Not to actually focus on healing that is, but to have another minimally overlapping talent branch that creates a play style similar to a healer: where the majority of GCDs are spent clicking and augmenting other players in a variety of ways, with some dps slipped in here and there?
It is common for other specs to have at least two very different play styles revolving around different primary abilities slipped into their talent trees, such as AOE vs ST. Thus, it seems reasonable to have talents that would either give the player the current aug status quo of ‘some dps with minor augmenting characteristics’ based around eruption, or, a true augmentation feel using an optional, player-targeting eruption replacement(s). Or, would this break the game? Interested to hear other thoughts, or if this has been discussed in other threads in more detail!
So basically lean further into buffs rather than damage? I don’t see that even remotely happening looking at the direction they are taking with the Augmentation spec. They in fact took the focus away from the buffs because a character that buffs people is either too powerful or completely useless with seemingly very little middle ground.
I agree that it is a stretch based on current directions, and the difficulty with a new role is that if it succeeds in truly becoming a new role, then it will almost inevitably be advantageous to pair it with the other roles (you need all 3 prior roles in a dungeon, so creating an optional role will be difficult), but this is what a true support class feels like in my opinion (most of one’s buttons going fully into some form of support and buffs).
However, for the sake of balance, they could start by using player-targeting GCDs to push most one’s DPS and maybe a bit of healing and defensive contributions, in a spell-wise instead of stat-wise manner, through other players (eg the evoker continuously adds X damage or [less frequently] Y healing to another player’s next spell each GCD), while going slowly with tank and healer stat/percentile buffs to avoid breaking the game. I think it is possible, it will just require a fair amount of tuning to avoid making this 4th role mandatory like the other 3! (unless or until they release a few more support specs for other classes!)
To my understanding at least, it was stacking stat/percentile buffs on tanks and healers that broke things?
This already exists in theory… but aug is a dps and not a healer. The talent that makes you a “healer” ooms you pretty fast, and on purpose. It would be like letting ret wog people without losing mana, that wouldn’t be balanced.