I’d like my support totems back.
Give me back my Totems, let me heal and enchance my party again.
Correct. And that was the metric given to somehow distinguish the spec.
I WANT a support class but we’ll never see one due to the “Bring the Player not the class” which does have it’s benefits but also like this it’s drawbacks. One of my favorite classes to have in a group was the Enchanter(good). Their primary focus was crowd control, think mage on steroids. They could also kick out good dps or if you were a Coercer (evil) you could control almost any mob in the dungeon to act as a temporary pet similar to a priests mind control and a hunters pet.
Well, developers have gone on record saying “bring the player, not the class” is the dominant design paradigm, and that message hasn’t been strongly countersignalled by anything they’ve done in BFA.
In what, BC? They did a whole dev diary about how they’ve been trying to rebuild class distinction in BFA with stuff like the return of class buffs.
Of course how much they’ve succeeded is another question.
No one’s getting taken along for a 5% buff, when the alternative is a guy who does twice as much DPS and is better at dodging mechanics. Buffs would have to stack, and scale with gear the way damage does, for them to matter.
Spread that 5% across 20 people and you’ve made up for the sacrificed spot. Add in personal DPS, and you’re doing better than you would have without.
I’m working at a Nightfall in Classic to do something quite similar.
I already think we have support classes. As a SPriest, my vamperic embrace heals the whole group. I also am able to put shields during battle on teamates to mitigate dmg and give me insanity apart from shadowmend healing. I have done this a lot during islands, dungeons and raids to help the whole team. I also did this with balance druid having the healing talent, that gives me wild growth. Also elemental shamans are a great support class.
So in short support classes already exist, people just need to know how to use their utility and help the team out.
Pruned into a cooldown, a sad “shadow” of the hybrid spec monstrosity it used to be.
I don’t know. Someone who wants to do big damage numbers will just gravitate to whatever method that entails, whether it be from synergy with the team, or through picking the FOTM damage dealer of the moment. Whereas someone who gravitates towards a force multiplier probably doesn’t want the pressure to master a DPS rotation, and probably isn’t going to be a beast when it comes to personal contribution.
This is what the healer role used to be for people, but bit by bit they’ve removed everything from the healer that doesn’t synergize with personal DPS (Spirit, MP5, etc), until they became a DPS with tools to react to encounter specific mechanics (tankbuster abilities, unavoidable AoE, etc).
I think it would just end up being another barrier for raiding. Stuff would be balanced so that you need this support class or spec and now that adds a 4th role that guilds have to fulfill for their raid team. To make it unique you would probably have to take away cleanses, purging, etc from healer specs making both healing much more boring.
I would rather just bring back some of these utility abilities and support abilities, maybe add a few more.
The problem with support roles is they are incredibly hard to balance and make fun at the same time.
Even that other sub based MMO (I don’t know if I can say its name on here) has recently dialed back the low-dps-support class mechanics, because people didn’t find them engaging.
Hm. The newest addition had been very successful in remaining engaging. I think the previous two have been struggling purely because “support” isn’t a wholly recognized concept.
I think a good support role class would be the Peon! Every raid group needs a guy to cary supplies and backup weapons. And you know those fights when the group wipes with 1% left on the boss? Well, what a perfect time for the Peon to pull a sword out of the bag and save the day!!
Support roles just won’t work in WoW unless combat is drastically redesigned.
Support roles also lend themselves towards being low skill roles that remove the need for thinking or playing well (see enhancement shaman from like…WotLK).
I tend to see them as easy to learn, hard to master. And there’s nothing wrong with having that initial hurdle be virtually at the ground level. This is a bad analogy, but think of it in a musical context, with the “support” as the guy organizing the orchestra. Anyone can simply hand out sheet music and be passable. But it does take a subtle mastery to be a conductor.
This was more important back in the days of 40man raiding, but there’s nothing wrong with someone being happy with actively contributing to the success of others because they don’t have the capacity or desire to be a top performer otherwise.
But they have never been hard to master…Shaman were a joke of low level skill needed to “master”.
You dropped the same 4 totems. You stayed alive. You become a raid’s token enhance shaman.
Support classes in WOW were never “conductors”.
I won’t argue that. But neither were any of the other classes at equal points in the game’s lifetime. It would be very interesting to see what Shamans and Paladins could have been if they had kept their niche.
Yes I honestly love the idea of seeing the support role being added. Balanced so that they aren’t mandatory, not able to heal or damage as well as a pure spec could but bring loads of buffs/rebuff/utility.
Couple of easy examples, enchancement shaman doing less damage but having totems buffs be important, disc priest healing less but shielding and budding others damage more, frost mages being less dps and more about roots/slows and setting up shatter combos with physical damage dealers.
Plus it opens up the door for classes that are support first such as a bards.
I think it would need to be a major update and rework so it have to be a full expansion more or less focused around making it work but I would love to see it