I recently had a brief conversation with someone in the comments of a youtube video I was watching and wanted to extend this out to a wider group and see what others might have to say on the topic. I’ve removed a bit of the lead up to this as it wasn’t relevant to the topic of “Support playstyles” and the upcoming Augmentation spec but rather just general discussion of WoW as a whole:
His comment:
“I actually think they need to go the route of more support classes and end healers. Make it groups just tank and friends.”
My Rant:
I certainly wouldn’t remove healers, but I absolutely agree with the idea of more “support” playstyles. When I think back through my MMO history some of the most fun I had was playing “support”.
The controller role of some classes in DCUO.
Or the Bard or DPS Chloromancer and others from Rift.
That brief period of time in WoW where shadow priest restored mana to the whole raid with Vampiric Embrace.
Guild Wars 2 does a great job with this at the moment, however there’s still room for improvement. Unfortunately the relatively short range, radial nature of boons in that game leads to a “Stack or Suck” playstyle for almost all endgame content.
Then there’s the elephant in the room: DPS Meters.
As Preach expressed after his stint in GW2. a fairly significant portion of players will likely resent the idea of their performance metrics being dependent on the performance of others. WoW is experiencing a bit of an issue with this right now I’d say. Power Infusion. Most of the top parses on WCLogs are what they are due to the players in question getting sometimes multiple power infusions.
The players that don’t get the buff can try as hard as they like but chances are low of them being able to “win” if the priest either doesn’t buff them or uses PI at the wrong time. Personally I detest DPS leader boards. I use a DPS meter mind you so that I have a way of tracking my personal improvement, but it is undeniable that a large part of the WoW player base is very interested in their M+ IO score or their position on WCLogs. So any support class added to WoW would need to take this player preference into account.
I Resubbed specifically to see how this upcoming Evoker Augmentation “Support” spec fits into WoW. Already you’ll notice that even a “support” class in WoW must be labeled as a DPS and certain “hooks” are being made to ensure that DPS meters and WCLogs can parse accordingly. I hope this class doesn’t disappoint.
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in the beginning, before WoW, the Holy Trinity was Tank-Damage-Support. I think EQ2 created the dedicated healer/rezzer.
Rift’s 5man groups were 1 tank 1 healer 1 support 2 dps.
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It’s a video game.
Game #1 is the game.
Game #2 is typically parsing.
Blizzard should always focus on Game #1, and making it as fun as possible. For the sake of Game #2, Blizzard said they’ll make API hooks to determine how much value is granted by an Augmentation Evoker. WCL and AddOns should be able to support this.
It’s not an issue unless Blizzard messes up.
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Augvoker is a tricky concept because at the heart it is a DPS that dips a lot more into hybrid healing/buff roles. In solo content, it is like playing a healer with less healing but in group content it is entirely reliant on just making your group succeed more in situations where they were already going to succeed in.
It has a vaguely similar playstyle to Devastation but it has buttons that don’t do any damage to instead buff others (Molten Scales/Prescience/Ebon Might) and is a class where if you are lacking in gear but your allies are all in BiS, you would contribute more by buffing them than you would by playing devastation but if everyone is in BiS and good with the class, it’s a weird numbers game to know if Devastation or Augmentation would contribute more to group success.
I personally would likely not touch Augmnetation in raid short of a 2/2/6 but I might try it in M+ when I know the other DPS are good to see if buffing them would do more than the damage I’d lose from playing a half-DPS.
I’m just waiting for the complaints when this is all hooked up, and details shows the Augvoker doing over twice as much damage as the 2nd highest in the raid.
so i actually prefer a non-trinity system myself. Its way more flexible. For instance how gw2 does it classes system. I like that in gw2 there’s no notion of having to many mages or thief types and someone has to swap off of their desired character. you can just swap your build and the group could be good to go for ANY content.
obvi i dont like gw2 as much as wow or i would be there; and not here, but i would love for more of a non-trinity notion to appear in wow. it already kinda has thankfully.
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Easy enoug to see when we get there. I’m just reading these similar complaints like “you’re complaining about the color of the house before its even painted bro, chill.”
it will be OP first month, nerfed into irrelevance afterwards.
with M+ as a pillar, you cant balance around 4 roles and you know it.
My entire stance on this support playstyle is that it’s going to inevitably always be a balance problem.
It will either be hard mandatory, or completely worthless, and nowhere in the middle.
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DPS meters are less important than…
Did people kick-interrupt. Did they CC hardcasted abilities. Burst down a priority target or during an important phase. Did they coordinate or are they willing to coordinate or follow the leaders direction.
All this is 10000x more important than dps.
That said there are just some moments where you have to at least reach a baseline or bare minimum to do certain content. I don’t believe that support classes will change that or reflect on that very much. If the minimum is 30k dps it shouldn’t matter if your A-Team is using assisted dps (support) to crack 90k. You can still see the majority of people are doing 30-40k. And it is a legitimate and deep strat to the game to pump your best players and give them priority buffs.
That said it IS fun to chase the charts or meters. However we can always compete against our personal best, and when we do make it to the A-Team or get those buffs it’ll feel really good and fun.
Ppl gotta worry less about what other ppl got and, me, personally, I’m not the best at this game, I want to see my raid team do well, or my friend helping me push that key really pumping. That makes me feel good. And I don’t need to be the star of the show.
It’s all mindset. Pass it along and you’ll enable others to really enjoy this game without potentially hamstringing them future selves and others along the way. Better than any in game abilities we could ever care about. 
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I think that’s reasonable. At the same time. I feel that it’s up to Blizzard to solve. So long as I feel like AugVokers aren’t blacklisted nor mandatory, I’d be fine. It’s certainly not a simple ask, but I’m willing to let them iterate to get there.
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The problem is, what do you balance it for? Do you balance it for the most abusive, OP interactions? Then it’s almost certainly blacklisted for groups that can’t use those. Do you balance it for average use case? Then it’ll be hard mandatory for the groups that can pull off the abusive OP interactions.
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You’ve actually exemplified one of my main concerns.
Being that Augmentation will essentially be Evokers second “DPS spec”, whether it sees play or not comes down to how it compares to Devastation (and to a lesser extent all the other dps classes)
Personally I like being “the unsung hero”. The guy that soaks the thing in a raid that would have wiped the raid if it went unsoaked. The one who CCed a mob just as it was about to one shot a healer. The things people rarely notice but have massive impact.
One of the main reasons I main Lock (other than being an og edgelord) is because they have so many interesting tools that doesn’t show up on a damage meter. Lock Rocks. Summons. Gateway. Soulstone. In the current era of wow, most classes bring some form of “group buff” but nothing is quite as…unique as the warlock. I’m hoping Augmentation changes that.
I liked how Cyous put it. “Game 1 and Game 2”
I wonder though if there is room in Game 1 for a class/spec that doesn’t compete at Game 2. And if not, does Game 1 even really exist?
To me, it’s no different than balancing Feral or Ret. Those specs were typically seen as “bad specs” even after their tuning updates. It’s hard to overcome community perception, as evident by those two specs being quite good overall. (But the stigma persists.)
But I completely emphasize with your POV. I think they’ll launch overpowered, but feel super shallow. So, it’ll be easy to play at a high-level for DPS purposes, but the “Skill expression” comes from your utility, like working with the tanks and healers to properly combo spells and use your CC effectively. (Upheaval + Landslide → Stun; this is a 4sec pause on tank damage, that can be huge, but it doesnt show up on the meters)
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FWIW, this is a game dev term that’s been floating around.
Game #1 is “the actual game.”
Game #2 is typically “the game, after the game #1”
In WOW, Game #1 could be Mythic Progression and RWF. But Game #2 could be related to parse culture. Given Game #1 in this example effectively is Game #2, you need to recontextualize your POV to what Game #2 really is. Game #2 is a new competition for those players aiming to push their class/spec to the limit, whereas Game #1 was simply trying to beat the current raid on the hardest difficulty. Lots of overlap, but a very different mindset.
I think it’s going to be a different problem than ret/feral in the sense that it’s not just a spec that ret and feral just don’t really bing anything besides damage. The problem is going to be getting the specs damage contribution to a reasonable level.
I loved playing Bard in Rift. My usual class was Marksman, but occasionally a fight would be just that extra bit of annoying so they would lemme switch for it. Being able to keep up the party buffs while supplying aid to the healers was fun. 
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Agreed. PTR felt really underwhelming for solo play. So it makes me think the outside for their support playstyle is like 0.5, instead of FF14’s Dancer which is closer to 0.8
My understanding of last builds PTR tuning is that they were ~0.6 solo,1.5-2 in M+ (comp defendant), and 4.0+ in mythic raid.