Balance, Homogenisation and Encounter Design: The Problem.

[CapricaLangley]

I want to tell you a bit about a game that released just over 6 years ago. It had the things you are asking for but due to various reasons things did not work out like you would hope they would.
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Good read, I actually remember something about just the first patch because i was part of ARR beta and took a long break afterwards. By the way I didn't want to list down examples of good and bad design. Some of the things you mentioned were good ideas, but flawed or badly executed. Some were just bad. Some other design choices, like world bosses and non-instanced dungeons, or unexpected results, like people tanking with Ninja in FFXI, are just a beautiful magic that happens when you are not tunnel visioning on design rails you yourself built.

Even you and I are mostly able to make examples based on things we know or remember; let's try to create something new: imagine a mechanic that marks the two tanks during an encounter, with both their health pools being reduced to one HP. Healers, then, have to heal them to full and prevent them to die to a debuff that hits for a set amound of damage every X seconds. If one of the tanks dies, you get a raidwide AoE that can kill the other one, hypothetically causing a second AoE which would lead to the wipe. Et voilà, we have an healer check.

This is probably a terrible idea, just wanted to say that we are too biased because of mechanics we know from the past, things we saw succeed in other games or interesting ideas that didn't work as expected.

[Ultimatecalibur]

Good read, I actually remember something about just the first patch because i was part of ARR beta and took a long break afterwards. By the way I didn't want to list down examples of good and bad design. Some of the things you mentioned were good ideas, but flawed or badly executed. Some were just bad. Some other design choices, like world bosses and non-instanced dungeons, or unexpected results, like people tanking with Ninja in FFXI, are just a beautiful magic that happens when you are not tunnel visioning on design rails you yourself built.

That "beautiful magic" of emergent play while it can be cool was more often than not part of flawed design. Ninja tanking in FFXI was pretty much a failure of design just like Tank jobs (Samurai and possibly Dark Knight) being better at dpsing than their intended role.

Instanced Dungeons came into existence because of problems with players arguing over non-instanced dungeon areas after capacity reached a certain level.

Even you and I are mostly able to make examples based on things we know or remember; let's try to create something new: imagine a mechanic that marks the two tanks during an encounter, with both their health pools being reduced to one HP. Healers, then, have to heal them to full and prevent them to die to a debuff that hits for a set amound of damage every X seconds. If one of the tanks dies, you get a raidwide AoE that can kill the other one, hypothetically causing a second AoE which would lead to the wipe. Et voilà, we have an healer check.

That is pretty much the reoccurring version of the Doom debuff that is cleansed by healing the victim to max hp and similar "don't let the victim die or it is a wipe" mechanics have appeared in various EX and Savage fights. Burst healing checks are not that unusual in things like the Extreme Trials, Alliance Raids and Savage Raids.

This is probably a terrible idea, just wanted to say that we are too biased because of mechanics we know from the past, things we saw succeed in other games or interesting ideas that didn't work as expected.

That is fair, but I also wish to point out that the other side of the coin is that many changes have very good reasons for being made and being different just to be different is not always good. "Homogenization" sometimes is sometimes a very good thing.

[IttyBitty]

Even you and I are mostly able to make examples based on things we know or remember; let's try to create something new: imagine a mechanic that marks the two tanks during an encounter, with both their health pools being reduced to one HP. Healers, then, have to heal them to full and prevent them to die to a debuff that hits for a set amound of damage every X seconds. If one of the tanks dies, you get a raidwide AoE that can kill the other one, hypothetically causing a second AoE which would lead to the wipe. Et voilà, we have an healer check.

We already have plenty of healing check mechanics. They're just not often in the more casual end of content (eg white hole, photon+eternal darkness, charibdys, hellwind+towers, flare+stack, allagan field).