Let me first say I don’t have a lot of detailed knowledge about the spec and I intended to write this having no clue why aug is so hated, but something just occurred to me. The way I understand it aug buffs other dps such that the stronger the other dps is the more beneficial the aug presence. Doesn’t this mean that aug reinforces meta picks even more because it doesn’t just take away 1 slot when aug is strong, it takes away at least 2, the aug plus the highest dps spec chosen to complement it?
Are there other reasons why aug is so hated? Simply being meta doesn’t explain it because while meta specs are often disliked, the level of hate I’ve seen toward aug is much higher than the usual disdain toward a meta spec.
Also, could aug be reworked so that the initial issue described isn’t such an issue? People have been asking for a support class for so long and now that it’s here it seems like everyone hates it, but to be fair implementation and tuning is everything. I don’t know aug in detail enough to have any idea if this is even feasible or if it would require a complete rework. I have played with aug many times in m+ but I still don’t really understand their spec very well. I have heard rumors that the new round of patch notes makes aug dead, but it’s hard to know if that’s really accurate or just an exaggeration.
I think the part of the problem is the game is designed around the Tank-Heals-DPS triad without really a defined spot for a Support spec which means it doesn’t fit anywhere neatly.
Plus, its the only Support spec so they can’t really start to design the game around having a Support spec too.
Was OP its entire existence, basically mandatory for higher content, and early on was basically the easiest thing in the world to play while hard carrying the entire group
It’s just their design. When at the very top tier of M+ …16s, 17s, etc … any buff to survivability and burst dps dmg can just power through all that incoming dmg and mob health. It’s such an advantage to group survivability and dmg to not take.
I do like the idea of a support class and imo they shouldnt gut it and instead encourage more people to play support classes.
But we only have 1 and considering we only get a new class every 2-3 expansions it’d be a very long time before we had an adequate number of support specs for it to be it’s own proper role with competition.
I know my reasons, and for starters, there’s no way to know if an AUG player is good or not. AUG players don’t typically focus on DPS, and add-ons don’t usually track AUG buff uptimes.
During Dragonflight, many AUG players have taken advantage of this, joining high keys while barely contributing to the group, which has led to a bad reputation for the role.
Fact is we have no idea if there is really aug hate. Out of the millions of people who play this game only a few tens of thousands use the forums which would be about 1% of the player base.
According to the statistics it is not a popular character type but that doesn’t mean people hate it. They could just be indifferent and prefer something else.
It’s not just the forums, it’s from talking to people in game, it’s youtube comments, it’s reddit comments, it’s streamer comments…whether they represent the general population is another matter, but a lot of people are pretty vocal about not liking aug.
Aug is living the life cycle a lot of people called when it came out.
It was destined to be too op, or not worth playing and the likelihood of Blizz being able to balance around it was slim.
At this point they are trying to make it less “mandatory” even though it isn’t. It was fun when it came out, but they will gut it slowly until people just don’t play it anymore. The cycle of specs Blizz doesn’t understand how to tune. If they tune a knob too high, they smash that knob to pieces rather than dial things in. A story as old as wow itself lol.
YouTube comments come from Content Creators who are divided into a couple categories. One category would be the helpful type who are not being discussed here.
The other are those CCs who have an agenda which is to pick a demographic, figure out what that demographic wants to hear and tell them what they want to hear over and over again. I won’t say who but one likes to “preach” to us and another has a mouth the size of the Grand Canyon which he uses to make funny faces. Count them out.
As for reddit, it’s a forum. As I said we hear from tens of thousands of the millions who play the game, about 1%. Or maybe it’s four times that amount which would be 4%, still a small fraction of the player base.
I think this is the glaring problem with them. And the fact blizz has pretty much decided they won’t be adding any more supports just makes it worse.
If they added more, like a 4th spec for many classes. They could redesign dungeon teams to 1/1/3/1.
6 players, old comp make up but with 1 additional spot for support.
Pipedreams I guess.
Because aug buffs survivability, and Blizzard tuned around having the extra survivability from aug, which made them required at high end keys. Being unable to do something without a single specific spec is bad.
Also, in DF they frequently attempted to nerf aug by nerfing the DPS that synergized well with aug. So, having your spec nerfed to target another built a lot of resentment.
