druids, shamans and paladins were exactly that role when the game first came out.
Healing is a form of support. Healers support their teammates. They do so by returning missing health, dispelling debuffs, buffing teammates, some provide absorptions to stop damage from even happening, and help kill things faster so no health gets taken away in the first place. Yes, other classes have some of these tools, but healers are the complete support package.
In some very organized m+ groups healers don’t even heal that much. They’re there for all the other things that I mentioned.
I didn’t “broaden” anything. That’s straight from the actual definition of support.
And again, shields aren’t healing.
It’s health management. Healers prevent you from dying by direct intervention. Support, as a role, is indirect. They assist others in performing their role better and hamper enemies in performing theirs.
Windfury is support. Bloodlust is support. Battle Cry is support. Arcane Intelligence is support. And so on.
This is not to be confused with utility, which are primarily movement nd CC abilities in WoW. That being said, a role that focuses primarily on CC is called a mezzer.
These terms have fallen out of common usage. I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t know the way they’ve been used in the MMO space as they simply haven’t been used after WoW streamlined the industry to the trinity. But now that the support role is being discussed again in earnest? It does have a specific meaning in this space.
You can make the same type of pitch for both tanks and DDs.
Healers prevent people from dying from a combination of both direct and indirect intervention. That’s the mechanics of this game. There are some things that are better served by dispelling them over simply healing through it. A good example is the debuff on the first mythic boss in the raid. Yes, you can heal through it, especially if you want to top the meters, but it’s far more efficient for a priest to mass dispel it on the group and save your healers the mana. The healer role is NOT as cut and dry as you’re making it out to be.
It is. Stopping health bars from reaching 0 is their primary responsibility. As mentioned, a myriad of classes have support and utility abilities that are secondary to their primary role. They are all hybridized to a degree, and the best players take advantage of those buttons that fall outside of their primary role.
A support class would focus on those support abilities, with things like damage and healing taking on that secondary role. They would help others to perform their role much more efficiently. Look at EQ’s Shaman or DAoC’s Skald for some good examples from games past. FFXIV’s Dancer is a decent modern example, but even then, I think it skews too far toward damage to be considered a support.
Stopping health bars from reaching zero can be and often is accomplished by things other than simply raw healing, because it isn’t always the most efficient thing to do. Ask your healers in your raid if they just simply heal through everything.
You’re missing the forest for the trees in this discussion. Feel free to respond to the rest of the post, which already responded to the detail you are snipping out of context.
I’m not snipping anything out of context. You just don’t want to admit that you’re wrong.
Healers don’t simply provide raw healing. Yes, it’s a large part of the role, but providing support in the form of non-healing spells and abilities is a sizeable part of the role as well, and in some cases is actually more important than simply healing.
Just like new healers tend to overly focus on healing meters to tell if a healer is good. It’s not about how much you heal, it’s more about how you heal and what you’re healing.
You quoted:
You responded:
I already answered, which you snipped:
And provided additional context:
If you want to continue the discussion in good faith, I will be happy to continue. There’s a lot of MMO history and terminology that you could learn if WoW is your only slice of experience with the genre. If you’d prefer to continue with a bad faith argument, your ego can have the final word.
I… really hope there isn’t a ‘support’ role. I just got a bad feeling.
Every time WoW attempts to add some new and original idea to their game, it’s garbage. 100% of the time.
I do not trust them to add in a new type of specialization to the game at all. They will 100% execute it terribly, sorry devs, and make the game worse by comparison. Remember Shadowlands? Remember Borrowed power? remember Borrowed Power in BFA? Legion? Remember all those horrible grindy systems? Remember Azerite Armor Perks that allowed you to play in new and cool ways?
Remember the cool idea of infinite Island expeditions? Oh what about Torghast! Those were cool original ideas right?
I know these aren’t exactly the same but you see my point.
I mean…Lokaa isn’t wrong lol. There’s nothing bad faith about their argument. There is in fact more to the healing role than just keeping people’s health from reaching zero.
Or are you one of the folk that think healing is just afking until they see a health bar go down and pressing their healing button?
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I’m not wrong. Healers don’t just heal. That’s my entire point. You seem fixated on the fact that healers are not a support class when my entire point is that they are the total package. They can heal, they can support, they can damage. Providing support as a healer isn’t a “secondary role” like you claim, it’s an integral part of the kit.
We are not just simply “healers” - or at least the good ones aren’t.
Thank you! To be completely honest, I think they may be.
That’s the age old crux. Your support class is going to have to be able to damage in someway outside of auto-attack or they will be impossible to level. So now what you really have is a dps class who’s damage is worse than other dps classes. Now you have to do the calculation of how much damage your support class brings, not just through their own damage but in the utility they bring, and if it’s ever less than just bringing another dps class, then that role is dead.
There are other kinds of roles that can be considered support, roles like Mezzers and Controllers are represented in older MMOs, the issue of course with these roles is that, in WoW, lots of classes provide utility that cannibalizes these roles. So in order to make them work you’d either have to remove a lot of existing class based utility which people would dislike, or you would have to force encounters/dungeons to have certain kinds of enemies that only these classes can deal with, which would likely also prove to be rather unpopular.
I think the idea of a modern support role is largely filled by the healer these days, and that any effort in building out a 4th role would be a massive waste of resources, effort, and time.
Which I think is solved by modern scaling tech. A modern support could very easily have scaled efficacy based on group size or other factors. You do 100% damage when solo, 50% when in a duo with the other 50% (or more) going to your teammate, and so on. I wouldn’t be so bold as to venture any specific numbers. But the technology is there to make it work now.
That’d be a really weird thing to do to a player. Making them feel suddenly 50% weaker or more if they join a group with another player. While that may make their teammates feel good, if I was say, queting in the open world, what incentive would I have to joining a group with another player if all of a sudden my personal damage contribution drops off a cliff? What if say, I join a group and my group member is half a zone away, would I still get the 50% damage cut despite the fact I have no way to actively buff my group mate?
Should my own damage drop 50% at all passively if I’m not using my skills to buff anyone?
Yeah scaling a role’s abilities like that sounds like a recipe for disaster.
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Doesn’t go against a fundamental MMO principle though? You should be stronger in a group than you are alone. I feel stronger when I have all these buffs that my friends give me. If my class, arbitrarily gets scaled down when I join a group, that would feel terrible.
Not only that… there are big implications of damage meters. A lot of what drives people is that aspect.
Seems like youve never heard of shaman and pally back in the day.
Its ok to be wrong.
But to be so damn certain about it is scary
You’d be wrong there, because they most certainly will tune the high end content around having whatever utility the spec provides.
Mythic Rasz basically required evokers to be completed before multiple nerfs.