Haven’t you been reading this thread? That’s impossible!
… apparently
You’d think from some of these other responses it would be an equal effort to putting someone on the moon.
Lmao. I didn’t read the thread. I like to keep my sanity.
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FFXI had an undefined support role back in the day.
It did nothing other than triple group formation time so you could have haste and refresh.
If people want support function, give it to healers
Again, I feel you could make the same critique of any FFXI role. I loved my RDM. The support role is simply one of the non-trinity roles that find themselves without the benefit of having evolved into modernity.
Support role MIGHT be for evoker 3rd spec, not others. And as of now, its NPC-only.
WoW isnt built like FFXIV to balance around support roles. Its all about having enough dps.
so like a person with a tiny little guitar thing that plays weak heals, weak shields, weak buffs and gets 1 shot by the giant ogre after the rest of the party is killed because they didnt get enough heals, and didnt get any meaningfull buffs.
I have seen a video like that on youtube… lol
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WoW and FFXIV have identical goals in their combat systems. Their “support” is just a different type of DPS.
What are you talking about? WoW was built to have support. Paladin, Shaman, Mages, Warlocks, etc. had a strong support kit at one time.
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OK I have made similar threads asking about what other players think and honestly I stand in the middle as I see both sides pros and cons.
Now I personally like the idea of support classes, but I also know just because I like something, doesnt mean its the right path to move forward on.
I have been advocating for more Disc Priest styled healing specs for other classes, where you have healing spells, but your main contribution to healing is in the form of DPSing. For example Disc keeping atonements on players while attacking the boss. I would also love to see a “bard-ish styled” class introduced to the game. But sadly if evokers got a spec like that I would never play it as I do not like skinny dragons. So it is what it is.
But what I do not understand is why “Adding a Support Role would be terrible for wow”. If anything more options for player is always a good idea. However I am not convinced moving to a pure support role model would be a good fit for the game. Players that I have spoke to are pretty much split 50/50 on it. In the end, I think adding more class spec options will always be better. This would allow players to choose if they rather be pure heals or hybrid in the case for Disc. Also pure DPS or hybrid in the case for a bard. If anything trying to stop blizzard from giving us more options would be bad.
That said, WoWs playstyle is based on an aging raid/dungeon model that is almost 20 years old. If WoW is to gain more subscribers and newer playes. Then the game must evolve and there is no way getting around that.
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This entire thread is a non-starter, because we already have the support role in the game, it’s simply mislabeled as ‘healer’. Priests support the team by providing healing, speed increases, haste, and DoTs on the enemy alongside the occasional stun. Healing is their most primary function, but their overall effectiveness and responsibilities are a great deal more than just a magical band-aid dispenser.
It makes less than no sense to cripple a character just because they went and found some friends to group with, and this notion of nuking personal damage just to wedge the character into the particular ‘role’ is asinine and completely inorganic. You also make other classes more one-dimensional by the necessity of having to strip them of their supportive abilities just to justify the existence of these specs/classes.
I have no idea why everyone is putting such a massive emphasis on the role when there is absolutely zero mechanical impact the role has outside of helping the Group Finder do its job. You are not playing a ‘healer’ or a ‘DPS’ or a ‘Tank’, you’re playing a Priest specced for Holy or Shadow or a Warrior specced for Prot.
To reiterate: Support as a role already exists, it’s just mislabeled as ‘healer’.
What makes support exclusive to healers in WoW? Do tanks and damage dealers not provide buffs and debuffs anymore? Are healers more responsible for these than they are responsible for ensuring that health bars do not reach 0, warranting a label change?
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It is not exclusive to healer and never was.
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I think it’s possible there’s a place for a Support Role in the game, but I know Blizzard won’t be able to pull it off.
It would have to follow at least 2 rules without fail.
1.) It’s OK for a raid to require one person playing a role. What happens if two or more people are playing it, however? There has to be some value for the 2nd player, up to a reasonable number.
2.) It’s not OK for a dungeon group to require one, at least until there’s a reasonable amount of players on the level of tanks and healers playing them. And even then, they need to be very careful with that, as requiring a 3rd role people gotta wait for is a huge impact on quality of life. So how do you make a support class that only adds as much value as one other damage player, no more, no less?
As Blizzard can’t even balance 2 button dragons at the start of a Heroic Raid, I have zero faith they’d figure out either.
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Precisely. Once support was no longer the primary role of a couple select classes, it became a secondary responsibility of everyone. Not only in WoW, but in the genre as a whole. Support abilities never left - it simply lost centralization. Anyone who suggests that healer is “basically support” lacks a fundamental understanding of what “support” means in the RPG genre.
Support isn’t exclusive to healers, because ‘healers’ are supposed to be doing a lot more than just healing. Same thing with DPS and tanking. A Holy Priest, for example, is a support spec of the Priest class, since it is designed to keep the team healthy and strong, whereas Shadow Priest is an Offensive spec. Just like how Offensive and Defensive classes with CC are expected to use that CC to stymie enemy casts or mechanics.
Ultimately, even DPS and Tank would get relabeled, so it would be ‘Offensive’, ‘Defensive’, and ‘Support’, which would ultimately suggest where your primary, not sole, responsibility would lie.
The other issue is that ‘healing’ is something that parties eventually need but don’t ever actually want. Time spent healing is time that could be spent dealing damage or mitigating other threats if only HP bars weren’t a concern. This is why groups run as few support classes as absolutely possible and stack as much damage as possible because, simply put, DPS is the measuring stick of how an encounter typically goes.
EDIT: The overall point however is the fact that much is being made over a label with absolutely zero mechanical significance outside of helping an algorithm sort PCs into groups. Gameplay doesn’t suddenly change if the Hunter is labeled the ‘healer’ the Holy Priest is labeled ‘tank’, and the Prot Warrior is labeled ‘DPS’. It’ll just confuse the algorithm, but the classes and specs all play exactly identically.
The issue with being labeled as support or crowd control it disrupted the holy trinity until you out geared the content. Than the tables turned and support was disregarded because you could dps and live through an encounter.
I have always preferred playing support roles. One some might understand is enchanter/bard in EQ. I enjoyed seeing surviving against bad pulls, bust the meters, or allow me to make a pet out of a big baddie.
Shaman was the closes to this class when WoW released.
edit - I guess you could say warlock to some extent but my buddy was already a warlock.
I made a Shammie and played them off and on but switch to Hunter because it reminded me of Creature Handler. Last game I played before WoW was another support type in SWG CH/Doc/Rifleman.
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Years ago when I played LoTRO both the Burglar and Minstrel had “support” specs. They essentially worked like a dps but would give dps/dmg mitigation/healing buffs to the party as a whole. I assume this is what they are trying to do here.
So you would have a group member that does only 50% normal dps but increases the other 2 dps by 25%. Or lessens the healing requirements so your healer can do more dps.
Yep. I was a Captain: two lost roles in one, as a Support-Offtank hybrid.
They are not true support. Mages are still high dps, shamans, etc. Having “utility” alongside your dps stuff doesnt make you a support class. A true support class forgoes high or even decent DPS or heals, to give the team plenty of support. But no one would take one of these since they cant hold their grounds in terms of dps, ending up being a carry. Examples of this is bard and dancer in FFXIV, but they make it work with how OP they are in support abilities.
I think it could make sense for Augmentation to have weak actual heals, like no more than what Devastation has, but Disc-level or even greater shielding. Then they could have a minor amount of personal DPS like most healers, and maybe some minor buffing on the level of what current specs have. And of course, as evokers, they have a homogenized lust-equivalent, their class buff, and the standard individual and mass rezzes out of combat.
In order to preserve distinctness from Disc, most of Augmentation’s damage abilities wouldn’t need to heal anyone, they’d just be filler to cast in phases with low healing/shielding needed, or maybe fishing for essence procs. Maybe you could have some dual-purpose abilities (CD or essence based) that damage all enemies in an AOE and also shield all allies in the same area, or something like that. They’d probably still have Fire Breath, so instead of Life-Giver’s Flame, give them Earth-Warder’s Flame which shields X nearby allies for Y% of damage done. (Although as an evoker spec it would be disappointing if they didn’t also have at least a few unique empowered spells, whether they are breaths or something else).
Their mastery or an accessibly-placed talent could grant leech or a similar effect to anyone affected by one of their shields, so they wouldn’t need to cast a lot of direct heals to still keep people alive in a long fight. Or Aug shields could heal by a % of damage they successfully absorb, I think mage self-shields had that as a borrowed power at one point. Then even if someone got chunked to 50% before you shielded them, their actual health could still go up by the time the shield wears off (but in a different way than Disc accomplishes the same thing).
A shield-centric spec would also offer another opportunity to let them do damage without focusing on damage: their shields could reflect a % of successfully absorbed damage back to the attacker. (I think this was also a borrowed and/or Torghast power for some already existing class, but I don’t know if they still have it as a talent.)
What I’ve just described would be a “healer” in terms of WoW party building, just like Disc is, so it wouldn’t require rescaling all content in the game or changing how people put parties together or anything like that. Its primary function is to keep other party members alive by casting spells, and its primary stat is Intellect. But it could be thematically and in gameplay as different from Preservation as Disc is from Holy.
That’s the subjectivity of fun for you. Affecting fights indirectly rather than directly was un-fun to most people so specs that focused heavily on it were redesigned into the trinity we have today, but a few people really liked it and want it back. It doesn’t help that they often have complex playstyles requiring quite a bit of game knowledge, which again, a few people enjoy greatly and many hate. (Nobody has to think about the best time to apply the monk or DH debuff. This is probably not an accident.)
But just because something is subjective doesn’t mean you can afford to completely ignore it. The experience of other MMOs shows that when a pure support is strong enough to improve their group’s chances of success compared to having another role in that slot (usually one more DPS)… that’s often bad for the game, because too few people want to be that support so all the other players are held back by not being able to find a support for content that is tuned to need one.
This is why I’m wary of the idea of a trinity-breaking spec (at all, not just mid-expansion). But I would totally try out the spec I brainstormed above, if it is introduced in 10.1.5 or something. (I agree with Taliesin that whatever Augmentation is, they probably won’t introduce it at the start of a new raid tier; a minor patch when RWF is over and there is time to hotfix-tune it before the next season would be better.)