As do tanks and healers, correct
But that’s not a major defining part of the role. It just exists.
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Neither would that be the defining role of support.
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Then they do nothing major for all three roles.
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Small values added to lots of people can add up to a good result.
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Then just replace them with a raid buff. No need for a player to fulfill that purpose.
We can even call it mark of the wild.
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Doesn’t seem like a fun choice though. Some people like supporting.
The recent nerfs butchered it to trash tier negative existence status.
The game isn’t built well to handle actual active support specs and it showed with Aug.
Unless you can present some sort of conceptual support that sidesteps the issue of relative provided value that any support spec would have currently, there really isn’t much to discuss.
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Even with paladins and shamans, being the hybrid support classes, it never gel well with the game. Hence, little by little, the devs chipped away at it because people were just stacking support.
Seems blizzard had to relearn that lesson.
First of all, people who are saying “SUPPORT CAN’T BE DONE IT’S IMPOSSIBLE” are just brainless. They’re the same kinds of people who called me a moron and said “that will never ever happen” when I suggested they should add Cosmetic Unlocks aka transmog (yes, people actually said that it would “destroy the game” because you can no longer see in pvp what level of gear people are wearing.) I even had someone ingame stating “housing will NEVER happen I’d bet my life on it” and I had to send them the article showing that Blizzard is adding housing. Anybody who says something with absolute certainty like “never” are brainless. So these people don’t need to read any further because they have room temperature IQ, this is for people with an open mind:
I had an idea just pop into my mind when I was thinking about this thread. There are already mechanics in the game that involve building up a heal, or building up an absorb shield higher and higher based on damage. They could definitely incorporate that more adequately into Aug Evoker, for example an ability that increases your other DPS team members damage, during that buff period damage that is done builds up a shield that is then placed on the healer or tank. ← Course if those low digit IQ people read this, they will scream and spam all sorts of stuff about my SPECIFIC example, but I am just saying in general there are many things that could be done and new ideas that could be applied. Particularly with buildup mechanics that are currently underutilized.
The people who are saying “support can’t be done” are generally saying so because it’d require an unrealistic amount of work from Blizzard to disseminate support specs to other classes (y’know, so it can be balanced beyond “it’s so good you have to bring it” or “it’s so garbage you have to bring something else”). They’re not brainless at all, guy. It’s a reasonable statement.
Now, I’m going to say it’s impossible. With things as they stand, Blizzard will not go through the requisite effort to spread support specs around, it is therefore impossible to expect balanced support. Having one singular support spec will ALWAYS result in it being either so good it’s required or so bad you’ll never bring it. You need I would imagine at least three, optimally four or five support specs to be able to spread buffs/utility around and balance it correctly. Thems the breaks, dude, it is what it is. Am I brainless? I’d like to think not, as that’s a well reasoned opinion with supporting evidence.
That said, I’d love to see support be a real thing here. It just isn’t. The balancing isn’t set up for that. Do I believe maybe it could be a thing with an expansion’s worth of work on it? Yeah, sure, but I also don’t think they’re going to go through that effort for say, Midnight, or The Last Titan. So. The word “impossible.”
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I am not saying support is impossible to do well in MMORPS as it has. I am saying is that with they way wow has worked with one of the most hard core implimentations of the holy trinity I have ever seen combined with a min-maxing and number crunching player base you can’t do it in modern WoW.
At a minimum support needs to be a defined role like healer/dps/tank which has massive implications for everything from party formation to encounter design in raids and dungeons. Just as a random point would such support count in an encounter where players go to a private mode and must dps down a mob single handedly. For example the last boss in Necrotic wake.
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Whole heartedly agree. There is a lot more work that is needed for Support to work well in WoW.
For all of its faults, Rift is the ONLY game I’ve see do supports correctly, and it had to be designed from the ground up to include that.
For those that haven’t played:
At launch there were two Full time Support classes: Archon (Mage) and Bard (Rogue). Both of them brought a handful of raid buffs. Archon’s were passive 5 minute timers, Bard’s were 30s timers but activation of them was a core aspect of the playstyle.
Archons brought bonus damage and the ‘Heroism/Bloodlust’ equivalent while Bards brought bonus healing and survivability.
Both classes were fully fleshed out and had their own micro optimizations to improve their bonus aspects (I’m so so so sorry for bringing Power Drain weaving to the forefront during Greenscale…)
Raid encounters were balanced around having at least one of these two present but they weren’t explicitly required because of how the balancing of their buffs and boons was handled. It was also clearly understood what benefits they brought to the group.
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That’s not a design to be praised. We don’t need a class with the sole identity of raid buffs that are set and forget.
I don’t think the point was the specificity on a 5-minute-set-and-forget but that the support system started with two classes at one “soul” each (due to how their system worked, that’s potentially half the classes, as there are 4 classes and a class picks 3 souls). As opposed to WoW starting with a singular one. Which very immediately ended up in the “so good you must bring it” area, and then subsequently landed in “so bad you must not bring it.”
I think the point was more “for proper balance there must be something to balance against” IE: at least one other spec. Beyond that, the game was set up for it at launch. Which is to say a lot of the utility we all enjoy set to specific classes here were plopped in one of the specific support souls there.
So I mean, yeah. It’d take SO much dev work to decouple certain buffs/cooldowns from some classes and roll them into some dedicated support, balance that, etc. It’s why I hold to the insistence that proper support won’t be a thing here. It just was never set up for it, and the tools a support would bring ordinarily in another game are already broadly disseminated to all the other classes (notably DPS).
Soooo Aug will probably end up a proper normal DPS, though I do hope it’ll end up something neat like a tank.
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This would also lead into another balancing nightmare once again, you either give so much shield it becomes necessary or it’s so little noone would even notice it, even if we said they would get that balance right and the shield would be a perfect in between there is still the fact that now a days almost every mechanic in this game is a personal Skillcheck, you can litteraly count the amount of unavoidable rot damage per dungeon on one hand.
So this could potentially lead into another issue and that is, the fact that said Shield could stay up for like 90% of the entire Dungeon, which would make everyone just way tankier and potentially even life said personal skillcheck, which once again could turn into a necessaty because of that.
It’s not a bad idea, but as everything in life, there is a negative for every positive.
Just the whole concept of Aug is hard to balance, you either make it so strong where you need it or it’s average and noone would pick it over a potentially giga broken regular DPS.
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The question isn’t the possibility of support being done as an actual independent role. The question is whether or not the work is going to happen to make it integrate well into the game’s basic functions, and currently there’s no indication that that work will get done or even would be realistic to do.
You don’t have to like that that is the case, but that is the current state of the things.
According to both Icy Veins and Wowhead, Aug spec is currently ranked as “F tier”.
For comparison, no other spec is ranked below C tier.
Well, yeah. I’d bet strong odds the development team’s cooking a rework. It’s what they did to Warlocks near the end of WoD, if you recall. They basically left Demonology in the Yamcha crater while they worked on it. “We’d rather you not play it” was the developer go-to back then.
Will Aug get a worthwhile rework? I dunno. My bet is it’ll be a regular DPS and they’ll likely keep a sniff of the previous support. I imagine it’d be somewhat easy to snap out something more of a “buffs for me, not for thee” style. By which I mean they could keep the style it currently has, do a 90 self/10 party buff split to bring themselves up to proper DPS level. With proper buff maintenance (and proper balance), their output should be around middle-of-the-pack as a goal. And with an 90/10 (or even 80/20), the party doesn’t get too much out of it thereby keeping it from being a requirement like it was in Dragonflight. The main point is that full conversion to a regular DPS is the path of least resistance, it’s the simplest solution and it’s already grouped into DPS for queues as well.
I’d still prefer it became the first proper int-based tank though, but that’s me.
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