We had support focused roles in the past…DPS Shaman, Druids and Paladins. I wouldn’t say they were pure support like you see in other games but they all brought great Utility and in the case of Shaman increased the overall DPS or your Raid/Group at the expense of their personal damage.
Support is tough to balance though. Rift had a Support role and Support specs like Bard but players generally abandoned the role once understood the content. They either dropped Support for another DPS to try and power through with one healer or just brought an extra “real” healer. We see the same thing all the time in Mythic Raiding.
oh great, a “healers only heal” ksm hero talkin smack…haven’t seen that before
1 Like
You seem to be confusing “support” with “hybrid.” Performing both the healing and damage dealing role does not make you a support. It makes you a hybrid. Again, understandable if the narrow WoW structure is your only reference. These terms have fallen out of common usage.
A support enhances the performance of other roles, often disabling enemies at the same time. Think original Enhancement Shaman in your melee group. Note that the damage and/or healing they do is often perfunctory.
nah i’ve played support in other games…they do more than just heal and have the same responsibilities as a modern WoW healer.
WoW’s “healer” terminology is way outdated. it maybe applied in classic wow era, but i have to use the entirety of my kit to progress…that’s not just a “healer”, it’s “support” by definition, sorry. 
1 Like
Who are you arguing against? I’m explicitly saying that the support role doesn’t heal. That’s my entire point.
ask yourself that. you responded to what i believe is an outdated term for no reason and then proceeded to speak nonsense. 
You’re going to break your chain backpedaling that hard. 
Feel free to have the last word, if that makes you feel better.
yay i love getting the last word(s)!
(i’ll be nice though) 
This the new Fury warrior buff we provide so we can be included in end game …lol
A “support” role would most likely be just another dps but with extra buffs.
Former, not latter. The outcry over DPS queues would be something to behold, otherwise.
If they plan on keeping things as faceroll as they are in many aspects of this game, I wouldn’t worry too much about balance (outside of raids and m+). And as much as I’d like to try a true support character (thinking bard or controller type), there really isn’t a need for them in the current state of the game.
Vanillia:
Pallies buff only lasted 5 minutes and single target. Spent the raid buffing 40 people amd when you got to the end, you had to rebuff everyone again.
Shaman totem twisting. Drop windfury, gave everyone a 6 second buff in the party, so every 6 seconds you would drop Windfury, then drop Air (spellpower or cleansing) right after to ensure getting multiple buffs out at once.
Those are classes that were directly built around buffing other team mates and that is what players mean by support.
No Disc priest was never a support class, mitigation healing is the name of the game. Bubble bots were mandatory during ICC and stayed strong throughout numberous expansions until other healers complained they were healing too much (tank gets hit for 10k. Since shields were always broken first, 2k of the hit always went to disc while other healers sniped each other for the rest).
One could argue Resto druids were supports in Vanillia, simply becuae they didnt do enough healing to be worth a spot. They were more innervate buddies.
Oh, Cata mages were a good example of support. Only one stack of ignite counted on a target, but all fire mages ignite helped bring it up. So top mage would be the first to apply it, giving them credit for all the damage, yet every mage doing damage would help boast it. The other mages would play support to the main one.
Support can be made to work.
You just described three extremely unfun versions of support classes. Thank you for proving my point.
healers are dedicated support classes, i don’t get what people are on about. i assume they are talkin about like enchanters in mobas? some one that buffs but we had that…it was vanilla paladin and shaman and it was terrible.
the forums?! Just tonight in game i got a whisper demanding feet pics from some random priest who gave me PI. People are weirrrrrrrd
I highly doubt that Blizzard has the capacity to create anything new or even venture into creating one. So you need not worry, OP.
They had buff classes in Classic.
They had a priest go shadow to get the debuff and then Disc for power infusion. Your role was to keep the debuff on the boss so warlocks got the damage increase. Then you off healed and gave Pi to whatever mage paid you the most gold.
Discipline Priest is a full healer spec, period.
The only difference between a more “traditional” healer (like HPriest or RDruid) is the way it mechanically works to provide the healing.
Discipline heals by using a combination of healing and damaging spells. But, at the end of the run, damage provided by Disc Priests is very similar to that provided by other healing specs. In some scenarios, other healing specs (like RShaman) can even do higher damage.
Disc’s damage is actually fairly limited, as it needs to be balanced around the healing it provides. Other specs can switch into “damage mode” and dish out a higher DPS than Disc.
A true hybrid spec that’s not a pure ops, not a pure healer, would be a spec that provides around half the damage a DPS provides and around half the Healing a healer provides, or at least one that can switch between those roles as needed (in that sense, Shaman might be the closest one to a hybrid right now).
EDIT: And it’s worth mention that, while Disc is the only healer spec that absolutely needs to use damage spells to heal, there are at least other 2 specs that have a kit designed around using damage abilities in order to heal. MW Monk can convert damage to healing, and several of its healing abilities are designed around hitting things in order to improve the healing. Holy Paladin is also designed around hitting things in order to generate resources that are then turned into healing. The main difference is that those 2 specs can opt out of using that playstyle (though sacrificing performance, usually).
Ah, good to know that BDKs are healers then. 
Again, it is literally just the name of the role you sign up for in a group; to support your allies. Healing is a large portion but not the only portion of supporting your team.
EDIT: This entire thread is another example of people getting hung up on role names instead of, y’know, the class that they signed up to play.