User blog comment:CTheDragons/Best Buffing/@comment-30677384-20170125205443

Hi! (Lorem here.) There's two other perspectives to look at the classes' skills – one is "which skills cause 'game saturation' fastest" and the other would be "how do I want to keep people addicted?".

"Addicted" is, of course, a strong word and while you could also call it "motivated", I am directly referring to the principle of intermittent gratification, i.e. not always receiving an expected reward. For Habitica, that would be eggs, hatching potions and food, as well as the enchanted armoire. As the rogue's party skill makes you find gold and items way more frequent, it can cause you to "numb" to the gratifying effect of finding items quicker. I can imagine, people who have all the pets, mounts and costumes there are, the game might suddenly turn stale. (As one might guess, I'm a bit of a gaming addict myself, and I'm helping out with contributions partly because I just want to help keep the game fresh.)

The mage's Ethereal Surge, as you wrote, encourages people to check in more often and keep using their skills, which can be suprisingly gratifying. A handful of mages can become an infinite mana spring which in theory means infinitely high stats – practically, it doesn't happen, though, or people have to coordinate very well. Which can be a motivation in itself – but not necessarily a very productive one ;)  Earthquake can make you level up super fast. I've seen people go from Level 0 to 100 in a matter of a very short time, I feel that can also make things go stale.

Thanks for making me see the actually encouraging effect of the warrior's Valorous Presence. I always thought warriors were of greater importance to small parties (<10 members) to get bosses killed at all.

I've never seen the appeal of healers, to be honest; most of the time, you have enough money to buy a health potion, and healing or heightening your CON stat does IMHO encourage negative habits or forgetting of (lots of) dailies.

And this might be off-topic, but I wanted to mention the two abilities that feel like actual cheats: The rogue's Stealth and the mage's ability to freeze streaks. Stealth is basically like sleeping in the Inn with eyes open, while still dealing boss damage. If I had an orb of rebirth right now, I would probably become a mage for some crazy mana shenanigans. >:D