We have 6 member parties in FFXI (Final Fantasy 11). For each event: exp, merit grinding, endgame, etc., almost each party needed a minimum of one support player. Guess which role was always in short supply of? It wasn’t DPS, healers, nor tanks.
Party leaders would be spending hours waiting for enough supports to do whatever task they needed. No one really wanted to play support roles.
I am speaking as someone who played two out of the four support jobs. When I used to log in, if I didn’t have myself on anonymous, I would get spammed with “join my party” whispers. Anonymous didn’t help either half of the time since people would remember that I play support roles.
The shortage of support got so bad during Voidwatch, we had players dualboxing supports along with their main so they can progress. Imagine having to pay for two MMO subscriptions because you want to progress on your DPS, but there’s no supports to fill the spot.
There is nothing about support (Aug) that makes it a required role in a dungeon to need a dedicated spot. Aug was too strong at launch, but in season 3 they are a decent but not required spec.
I’d be ok with 6 man dungeons just for the reason of an extra dps gets to play per dungeon, but I think Blizz is married to multiples of 5.
I never said it was? I actually very rarely see augs in the low/mid key levels that I do.
But the role could be expanded on, defined, and balanced much better with its own slot, while also improving queues. I think its very awkward that they created aug and are now just kinda leaving it hanging as its own wierd thing without creating any other similar specs.
If what Dessuul said is accurate, the answer would be not much in all honesty.
Assuming they don’t nerf every class in the game to do negative damage, in a mythic+ group all they’d do is add a 4th dps slot, since manually making groups don’t restrict roles. For queueable content adding a 6th likely wouldn’t move the needle all that much either, since its already automatic and again, adding another slot that isn’t dps wouldn’t suddenly make the DPS queues (the ones everyone complains about) faster.
Except it would, because the pool of players wouldn’t grow. The people playing that 6th slot would come from the existing players who currently play dps, tanks, or healers. So there would be less dps trying to get into each group because some would have shifted to support.
I don’t really care about a 6th slot being specifically tied to support. But I think that a 6th spot would be good, more support specs would be good, and creating a role just for support would allow it to be fleshed out much better than aug is currently able to, since it has to fit into the balance of the regular dps spots.
I mean that’s super optimistic, but again I don’t see how that will really be a long term fix. It’ll make queues only slightly faster in the short term until they get clogged up again, because fact of the matter is, dps queues will always be terrible because it’s the most abundant role.
Do we just keep adding more dps slots for queueable content? To say nothing about pre-made dungeon groups.
If you really want to make dps queues smaller, the real solution is to make it so more players tank or heal, since there’s more of them to go around and fill the groups, instead of just trying to cram more and more dps in.