Blizzard doesn’t like to mess with resources too much. Mana burn heroes don’t exist because once you’re OOM, you’re permanently silenced.
Same with the reverse, you give someone infinite mana regeneration and suddenly the “mana tension” a high-cost hero has may disappear.
That’s why there’s only a few heroes with mana regeneration abilities to share. An entire hero based on that? That would be heck to balance.
Mana is an irrelevant relic of the past which commonly has no reason of even existing outside of the early game for most heroes. For the rare exceptions, such as Kael’ thas, having mana problems in the early game is not only useful for balancing, it is also thematically appropiate but for most other heroes that use mana, such as Artanis or Medivh, if you were to change their mana costs to 0 without saying in the patch-notes, neither their winrates nor their playstyles would change as a consequence.
Therefor i am sure that it is just a matter of time for mana to be more seriously thought of during development and not just given to a hero by default–just like they did with Blaze (why would a firebat use mana?)–but perhaps a thousand years will pass before that happens, who knows?!
So, having said that, i don’t see anything that revolves around mana having any future at all.
I’m sorry to say it, but this mostly feels like pointless busywork to me. I don’t see any real benefit to it.
For one, having/adding an entire ‘mana providing’ class feels unnecessary at best, and actively detrimental at worst. We already have fountains. We have hearthing. Mana management is already a thing, it’s not like you need a ‘mana fueler’ as well as a ‘healer’. It also sounds awful to have to slot yet another class into your comps. And that’s not even going into the potential balance issues, especially on Heroes with non-mana resources.
Second, it feels like you’re trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, and just creating a new one in return.
There is no actual problem with ‘Support’ class not doing anything specific. (It could use a better name though). The purpose of the Support class is to be a catch-all for any ‘weird’ Heroes that don’t fit the traditional role. Heroes don’t get classified into it by being ‘Support-y’, they get classed into it because they don’t fit other roles.
Adding a new ‘Mana Fueler’ role (or turning ‘Supports’ into it) also doesn’t solve the existence of a potentially undefined role. It just means you now need a new tag for the ‘weird’ Heroes that don’t fit the other roles. (Or have more design limitations, because you now can’t even make ‘weird’ Heroes anymore, unless you can somehow shoehorn a random ‘Mana fueling’ ability onto them).
I don’t hate the idea of some more ‘refueling’ Heroes, but then it makes so much more sense (to me) to just add them to the Support legion.
They have purpose though. Just a unique enough purpose that there is no full class for it. Medivh is a ‘Portal Maker’ even if he doesn’t have a special ‘Portal Maker’ tag.
The problem with Supports is when the AI decides what your team will be and it gives you a support, a healer and you are the tank/bruiser and so your team gets into lots of trouble because the other team is a more “regular” team with only one weak hero instead of two. Too hard to win in those cases. (I Play with bots vs AI only) I hate when stupid AI picks such team compositions, we get decimated too fast. If I only get a healer OR a support I can manage, but with both in my team I know the match is going to be screwed up.
Remove Healers too then 
What do you suggest to do with the supports? Should the role exist at all as role? Should it be worked on and be something unique? What should they be then?
That’s exactly the thing… why? With this, though, heroes could actually be classified as “supporty”. isn’t?
On the contrary, it would actually make them an defined though, though. Just as assassins mainly deal damage, healers mainly heal, tanks mainly peel, etc. Supports could mainly provide resource. It is quite fitting, IMO.
Weird heroes can exist (and should, for fun), but what classifies them should be what are they best at not that they are weird.
Again, that’s the thing. That’s Medivh being Medivh with Medivh tools… why is he a support? Why not better an assassin? Zagara grants vision with her creep, why is Zagara not a support? (Do you get me now?) Having a role with not purpose other than to accommodate heroes that “don’t fit” anywhere else is not good design, and people notice. But give them an unified purpose, and suddenly they are not only logical, but interesting and important.
Or please tell me exactly how it is not the case, and how giving them a “duty” (so to speak) wouldn’t help on the long run?
Well, you may be right, but until that happens and a devastating major update happens that reworks every single hero that uses mana (which would be something like 80% of the current roster, mind you). Then such a function would definitively remain relevant. Isn’t it? And even so, the mechanic can easily function to other types of resources, as I said, not only “mana” per sé.
Having more than 1-2 hero who can provide mana would be problematic. Because a lot of heroes are balanced around it. Like Jaina or Uther. It basically removes their weakness.
But you would be losing something else in return, aren’t you? You would be giving your, either, tank, bruiser, other assassin or even healer for that spot. That can provide quite balance on itself. At least for starters.
In the case of Uther specifically, it wouldn’t be a problem since he can frontline.
I think they would occupy the same spot that a support takes.
Who are the Supports? What Heroes make to it? What do they need to have? What the Support role is all about?
Support role is all about Utility.
Why only 4? Why XY not a Support when they support or all about Utility?
If a Hero can fulfill a Role, the devs rather have them in that Role.
Tyrael is supporty, but can tank? Tank then.
D.va and Yrel are supporty but can act like a bruiser? Bruiser then.
Tyrande who (was a Support Hero (Sustain back then, hidden role) is all about utility? She can heal like real Healers, so Healer.
That’s the reason the devs don’t intentionally make Support Heroes (and said there are no new ones in plan atm). Because if they can make a supporty Tank or a tanky Support they choose the Tank. For balance, for meta and popularity reasons.
But sometimes (like in Medivh’s case who was planned to be a Healer but they decided to scrap that idea and make him into a Support) there are Heroes who doesn’t fit into the major Roles, but into Support. And for that reason it’s a welcomed one.
So the Support role is fine as is, and making a role for “resource providing” is a weak idea.
Why is Rexxar not a support then? (multiple bodies).
Why is Zagara not a support then? (vision and can build to cover all map as well).
Etc.
Or if you prefer the other way around (because they can fulfil another role properly)…
Then why is Zarya not a bruiser or tank then? She already was and functioned that way.
Or why Med is not an assassin? He is more than capable of very high damage.
Why is Abathur not a healer? Is pretty much how many players use him anyways.
And so on.
Every hero “supports” his team one way or another, and they do so by fulfilling their… well… their role.
Trying to use this point of view that “X hero helps this way” as a way to justify the lack of unity and logic within a role category itself, is very mediocre mentality, IMHO, is like letting a flaw in design be just because you are afraid of admitting it was a mistake in the first place, a not-so-well thought idea, or even simply being afraid of change or something like that.
The issue is, there is no uniformity in the support role… Yes, yes, they all do “support” as we said, but in a very different way from one another, so much to the point that they feel alien from one another, instead of having a common ground and a clear idea of what to expect by having said role in a team (regardless of who the hero is). Know what I’m saying?
You can easily know what to expect when you see a healer, or a tank, or an assassin in a team, but current support? Nope. That is totally dependant on the hero himself, not the role. Notice the issue now?
Is really not that difficult to understand, man.
I disagree, and seeing how many people are liking the idea, and how some other people are actually concerned it could be end up very powerful, I wouldn’t call it weak. A weak idea, on the other hand, would be denying what the vast majority of the player base recognize as somehow a failure in role design, and don’t wanting to do anything about it (or preventing others from doing so) just because it would bring “change” (that scary word!) 
supports are the heroes with defensive abilities for other heroes like a healer has but no heals
Yeah, “shield guys” isn’t? But how are TLV defensive, though? Why is Tyrael not a support then?
Okay, so we just effectively nerfed a bunch of heroes. Cool. Awesome.
Also rage is a resource, but it is not used for casting anything. which is what makes it more complex.
It’s like Zarya, if energy counts as a resource, all of a sudden she has got an absolute massive buff.
As I also said, junkrat has a resource, grenades. They’re on him HP bar.
Like, yeah. It comes down to what I expected. You don’t have a full solution (and as I said, a full solution is HARD for anyone to come up with). So right now your ideas essentially boils down to adding complexity for complexities sake.
Oh! I actually have been thinking about that! Don’t be impatient, my friend.
The way I formulated the problem was like this: «Non-mana heroes usually are more powerful the more they have filled their Fury/Energy whatever, the more the better, isn’t? Like Rage for Hogger, which the more he has the faster his CD, etc. So, how to prevent non-mana heroes to be busted this way with an hypothetical support that helps with resources?» (Is this good enough analysis of the issue?)
The conclusion I have so far would be that non-mana resources are granted by % based on the missing total!!. That should help the balance a lot, isn’t?!
So if the max resource is, let’s say, 100 (and the bar is empty), and the support grants 20%, then they would get 20 thanks to the support, but if it was already at 60, then it only would gain 8, and so on, with a minimum of 1 and rounded down.
This way, the support could only help keep the resource on the top for so long, and it would be mostly the non-mana user’s job himself instead to keep it at the top for the most powerful effects. The support, however, would greatly help (say, support! duh!) as a fantastic kick-starter for him. That would be very useful and cool indeed, and the gameplay would basically remain the same for the non-mana hero! So nothing gets broken beyond what the hero could already do by himself. (Damn, the more I imagine them working this way the more I get excited, so much potential!!).
What do you think about it?
Nothing (Again, other than maybe a name change to ‘special’ or ‘utility’, or some other more neutral term). I don’t see any problem in having a relatively neutral tag for Heroes that do something unique. On the contrary, I think it’s a good way to have those kinds of Heroes.
Yes and no.
Should the classification exist? Yes. See above, I think it’s a good thing to have an ‘undefined’ tag for otherwise hard to classify Heroes.
Should it exist as a ‘Role’ to use in comps? No. And it doesn’t. People just randomly assume/pretend it does, and then pretend that’s somehow a problem when it doesn’t live up to their (wrong) assumption.
The main thing I’d love to change is people’s perception of the class/role (And what I think a name change would be good for). I wish people would stop thinking of ‘Support’ as a normal Role that has or needs a specific definition. It isn’t. It’s just the collective tag for any and all Heroes with more unique qualities beyond the standard ‘kill things/prevent things from being killed’. Look for yourself and figure out what they do and how to use that.
And how would you want to do this? It’s not like there is any classification for ‘global push,dmg&buff dispenser’, ‘portal provider’ or ‘multi-body map presence’. You could add those, but then you have a whole bunch of essentially useless categories with one hero each.
That’s what the ‘Support’ tag is mainly for, to clean up the classification system by limiting the amount of classifications necessary to sort all heroes. Tank/ Healer/Assassin already covers most duties, Bruiser covers the overlap between Tank&Assassin, and ‘Support’ covers any Hero that doesn’t fit those roles.
Because it’s just cleaner to just group them all in one collective ‘unclassified utility’ tag, rather than create separate classifications for every one of them.
Not really, no. Even if you added those functionalities to those Heroes, it would still be a horribly ill-defined Role. They’d all add mana, but their kits and qualities are still wildly different. A Murky is not going to do the same thing as Medivh for example, and you wouldn’t fit them into the same team slot. You would have a definition of Support (makes mana), but that definition would be essentially useless for comp construction, arguably even more so than the current Support tag (where you at least know it’s a ‘weird’ hero that won’t cover the standard bases).
Obviously people could still use their brains and figure out when to pick which, but they can already to that now, without the new misleading ‘mana maker’ tag that tells you nothing useful about the Hero. The new role would only make things worse in that regard.
And this this the part where your idea turns from merely ‘useless’ to ‘actively ruining the game’, at least in my view. You say that supports would mainly provide resource. So what about their existing kits, the parts that don’t do that? Is Medivh going to lose his Portal tricks now that they’re (supposed to be) about providing mana instead of mobility? Is Murky suddenly forbidden to split push because his team now needs his egg for mana?
I don’t even want to think about how many Heroes whose kit you’d need to destroy to make them ‘mainly provide resources’. It’s not like you can randomly slap extra utility on those Heroes, you’re going to have cut significant parts of their existing kits just to make them provide mana, let alone making it their main job.
(And that’s not even going into cases like Malfurion, that do have an existing role but also do generate mana.)
Because Medivh is not reliable enough at killing things to really be an assassin, and far more relevant at providing utility with portals. And since ‘utility’ doesn’t fit the other roles, he falls under the ‘support’ class’. (Also he provides healing, so why isn’t he healer? Because his heals aren’t up to par for that either). Zagara’s damage is far more relevant than her vision (and she has enough to kill things), so she falls under Assassin (especially in team fights, what roles are mainly based on).
But you’re not entirely wrong, either of them could arguably switch roles. And then we’d have the exact same discussion, only from the other side: ‘Medivh provides so much utility, why isn’t he support’. ‘Zagara deals so much damage, why isn’t she assassin?’. It’d be a completely pointless change.
Welcome to Important Role Reality #1: Roles. Aren’t. Perfect. Nor are they ever going to be. The game is far too complex for that, and Hero design too varied. You’re never going to define entire Hero identities in one simple Role tag. There are always going to be Heroes that don’t really fit their role(s), or could arguably be changed. The main advantage of Roles is to simplify matchmaking, not to provide exact definitions of what each Hero does. Trying to somehow ‘fix’ the system to perfectly match Roles with Hero functionality is a futile effort at solving an unsolvable (and arguably non-existent) problem.
Hard disagree. I think it makes perfect sense to have an ‘exceptions’ role to accommodate unusual heroes.
Again, please stop thinking of ‘Support’ as if it is (meant to be) an actual role in itself. It isn’t. It’s just the collective name for the ‘Mobility provider’ Role, the ‘Global aid provider’ Role, the ‘shield provider*’ Role, and any other Roles (‘Resource provider’) that don’t have enough representatives for their own tag.
Those Heroes are already interesting and important, with or without the Support tag. Why do you think they aren’t? What does it matter whether Medivh is classified as Healer, Assassin, or Support? His kit is the same either way. If Johanna was suddenly reclassified as Healer or Assassin (again, kit unchanged), do you think people would suddenly stop picking her as the Tank she is? The Role tag is mostly irrelevant, it only really matters for QM matchmaking.
As for why giving Supports the ‘mana making role’ is bad in the long run;
See above arguments for various problems with it. It’d also add a random unnecessary ‘mana maker’ Role to the game, without any practical application. Tank/healer/dps all have clear reasons why you’d need them in a comp, ‘mana maker’ doesn’t (unless you’re also planning to ruin the game to the point you can’t properly play without one). It’s just as irrelevant as ‘support’ in that regard.
And it doesn’t even solve the problem of the ‘undefined’ role, as you’d still need a new ‘unsorted’ tag whenever you next make a ‘weird’ Hero that doesn’t make mana. (Or you’re needlessly limiting design space by forcing all ‘weird’ heroes to somehow be mana makers, regardless of how badly it fits their normal purpose.)
That does sound lovely. But I think I prefer something with a little tickster-esque in it. Instead of just, plopping the pylon somewhere safe and being the team’s battery. Maybe something that does heal mana but it would have to be an action I take, like hitting enemies with my Q or something generates an instant radial mana charge around me. I don’t know.
What do you think “more bodies” mean regarding Tlv and Supports?
Not the literal meaning of more bodies. But the ability to be at more places at once.
Do Rexxar and Mish can capture different Objectives at the same time? Nope.
But even if he’d be able to, Rexxar is not a Support for the same reason Yrel isn’t.
If you saw, I listed multiple things with every Support Hero.
Zag having vision is one thing. Her coverimg multiple lanes is situational (same with the vision tbh).
So Zag barely has utility and she can work fine as an Assassin.
The best Tank.
Because she’s squishy as hell.
Her only tankiness is her 10 sec cd shield.
Has no CC, can’t peel, dmg is very limited.
Has only one dmging ability.
Can’t provide reliable Heals.
Where?
In QM? Not in ranked. Ccl? If true, situational. And pros can use weird comps.
What an empty sentence.
What is the role of a Bruiser? Sololaning? There are non-Bruiser sololaners. Secondary frontline? Tanks and Uther can be that.
What is the role of Assassins? Killing? Dmg? Don’t other roles get kills? Deal dmg (talking about high)?
Support Heroes fulfill their roles by taking pressure off of their team in unique ways.
Tlv: soak > Aba: soak/heal > Medivh: heal/shield > Zarya: shield
There is this unity.
But tbh, having unique, diverse Supports is what I’m looking for.
And it’s not like Support Heroes are barely played.
There is no issue regarding that.
Not true. Uther, Alex, Khara, WM, BW and many others are highly different. You can’t expect the same Heals.
Same with Tanks and Assassins. There is no unity among them either. And that’s the goal. Diversity.
Your points and where you’rr coming from is easy to understand. But that doesn’t mean you’re right.
Truth is not affected by the number of certain opinions.
The Support role is niche and really hard to play, so ofc more ppl will fail to utilise that.
Not really. I guess it solves some corner cases, but mostly it just makes things more pointlessly complicated. The basic balancing issues still exist.
Non-mana resources are typically generated at different speeds, and how quickly they’re supposed to be generated and spent varies from Hero to Hero. Your changes can’t fix that. Even if you alter the amount of resources given based on how full their bar is, giving 20% to a Hero intended to only slowly refuel is still going to be significantly stronger than giving 20% to a Hero intended to easily refill their bar for example.
I think it was also because of her shielding, making it awkward to match her against zero support comps. (Since 0.5 healer from Zarya shields > 0 healer from normal bruiser).
Yea, most of the roles as you said yourself is for QM MM.
Ppl in ranked and pro games can and will use Heroes outside of their roletag.
(And use Supports commonly.)
And if we’d have a Role for resources, two possibilities would occur.
Either we now have a “must role”, or nothing actually changed.
I mean we have 5 slots in a team but 6 roles (and R.Assassin usually takes two slots), so no idea why someone thinks we need to make every role desired to have.
If the devs copied LoL supports then there’s not much to wonder.