Stats are really just "meld as much crit and direct hit as humanely possible and maybe determination sometimes."

It's sad. Piety as a whole is bad bc on paper yes, it gives you more comfort in having MP to save runs only to realize that better managing your MP abilities is better. Piety is a dead stat pass prog and even then, most mechanics will wipe the party immediately to even justify melding it.

Lowering healer's ability to have a stable MP economy is also bad as well, bc all that does is push the healers with the best MP economy to the front while punishing healers who have to to rely on piety.

AST was this way in SB and ShB (although SB had unlocked MP numbers). In ShB, you had to switch pieces or even meld piety to even be competitive with SCH/WHM for mp usage.

WHM got hit with this issue in EW when all healers got the 1.5s cast times and the nerf to Thin Air (which is ironic bc it's supposed to be more flexible with charges).

In the end, all stats end up being "which one is the best for damage?" The games obsession with 2 min burst windows and reliance on dps timers to balance jobs is hurting job identity and forcing jobs to be more or less carbon copies of one another.