Hate Watching Green Bars?

After our problems of lack of healers, I'd been thinking about ways to spice up the healing experience. Apparently, I wasn't the only one giving it thought, as Baklor, our Guild Leader, started a thread on our forums about 'Healing Fixes'. So, I thought, for fun, to put our ideas out here for you all to laugh at, pick apart, drool over, add to, etc. Since Baklor beat me to it, I'll post his ideas first! (And hopefully I won't hurt his feelings by adding punctuation, spelling corrections, etc.)

Baklor's Ideas:

Destructive Heals - 1/3 of heal on your target directly damages your target's target, no damage dealt if target is at full health.

Concentrated Anger - 20% chance upon sucessful heal to enter a clearcast state allowing the caster to use destructive spells at no mana cost or glodal cooldown, cast instantly.

Eased Pain - Cast on friendly target, all damage for the next 15 sec is equally split between group members

Blessed Shield - Damaging attacks heal caster for 30% of the damage taken, of that 30% is split equally to group members.

Light's Justice (lol) - Cast on enemy tartget, 20% of damage dealt by target heals the enemies target.

Soontir, our Priest Class Officer, picks it apart...

While i can appreciate your ideas, Bak. Its not abilities that healers are miffed at having. Its the starring at green bars endlessly and pushing the same 2 buttons (course every class does that part).

I'll break down your ideas (mainly cuz i'm bored at work and i feel like typing):

Destructive Heal: Cool I did damage but I was still looking at your health bar.

Concentrated Anger: This would be actually be kinda cool cuz of the no global cooldown. But is there anything already in game that ignores the GCD? I thought EVERYTHING had it. 20% is rather high too from a balancing issue. Otherwise i'd like it.

Eased Pain: Now I have to heal more targets. Thats hard for pallies and druids who have no group heal. Priests / shamans group heals are longer casting. This could cause problems if the tank gets hit really hard really fast.

Blessed Shield: Like Concentrated Anger, the % is too high, but the idea is nice. It really wouldnt stop me from starring at green bars tho.

Light's Justice: Again % too high but the idea is nice. 1 healing = .5 dmg would be handy. Save me getting two sets of gear. I'm sure all healing classes would like that.

Out of all of those ideas, the dmg spell w/ no GCD would be the most "fun." Otherwise none of them really alleviate the boredom of MUST WATCH GREEN BAR.

Kyp's Ideas:

Why not just get rid of the raid bars? Enable the little health bars over everyone's heads and then you can bitch about just see'n their heads rather then staring at color filled boxes all night.

Why not make a holy arua that adds holy damage to all attacks and acts like thorns? Or maybe one that dampens damage? Or maybe one that spreads damage taken by a target to others buffed with the same spell?

My Ideas:

Med-Pets (you had to have known I'd work pets into the first idea ;p ) - Little pets that you control (much like a steam tonk) and maneuver to the person needing healing and then have it heal them. They can be killed with cleaves, AoE, etc. So, you'd need to time and position your approach.

Proximity Heals - Much like the pets, you'd have to get close to do better heals, making it riskier for you and requiring you to time your approach and position.

Trinket Type Buffs - Rather than the game being so 'heal' dependent, give the 'healing' class the ability to do short term buffs that have long cool downs...like popping a trinket. This would require the healer to know more about the fight so they could do the right trinket buff at the right time on the right person. Game mechanics could even have limits on how many buffs are in effect at the same time based on group/raid size.

Damage Specific Shields - Rather than having abilities that just absorb X amount of damage, have shields that will absord certain types of damage; Arcane, Fire, Cleave, Crit, Crushing, etc.

AoE Heals - Like the AoE spells, give the priests the big green target thingy so they have to position the area that healing happens.

Physical Signs - Give characters physical signs of health....might be kinda hard to see during combat though. Plus, how much more hunched over and sickly looking could the Horde get anyway?

Soontir Diss's My Ideas:
(I'm called Nae in my guild...goes back to an Asheron's Call character that I played with a lot of my guildies.)

Sorry Nae, but all those would still require me to watch green bars. Unless the game went through a complete overhaul theres no way around how boring playing a healer is. I will admit, it gets fun when shit goes wrong in 5 mans and you have to pull stuff out of yer ass. Prioritizing and using the correct heals really shines in 5 mans. Beyond that you have backup and are most likely to be healing 1 person. Design flaw that MMORPGs will be sure to stick to for a while (at least heavy PvE games).

Soontir's solution to having to stare at green bars all raid long...

Make them pink with dancing fairies and unicorns and i'll play this game forever.

Can anyone make me an addon that can do that? ;p

Most of the other reply's on the thread that I hijacked from were healing comparisons to other games, teasing Soontir about his 'love' of staring at green bars (and, yes, I colored things in this post green just for him!), etc.

So, if you could change healing mechanics to get healers more involved, what would you do?