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.