I am deeply disappointed by the decision to make AST a pure healer as a player who always play noct ast in savage content along side my whm friend. I know this may be a selfish personal reason but in order for the two of us to continue playing savage content together one of us must now change jobs and as the shield healer it is going to fall to me. In order to play high level content with my friend, I will have to give up my favorite job. Never has this decision been forced on a player before now. You can play any job combination in any party as long as everyone is a different job and this has been the case since ARR. Now we are making it an actively bad choice for Whm and AST to play together and actively bad choice for SCH and SAGE to play together. While its discouraged to have 2 phys R and 2 casters its not an actively bad choice. This hurts.

I think this is such a bad decision for so many reasons. Currently on live any healer combination can play together optimally and effectively. Going forward there are 2 healer combinations that will be lacking due to a loss of shields or actively hindering each other by having non-overlapping shields. We already all hate groups that lock out 1phys r and 1 caster and wait in PF for decades. I fear this will be the new case with healers. Additionally the party match making are going to treat shield healers and pure healers separately as well in order to fill a party. I am worried about this as well since currently on live most of the content you queue for can be done with any healer combination even doubles, so why are we making changes to increased the wait time for these duties?

I just have these concerns and am also upset about the AST change.