Just healing can get a little boring, and DPS gets even more boring. So I want more support specs since they have a little bit of everything.
And it wouldn’t be that hard to come up with them since a lot of specs have conflicting playstyles (that limit each other HARD) or don’t live up to their fantasy very well.
For example:
You could separate mistweaver into two trees, one that’s about casting and focused on Yu’lon (the healer spec) and one that’s about fistweaving and focused on Chi-ji (which becomes support spec).
You could separate holy pally into two trees, one that’s focused on healing through spells, and one that’s focused on light healing and supporting through dealing damage.
Druid could get a new form, like an alpha wolf or something, that would focus on buffs / debuffs through howls and nature magic and whatnot. (Not what I mentioned above, but easy to do)
Hunters could get survival turned into a spec that focuses on debuffing enemies and making allies do more damage / live better through nature magic, traps and venom (like the spec says), and current survival could become a different theme based on gadgets - like a saboteur or something.
DKs could get something similar to how old blood DK had a ton of group healing, give them a lot of magic-based buffing / debuffing.
Warriors could get a battle master who uses shouts to buff allies.
Rogues could get something like an arcane trickster and debuff enemies / buff allies.
Disc could become a support spec.
I donno. I’d just like more support specs because, as much as I like aug, I hate hate hate hate drac’thyr.
More likely it’d just compound the problem with the DPS specs that benefit more from outside help being increasingly taken to content over classes that don’t.
That would pretty much require them making all DPS damage profiles similar so that they all benefit from support specs the same.
It’s been a problem with Power Infusion for years, now it’s a problem with Aug, and if you add more supports it’ll just be more of the same. Not every class benefits from outside buffs the same.
That’s why you don’t make every support work the same way.
Aug increases stats of allies, so we’ve got that covered.
Some supports could increase the damage that enemies take, while reducing the damage that allies take.
Some supports could reduce the cooldowns of allies.
Some supports could restore resources to allies.
Some supports could work like an offhealer.
Some supports could work like an offtank.
Get creative with it, the only requirement is that the buffing / debuffing they do has to outweigh the loss in damage or be a net neutral, and it’s worth taking over a DPS slot if you want to. Would open up a lot more interesting comps in upper end M+ and raiding if Aug isn’t the only option.
my take is that all dps specs should offer some form of augmentation-esque support. give shamans back their totems, rogues back their poisons, paladins back their auras, etc. allow arms to offtank, frost, ret. hybridize holy pal and brewmaster. braindead dps play is why we’re where we’re at, honestly they’ve really just boxed themselves into a pretty unenviable position with evoker as a whole. but until they stop catering to the vocal 5% of players and start actually developing a game again i think most of these suggestions are just piss in the wind tbh
I’d like more support specs, plenty of options but leave it to blizz to pick what feels right at the time. DH would be a good candidate since they only have two but I don’t know if I buy it thematically. Monk, Paladin, Shaman, maybe even Mage seem like fun options.
I personally think that every class should have a tank, DPS and a support spec.
I understand class design is not easy and balancing several new specs would be difficult and time consuming. I genuinely think that this would add new flavor to our classes. If every class could offer every role, it would certainly make things more interesting. For those that stress about class identity, well, what is stopping a mage from becoming a battle-mage or a priest becoming some sort of weapon wielding cleric like Anduin? If everyone became special, then no one would be. People would no longer lament about evokers, because their own class can now offer that same party or raid slot. Of course, there will be flavors of the month as there always have been. This would give every class desire because suddenly everyone becomes beneficial in some way. Really, they could even give support its own role to select when in queue.
I hope to one day see more specs added into the game as support. I think it is healthy for the growth of class customization and expands class fantasy.
I don’t hate the idea of more support specs but they need to fix the log hooks so we can at least accurately measure the value of the specs adding support.