Quote Originally Posted by novamare View Post
Big disclaimer: I am not a game designer, and this may be a terrible idea; feel free to (preferably kindly lol) tell me why or suggest improvements.

Personally when I play healer, I want to heal. Obviously I dps as well, but when I think of a more engaging healing job, I don't really think I want a beefier dps rotation as much as I wish the healing itself were more complex. In addition to additional incoming damage (which is a step in the right direction), I want my heals to mean something more than just "party not dead" I guess lol.

So could a healer job have a similar feature to ninja's mudra system? As in, a healer is rewarded (with a fat dps attack proc, for example) if they string together the correct series of healing abilities (or categories of abilities like shields, pure heals, buffs/debuffs, etc.). Or if they use X many unique healing abilities within a given time frame. Or another system that prioritizes strategic combinations of abilities beyond what's needed to manage the fight mechanics.

The idea would be to reward healers for hitting a "rotation" of some sort--for healing if not dpsing--in such a way that encourages players to strategize beyond merely reacting to fight mechanics (or party mistakes). And sometimes those priorities may be in conflict: A series of raidwides is coming up, can you map that rotation around it or can the rotation cover the damage, or do you need to give up the rotation bonus attack to keep everyone alive? Are you willing to overheal if it means you get your big dps button? Are you willing to drop your dps gcd if any of the requisite abilities in the rotation are non-dps spells on the gcd, but the finisher an overall dps gain?

That way, yes, healers get more dps, but they get it by engaging more deeply with their healing kit.
Let me just ask one question, how would this apply when there is no series of raidwides? Because that's the case in normal content, and unless all of the existing normal content is reworked and the future content, there's fairly long intervals between raidwides, so this rewarding DPS isn't come around very often. So there isn't much payback at at all, and where is the value in overhealing in the meantime?

OK, sorry that was two questions, my bad