As much as I love Support roles, and wish we’d see some come back, I do think it’d be bad at this point.
They have mangled things so much due to massive changes lately that many classes still feel like their in shambles. Hopefully they’ll fix what they have now before totally rebalancing the roles (which I agree will also be needed at some point)
As support you should be able to heal or tank just nothing too crazy.
I have played support before in other MMO’s and would often heal the group, some support builds have some great passive effects that would allow you to practically DPS the entire time while passively healing the group, almost like Shadow Priest back in BC, I’d heal the group as shadow running dungeons with my guild all the time.
Just gives groups more flexibility, but frankly I feel the game has too many classes and specs as it is, and with the current talent system support roles would likely suck and not work as intended anyway.
Have a great weekend! 
Yes. But complexity is not something retailers deal with well.
“Nothing too crazy” doesn’t sound fun to me.
It wouldn’t really work unless combat was completely redesigned, from the ground up.
Well then you wouldn’t roll a support toon would you. 
Support roles are there for larger groups to be 100% effective but that basically means everything else is still doable, you’re still useful but you are not replacing main healers or main tanks.
Support classes in past games were actually top notch at soloing. By not being the preferred CC, Tank, Heal, DPS you were actually super competent in soloing.
Depends on who gets to define “crazy”. Like, I never thought the tank mechanic “Vengeance” in MoP was crazy. Never thought “don’t need this mythic SoO geared Warlock, because the tank has Vengeance”. Yet, Vengeance has never made a comeback after MoP, so SOMEONE thought it was too crazy.
I feel like Squeenix is in a weird mindset with “support” classes.
They introduced Dancer, yet in the same expansion completely gutted the already-limited support aspects of the existing Bard class.
And FWIW, Dancer is a viable class for high-end content, but I mean viable as in the actual definition, not the way people use it on these forums when they’re whining about not being viable because some other class is doing 9% more damage than them on average. Dancers are notably low compared to every other class in FFXIV, AND THAT’S INCLUDING THE DAMAGE THEY CONTRIBUTE TO THE FIGHTS VIA THEIR DANCE PARTNER BUFFS.
Does it count as a support class if it’s tuned to be worse than just bringing another regular DPS instead?
(barring situations where the Dancer is a horrible player to begin with so buffing a good player is more beneficial than them playing a regular DPS class poorly, anyway)
@OP: To have a meaningful “support” role that isn’t healing, you have to be willing to play a class that would be borderline useless (or at least significantly weak) while not in a group. Not many people are looking to be totally codependent on their peers to play the game – especially not the modern Retail crowd, so I don’t see Blizzard ever bringing it back in a form worth mentioning.
Even the totems we used to have weren’t really “support” as a gameplay mechanic. It was more like everyone else’s class buffs but tied to a location in exchange for having a few of them up at once.
I miss this. I played pally in vanilla for support role.
Not necessarily, no, but healing can be support.
Honestly instead of having every healer focus on doing dps they should roll the old support role up into healing. It’d add more complexity and gameplay to them short of trying to maximize hps/dps.
A couple of healers, like hpals and disc priests, should remain damage dealers though. Hpals are essentially clerics and not having them thunking things with hammers would be silly.
Oh I know, they gutted Bard’s support but they got a massive DPS boost. It made me feel really bad to get to 80 on my DNC and I was just having a hard time not feeling like I was doing enough. Black mages were happy I was with them for the buff, but yea. And then someone told me about Bards being better, I tried it, and woah boy did it feel good to do open world content hehe
You mean besides ele being an absolutely cracking dps spec and one of the best AoE specs bar none?
Not to mention the various paladin specs have held several niches since vanilla…
Yeah this guy makes threads all the time where he makes claims that are just patently untrue.
As in the eq2 support role system
Example
Bard class in eq2 had
Troubador - caster DPS buffers and regen
Dirge - Melee buffers - hast
so so then yes i would
prob will it tho is the re-balance of 5 man groups unless they want to remove 1 of the 3 dps spots for a support/dps
then you might get into a group with all casters when you are melee buffer but that’s easy to fix just make the eq2 class into 1 class -bard-
Yes, they’re separate concepts, and what I’m saying is that support no longer exists and utility has taken its place in meta.
They do damage. So unique.
As an illusionist/dirge from EQ2, YES.
Give me a support role. Buffs, buffs, buffs. Buffs for days.
By this metric no dps specs have a niche.