Balance was balanced

[Reilyn]

The problem is not one single thing looked at in a vacuum. A slight crit buff is not amazing in and of itself. The problem is AST was already tune well above the other healers. Ask yourself this, is there any reason at all to ever make a party without an AST? The answer is of course no, never. Asking the same question of whm or sch and the answer would become "well sch probably provides some more utility so it's better than whm but it's not that big of a deal." The is the problem, AST is clearly OP. Now we ask another question, what is stopping all raid comps from being AST/AST and ignoring the other healers entirely? There are only two reasons and both are entirely arbitrary. The first is that now the game just flat out disallows, and the second is card buffs not stacking. Basically AST is so OP they had to make completely arbitrary rules to get the playerbase to even use another healing job.

That is SE figuratively saying "we have failed so spectacularly at game balance we must force comps on the players just so that some jobs get any use at all." Do you understand now why people are so upset?

I couldnt phrase my beef with the imposed job limitation better myself.

The card stacking limitation was still very possible to work around with communication too, and of course SE knew it.

It indeed basically looked like "in case of failure to balance multi-NIN, or AST/AST, impose limits" to me.

I'd argue if they had any faith in their own balancing act, they would not have done this, but they did it, so...

It was indeed a depressing moment of self realization when I caught myself thinking "no matter how stupid AST gets, at least one other healer will be relevant because of this limitation!"... yeah... for all the wrong reasons.