Quote Originally Posted by HyperiusUltima View Post
You make a valid point. I wasn't sure if it was a viable way for balance, but AST has been lacking in the MP management department since the other two healers have better management. Especially in regards to N.AST, which needs the extra MP. If 1k MP is that much, they could simply just make it 500 MP since that's what a Aetherflow is for SCH. Though in hindsight, we already have WHM that has a ridiculous amount of MP Management(Infinite MP for 12s, Free GCD Healing, Free Instant Cast, etc.) while SCH has to manage a fairy while on GCD and their Aetherflow which is all oGCD.
It's worth noting that a frequently-overlooked SCH CD lets them use anything without consuming aetherflow and guarantees crits. Sort of the SCH version of thin air.

N.AST has issues, but they run much deeper than MP - to make it competitive with SCH, we need to be talking about completely different things. AST as a whole... well, let me put it like this. As of the 5.1 buffs, AST is already topping the damage charts ahead of every other healer, and every tank. And buffing AST's MP (along with faster casts, etc) in stormblood is what sent the healer balance from the relatively balanced 'SCH+AST for farm, but WHM for prog' to the completely out of control 'SCH+AST for everything', so I'm a bit wary about this.

500 MP would be more reasonable, but I think it would be better still if the ability was on something not in the healer role.

Quote Originally Posted by Side-Eye View Post
Then why not make the "undesirable" cards more desirable, rather than tossing out the baby with the bathwater? The old card system had a minor flaw, and that could have been remedied without scrapping the whole thing and replacing it with something that I cannot even see the benefit of without a parser...
They started to do that.

What happened was more and more of the cards became DPS buffs. Inferior to Balance, however, so most people still sought that.