I’ve been thinking about a damage only class that leans more into the support style of game play. Summoners would wear cloth and the Specs would be Aion Summoner, Weapon Summoner, and Necromancer.
Aion Summoner: A class that would depend on summoning several bosses from past expansions and using their abilities in raids on the battlefield. The player would go into a vehicle for a short amount of time and start fighting. Long cooldowns for short amounts of time, for high damage. The class would have quest dependency though, if the player never fought that boss on their account they wouldn’t be able to summon the Aion. But a player could get the chance to get Aions sphere’s (bind on account items) by going into Timewalker raids.
Weapon Summoner: A heavy support class that raises attack or defenses of ally players with AoE spells. Spell could raise Intelligence, Strength, or Agility, range, or even speed, or lower the stats of enemies. Soloing the class in quest would have curtain DOT spells to damage and slow spells to flag. A Weapon Summoner would appear to have several weapons when fighting enemies, but will primarily be using a staff or wand.
Necromancer: (I’ll let Blizzard play with that and I’m wondering what you guys would do. I’m not going to suggest anything, but the developers have put together a few things and I’m wondering if it will happen.)
Warlock feels this niche already.
I’d do none of the above, and just make these talent choices for Demonology.
2 Likes
Blizzard has made it clear that they don’t feel that support classes have enough utility in the WoW “meta” to be viable.
That is, how do you make a class that say… grants +10% dps to everyone without being mandatory? How do you create one that doesn’t pull more weight than the standard DPS class, but isn’t a hindrance based on any of it’s own mechanics (range, player stacking, etc). How do you make this, and make it an engaging character to play that isn’t just floating around buffing other people?
In lieu of this, they’ve removed most of the “support” nature of classes. Hybrids no longer off-heal or off-tank without changing spec, for example. The exceedingly rare example that they may do so is non-standard and outside of their design intention.
As such… yes, Warlocks already fill the niche of “Summoner with the Support Stuff Removed.”
2 Likes
I guess that’s why we’ve never seen a Bard class. Expect as April Fools jokes.
Support classes have their… heh… supporters, but overall I think the concern is that not a lot of people would play them.
A lot of “support” classes in WoW used to be little more than buffbots, healers, or the "take just one for the buffs but not two because they’re terrible everywhere else."People got upset when support classes had too much damage, for example, because of what all they provided elsewhere.
It might be surprising, but there were a lot of vanilla players who staunchly supported what was called a “Hybrid Tax.” Which is shorthand for “any class that is capable of performing multiple roles at the same time should not be as good at either role as a class that can only perform one role at a time.” Which means that Feral Druids, or Retribution Paladins, who could both pull out and spot heal (or spot-tank some adds but not bosses), couldn’t do so as well as a dedicated healer or tank. They also couldn’t DPS as well as a dedicated DPS class.
In the end, most people who played them recognize that the tax was meant to keep them from outshining the regular classes. We also recognized that it meant they weren’t as useful beyond having one of each for the buffs.
So, yeah. ![:frowning:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/frowning.png?v=6" ":frowning:")
I’d like a Bard or a Summoner or a Mystic or a… the list goes on. The time of “support” has come and gone in WoW, and it was a contentious issue even then.
Well there are 3 specs for every class. I was thinking, maybe even hinting at the Necromancer being the heavy damage spec. I just wasn’t really sure what kind os spells it would have. Spells and abilities have been taken away from Warlocks to give to Demon Hunters. The same thing could happen to Death Knights. I guess I was just thinking about Yuna from Final Fantasy X and thought it would be cool to have something like that. Don’t really play Warlock and there hasn’t been anything about them that made me want to start playing the class, in PvE or PvP.
Lastly, I’ve always liked and played bard classes in my table top games and never really understood why they haven’t been a lot in MMORPG’s, but I guess you explained the reason.
Warlock and DK, mainly Demo lock and Unholy DK.
Yeah, unfortunately players often prefer more impactful roles. Those of us who do enjoy supporting roles are few enough that the class isn’t seen as “worth” having.
A flip side is that in tabletop games the whole goal is working as a group. Communication isn’t an issue when that’s how the entire game is played. So, if I’m a bard in Pathfinder, it doesn’t matter if I can’t deal any particularly notable damage because my group have a wide variety of skills. We can make strange choices, like attempting to go around issues, or even sometimes trying to ‘charm’ them into letting us past.
In an MMO, it’s a bit trickier. The mechanics that make so many classes viable in a tabletop game don’t exist in an MMO (usually). It’s not that they can’t be made, and play well in group content, necessarily. It’s just that the more “support” or “esoteric” your class becomes, the more it relies on lateral freedom in a tabletop setting.
MMO’s as a coded game tend to have much more limited lateral freedom. There isn’t really a lot of room for “everyone sneak along the wall while I distract them with a sleep-song”, or perhaps a “visage spell that makes them think I’m their commanding officer/head boss”.
I’m all for broadening our options, of course. I think it just becomes a question of whether it fits into the WoW meta and narrative. What role does a bard play in a WoW group? We have a lot of crowd control already, so that may or may not be necessary. We don’t want a hybrid CC/Heal/Aggro-Redirect class because then it’s doing nothing for long swaths where it’s skills aren’t needed. I think it’s just a matter of… “If we make a new class, it should fit the mechanics we use in dungeons. A class that can either trivialize current mechanics or mitigate them a great deal would need to be designed around, and then we’re setting out to design a class that we need to design content around.”
1 Like
Problem is, really the only summonable beings in Azeroth are elementals and demons (and beasts I guess) and we already have classes for those.
It works in FF because they have primals and primal egis but WoW doesn’t really have an equivalent.
A Majestic Summoner, 'eh?
A class based around multiple pets would be awesome, but with how badly a single often works, and how bad the double pets do, it would be a class that sometimes did nothing in a fight if the pets bug out.
Well I was thinking they wouldn’t actually be pets they would be vehicles with 4 or 5 abilities.
Yes “Pet Vehicles” would be nice and give the class a little more appeal. I started playing the class during demon transformation during BC (I think) but they took that away.
Seeing how at the end of a quest line the developers like to reward the player with a vehicle destruction fantasy by kill large groups of mods, I’m thinking why not have a class that does that for a short amount of time.