What do you want in your AST?

[Eisenhower]

Giving an Arrow to a caster or a Spear to BRD / MNK felt more impactful and empowering to both the AST and the one who receives it, same a Bole to a tank or a refresh to someone that needed it. If you ask me, I would have rather 100% the removal or rework of Balance, than what we got every card being it.

This right here. I really enjoyed AST feeling like the job that performed ally manipulation. When I ran AST in savage and ultimate, getting Balance was the efficient and desired target. But what felt way better was putting a spear on a monk or bard and have them be happy about procs and chakra, or giving arrow to a black mage and have them become one with the speed force inside their ley lines.

Using time dilation on a tank with diurnal effects and bole on them also felt great. But I also hated how you never could plan around bole in savage and ultimate content. So I'm less upset about bole disappearing from those scenarios.

I honestly think that nocturnal AST should stop providing the same kind of shields as scholar and find another niche so that ASTs can finally be allowed to go between sects in combat. It would also help with the previous problem of time dilation effects doing just about nothing for nocturnal effects. There's a massive design space that remains unexplored because SQEX are so tunnelled into the shield/regen SCH/WHM duality that dominated ARR and still can't leave it.