Quote Originally Posted by Reilyn View Post
AST has COPIES of other healer's basic tools, but better in multiple cases, AND brings buffs to the party neither healer competes with at all. If you don't see a problem, you might be blind. This is ironically the problem they wanted to avoid when AST came out in 3.0 which is why AST potencies were lower across the board back then.
Oh, but I wasn't talking about potencies, or buffs or anything of the sort. The post I quoted talked about stances and how it was weird for AST to have a WHM stance and a SCH stance. DESIGN wise I don't see the problem. Then again, it could have been completely different, but what can you do, it's a healing class so it obviously needs healing of some kind, WHM being the standard.

If you remember SCH shields were far better than AST's in 3.0 as was WHM's healing. Even the buffs didn't save AST from being kicked from raiding. I'm thinking it could be in part due to people sticking with the old and known. SCH brought dps and shields, WHM did all the healing with some decent DPS. AST could neither DPS, shield or heal better than the other 2 jobs. And the buffs were so minimal (5% in AoE) that no one even considered them to be game changing.

SCH was definitely OP. Their heals were good, their DPS godly for a healing class, aetherflow gave instant MP and was not a refresh buff.

And AST buffs are hard to plan unless your co-healer is smart. They were hard to plan BEFORE they removed them from the party list, as other AST wouldn't even bother to look at the party before replacing an AOE balance with TP (for real this happened to me more than once, and one time the other AST even had the nerve to say 'We didn't need your buff anyways did we?'). So it's even harder now that you have no idea what the other AST has down in a PUG. I think they're supposed to re-add them, but again, it didn't help much before.

I'm not sure if I can call the recent changes much of a nerf, but the Balance card is probably the top one buff so in that regards it was.

I repeat, I'm not against a rework. But DESIGN wise I don't see a problem with being a versatile role, who can work with either WHM or SCH on a party.