1) Helios is near redundant these days. Its purpose used to be in high damage situations you’d press aspected Helios once then spam Helios while the regen ticked however they doubled the regen potency and halved the duration so this niche barely applies anymore. Regardless both are rarely used anyway
2b) AST has a lot of problems right now but people debate on what constitutes being a problem. Basically let’s split AST into two halves, the burst window and outside the burst window. Outside the burst window is pretty self explanatory. You spam malefic and barely do anything else. Even healers collectively suffer from the problem of being cucked by the superior shield healers so this makes this even worse. Now inside the burst window, in EW they made the change to give draw charges and added astroydyne. This has massively inflated AST’s burst window as they now have to juggle 2 minor arcana (which has its own problems of being a pointless RNG button) earthly star, divination, 3 cards and potentially 2 astrodynes. This requires the use of AST’s only movement tool lightspeed to facilitate the needed number of weave slots. People complain this burst window is clunky, overfull and barely worth the effort as in most content except at the top end WHM out damages it anyway. This has led AST to being the most unpopular class in the game right now