Quote Originally Posted by Havenchild View Post
If the devs haven't chosen to do a complete 180 over 3 expansions then I take that to mean that, no major amount of players have left the scene due to those changes that didn't offset the gain in players on the role.
You can choose to believe that the devs don't do a 180 pivot because they're seeing it going well. I can point out an equally possible alternative that they're continuing with this design and just randomly throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks because admitting that gutting the healer role in ShB didn't bring them the large increase in healer population they were expecting would mean that they're admitting that they were wrong.

Neither of us is inherently correct though, because neither of us have hard data, all we have are trends and personal anecdotes.

My suggestion goes in two parts. You don't only entice with gameplay but ALSO with drops. If people want to gear their mains faster, they will undoubtedly, jump into job-in-need bonuses that reward extra drops. I have no doubt that people will respond in kind to filling those roles. Creating casual off job Healers is smart. Getting people into the mentality "Hey I want more chances for drops guaranteed but I'd have to play "x" role and they also just expanded on the toolkit so let me see what its about" is a good thing. You also have a higher chance of converting casual healers -> main healers another tier then converting Main DPS -> Main Healers. And you have to entice DPS specifically because they FAR outweigh the support roles in presence. Now more than ever.
So, a few things that you'd need to answer to implement this vision of yours:

1) What do you propose removing from the DPS job's kits to make way for the extra mitigation that they're now in charge of?
2) How will you convince the melee DPS that they now need to weave in required mitigation during their busy double weave burst window?
3) What's stopping the DPS players from playing healer for 3 weeks to benefit from the accelerated loot and then abandoning the role altogether after they've gotten BiS for their main?

Also, you're not really addressing the commonly accepted fact that people choose to play DPS to escape responsibility over the party, do you really think it will go over well when SE tells the DPS players that they now play a large part in the survival of the party and they can now be blamed for the party wiping? I think there would be heavy backlash because they didn't sign up for that.