Dps As Healer

[JunseiKei]

Before the first round of buffs AST was just plain bad, there's no ifs or buts, it was inferior to both other healers and there was no reason to raid with it

I could give you a couple of reason I don't personally agree AST was inferior, just simply a difference in skill and available tools:

Essential Dignity: Up to 1,000 potency instant heal usable every 40 seconds. That alone offsets the healing potency differences.
Disable: Reduces 10% of all damage- originally this was next skill and not lasts for 6 seconds, so yes, it was a bit difficult to time, the fact it leaves supervirus usable, too, made it a pretty powerful asset.

However, after 2 years of the tried-and-true composition of WHM and SCH as well as Gordias Savage being more difficult, I could see why people opted to simply not take risks (which is what AST was to them- a risk). People were (and sometimes still are) stuck in the notion that WHM, AST and SCH have oh-shit heals that had been largely viewed as such in raid content (have seen this echoed on tanks as well with Hallowed, Holm and Living). IE: Benediction, Lustrate, Essential. AST doesn't have such a tool (well, now it arguably does since its healing potencies were increased, giving up less of a reason to really use essential outside of mistakes on most content).

Please note, I'm not trying to change your mind nor anyone else's, just a small explanation of why I choose to say what I have said. The changes would have been made anyway simply because of the fact that not everyone could equally pick up AST and play it. This is called lowering the skill ceiling and exactly what we are seeing in upcoming changes to role skills and skill updates and removals in Stormblood.

[Miste]

That alone offsets the healing potency differences.

No...no it didn't.

All of AST's healing spells were less direct healing potency than a WHM along with all of their attached Regens in Diurnal.

Nocturnal paired with a WHM wasn't as bad because Nocturnal Stance had 5% healing potency up buff attached to it and you still got the party MND buff. WHM + AST pair suffered where DPS was concerned because no Fairy meant no auto-bot healing while healers DPS'd a bit longer, but WHM regens are quite powerful and along with Asylum and if AST had some luck with cards it wasn't too big of a loss.

AST + SCH though? Terrible. Diurnal not only had weaker direct heals and weaker regens, but this pair also never got the party MND buff. Lacking the MND buff too dropped AST's already worse healing potency even farther and also reduced healer DPS contribution.

AST was supposed to be a flexible healer that could pair with either WHM OR SCH....but they didn't balance it properly.

Anyone who collected the 'numbers' and compared them could see AST healing potency was a lot lower than WHM and SCH no matter how skilled you were.

AST was failing at it's main role basically. Yes, they could clear content back then, but it was unnecessarily harder than it needed to be (for the AST and for the co-healer) since it wasn't as strong with its main healing role as a WHM and SCH were.

In general none of the healers should have quite a bit less healing power than the others because healing is their main role. Obviously there are some differences between the healers still, but the main point was that the gap of healing potency between AST and WHM/SCH was just a bit too far. The healers can vary in healing power slightly from each other but they have to stay relatively close because healing is the main role.