Concept for a Magic Melee DPS

[SaberMaxwell]

I don't inherently dislike your idea. Never played Priest in WoW, nor played long enough to get a feel for the meta. What you're describing sounds like it would, itself, be a class that has specs, and after SCH and SMN, SE has sworn off of that. As far as "it could queue as either role," SE avoided that possibility with RDM and BLU, I think they're avoiding that idea as much as they can.

If Elementalist were 100% healer it would still largely be able to fulfill your fantasy of a healer that does damage. It just can't be a healer that can take the place of a DPS, or vice versa, because then you end up with it as an almost mandated job in the meta due to how DPS focused this game is.

[Duelle]

I don't inherently dislike your idea. Never played Priest in WoW, nor played long enough to get a feel for the meta. What you're describing sounds like it would, itself, be a class that has specs, and after SCH and SMN, SE has sworn off of that.

Legion's version of Disc Priest is what I was exposed to most, and that one had a spammable buff that could be placed on party members, and when the priest dealt damage to a mob, party members with the buff would receive a heal. The idea being that through dealing damage, the priest was also healing their allies without spending GCDs casting direct heals. And yes, it was insanely hard to balance.

And the only reason the ACN/SMN/SCH experiment failed was because SE could not set the ground rules for how dual job classes worked. If ACN had been capped at lv30 and designed around having a rudimentary kit, with one job stone expanding said kit (SMN) and one job stone altering parts of said kit before growing in its own direction (SCH), the devs would have had a much easier time doing things to SCH and SMN while keeping them separate from each other. Honestly, not capping classes at lv30 in general has repeatedly bitten the devs in the ass.

Blunt weapons and fighting sticks are woefully underrepresented. Spellblade aside, I wouldn't mind seeing a 'magic melee dps' swinging around a meteor hammer that gets imbued with the magic.

I can get behind this. Maces and hammers in particular would be a nice weapon for a Mystic Knight. With the popularity of the Marvel movies, I'd probably see a bunch of Thor cosplayers using "hammer that suspiciously looks like Mjolniir" smashing the ground using the job's mandatory AoE attack.

Here's another rough idea I wanted to share, though this one is from way before we got the resource bars all over the place: Mystic Knight would imbue their weapons through an oGCD or weaponskill aligned to an element. Performing certain actions helps keep the weapon enchant active, the enchant growing more powerful the longer it is active. Once the enchant reaches a certain potency, the player can "release" the accumulated power through a powerful attack that also prevents them from using that same element immediately.

So for example using Firebrand would grant a "deals additional fire damage with X potency" buff that could be extended or refreshed the duration by using weaponskills. Every 6 seconds the buff was active it would gain a potency stack (similar to the old Wrath icons we had for WAR) until you hit 4 or 5 stacks, at which point you'd use the release ability. This also applies the debuff "Overburn" on you, which prevents the use of Firebrand or won't allow Firebrand to grant you the elemental buff until the debuff expires. Something like this would severely clash with the way stuff is designed in this game (bosses with untargettable phases would screw over this version of Mystic Knight), but I think there's merit in the idea of harboring an elemental enchantment and releasing it once enough power is accumulated.

[Shurrikhan]

Legion's version of Disc Priest is what I was exposed to most, and that one had a spammable buff that could be placed on party members, and when the priest dealt damage to a mob, party members with the buff would receive a heal. The idea being that through dealing damage, the priest was also healing their allies without spending GCDs casting direct heals. And yes, it was insanely hard to balance.

Honestly, even as much as I had been milking my healer for as much damage as I could even since Vanilla, so long as it wasn't delaying the next pull too much to recover that mana from my mage's Conjurered Mana items... I could never get into Legion's Vamp-Priest. Heck, I got into Shadow Priest healing more than Legion's Atonement-and-DPS Discipline priest. None of it felt like Discipline like me, as it had ever been or lore had ever indicated. Moreover, it just felt... squished. On a Holy priest I could deal more damage, just not at the same time as healing, and of course far more healing in any given moment, just at the cost of damage. Discipline priest just felt like it only had a half or even third the ability of other healers to match the given situation by varying healing or damage output. You got 60% healing and 40% damage priority or 40% healing and 60% damage priority.

I would hate to see that from an XIV healer. I don't think they should be as straight-cut as they are now, and would love to see damage and healing integrated into each other a ways, but I prefer that damage is not literally healing or vice versa, as it is in any typical Discipline priest play. That equivalence made Disc Priest feel like nothing more than a dps with added, albeit choiceful, buff maintenance.