Honestly, I was a main AST up to SB. I loved the cards, then they started dumbing down the system until they made it what it is now.
Now healers are just simplified caster dps. In most situations, your passive healing is more than enough; unless you face a raid wide aoe, a clumsy dps or a huge wall2wall pull in some dungeons, you won’t need to use a healing spell ever. I wanted to heal, if I wanted to be a caster dps, I’d have picked a caster dps.
Before the first dumb down, cards were fun, they had a lot of different utilities, from recovering MP to raising crits. And we had the sects, before a fight you could switch from shield to regen healer, then they started dumbing it down until it became a glorified WHM with a buff timer. They are doing this with every class, and the last BLM changes look like the SMN “rework” all over again.
It’s sad but I have to say that I am less and less interested in the game with every patch. I could accept that the story was lacking (because they need to build up from the beginning, so it’s an ARR situation again) if the gameplay was fun but, as a healer, I’ve been bored for a good while now.