02]

Probably because they have no idea how to balance healers, reason why hopefully we don't get another healer in 4.0.

[Alberel]

Probably because they have no idea how to balance healers, reason why hopefully we don't get another healer in 4.0.

The problem is they made the balancing job far harder than it needed to be.

True balance is almost impossible to achieve without homogenisation rendering all the options meaningless. The best solution is to ensure that no two classes in a game ever work the same way. If they added a third healer that used a different mechanic (spending HP or TP to heal instead of MP, a lifetap healer, a debuffing healer, etc.) then balance would be much more easily achieved because it would be much harder to directly compare the jobs. Instead they added AST, which does exactly what both WHM and SCH already did, and thus it is extremely easy to directly compare the numbers and see which is objectively superior.

As long as AST uses MP to heal or create shields they will always be either over-powered compared to the other healers, or under-powered.