What needs to happen with Support roles

This is my view at what changes need to happen to support roles.

1. All flat bonuses need to be replaced with % bonuses.
This has been discussed a lot before and still hasnt changed.
- Controller role: Instead Flat +350 vit role bonus, change it to 10% Vita.
- Iconic Powers:
Nanowave Armor: Instead +200 Defense, change it to 5% damage mitigation;
Powerful Resistance: Instead +200 Health, change it 5% health;
Intimidating Gaze: Instead +40 Dominance, change it to 10% dominance;
Wisdom Of Solomon: Instead +75 Vita +125power, change it to 3% Vita 3% Power Heal Crit Chance;
Neo-Venom Boost: Instead +176 Defense, changed it to 3% damage mitigation.

Additionally Neo- Venom Boost and Hard Light Shield should have their cooldowns reduced from 40 sec to the more realistic 18 sec bringing them in line with the cooldowns of tanks' Immunity skills. Its awkward to have a clipping power at cooldown for almost a whole minute.

2. Allow the use of AMs without any restrictions for support roles. The difference between DPs and Support should come only from damage modifiers not from mechanics.

3. Weapon Mastery MELEE combos' damage should be brought on par with weapon clipping.

4. Additional roles buffs:
- Controller role: Beside proposed 10% Vit bonus and current 100% Dominance increase, additional 25% damage bonus. Controllers were the second damage class in game but somewhere along the way they were shafted with same damage potential as healers and tanks. Controllers while support is not really a defensive role so it should have higher damage potential.

- Tank role: Beside current bonuses for different power sets, additional 15% power pool or 15% power cost reduction. This is needed if tanks are actually to be able to do any damage in solo content and alerts. Additional power pool will make weapon clipping viable for tanks without making them any stronger in 8 -man content.

Additionally for Earth tanks: Instead current 1:1, 1 point Defense per 1 point Dominance bonus, increase it to 2:1 or 2 points Defense gained per 1 point of Dominance. That current 1:1 bonus is barely noticeable and makes modding with Health actually better than stacking extra Dominance.


Hopefully, if any of this happens people will get more interested in support and hybrid roles and we gonna be able to leave all the "5-1-1-1" drama behind us!

I do agree with you on many levels but no support role should have a higher damage potential then any other I myself feel when stats matters becomes active to normal way players have been so called hybrid will have to change just changing dps gear out should not work but with skill points mods trinkets a support role should be able to do close to 1/2 of what a dps can do during t4 and below a support role could do 20 to 30 % of the damage of a dps the biggest advantage a dp has is their crits. But if you have the skill points mods you could reach with sodars and trinket between 12 and 13k might in full support role gear.

Support roles shouldn't do as much damage as DPS, that's not how they are meant to work, that would just cause an even bigger imbalance as players would concentrate too much on doing damage rather then their role jobs.

If u refer to the proposed buff to controllers:
25% buff +10% from Max Damage white mod is 35% total which is still almost half compared to the 60% damage bonus DPS gets.

Now if modded Support player with say plenty of SP can do more than 50% or even comes close to the lowest DPS in group (presumably lacking gear, SP or mods) thats OK with me and it would be a good indication where everybody is standing. But keeping Support roles down just in case is not acceptable anymore.

Agreed with most of this. Flat stat buffs that cost SP make sense because we always get new SP so effectively they scale linearly, but we never get new PP so Iconic innates and role bonuses shouldn't be flat.

What I agree most with is a support damage buff. I've been saying for years that it's a key issue in the game.

Some people always come in and start crying that damage isn't what supporters are for etc, but a support damage buff is needed. DPS have three ways to do more damage than other roles: damage modifiers, stats, and loadout space (because they only have this single purpose). Damage modifiers and loadout space already provide a huge advantage for DPS over supporters so there is no need to have such a large stat gap and mechanical differences. Fortunately the devs are already working on enabling AMs for all supporters so we will have to see how well they perform after that. I think they should get slightly higher Might/Prec too, up to 75% of dps level if modded offensively.
People expect supporters to solo everything or don't even want supporters in alert/duo groups just because it's so much faster with more dps. No need to control enemies or heal damage if you can just kill everything in seconds. Let supporters do significantly more damage so groups don't **** themselves (or feel like they do) by taking a second healer/troll/tank. This would also allow pure support players to actually finish duos or solos in an appropriate time without needing to switch to dps.
DPS don't need to do 10x the damage of supporters, 2x is well enough and they get that much automatically just by having more loadout slots and higher damage modifiers. Having such a high damage gap just causes people to hate playing or playing with supporters.

I run PZR, BN, BBS, etc as a troll. Due to my precision being half of what I have as a DPS and needing to stop my rotation for debuff, POT, and power dumps my damage is about 1/2 to a 1/3 of what the DPS do. My atomic tank is the same way.

It all depends upon the group I run with.

As for support role changes, I wish they would add a small power regen for support roles.

Again about might you can get between 12k and 13k for short periods of time if you use soders omega any buff might help then the dps trinket. All while maintaining 10k might most of the time all in your roles armor

Doesnt matter. Support role changes were put on hold remember? We can talk about it all we want. But it still wont come until after electric and nature get updated and you all know how long we have been waiting for that.

2018 Nature Mid Range adjustments!!!

support roles should all be effective as atomic s is were you can still perform your am and do decent damage in support role and many more people would play them and would utalize them more in all content

You lost me when you said AM for support roles and that is a huge no.

Hybrid roles........battle tanks, battle healer, battle troll noooooo...

The only time hyrids really work is when they are on OP for an instance or have two support roles running content.
Run a single role and do it well. Run two roles and do neither very well.


You are basically asking to buff all support roles and its not needed.


% buffs vs static that's is a whole different issue.
The SP tree needs to be changed from static number to % all across the board.
This is not going to happen for a while from what I am seeing. There are to many other things that need to be addressed.

If I'm not mistaken the ones people had less trouble being hybrids, at least with celestial, prior to the cr differential change. I doubt it's really going to affect those who truly hybrid after the cr differential (because the successful ones probably already spend their skill points effectively, in addition to having enough skill points necessary to "seriously" hybrid).

There are only four powers in the game who do not have access to such abilities. Earth, Sorcery, Nature and Electric are the only ones who do not have AM damage in support role. All the other powers do, you may not see them doing it because some powers, such as fire, it's counter productive in most cases to do so. Other powers, such as Celestial or Atomic, can easily excel at this role without truly sacrificing anything necessary.

Also, as being shown this month (and as it has often been shown when the raids have been made of sterner stuff) their are a lot of bad dps'. Most groups would be running with one two support roles in raids, with at least one of each of those being a hybrid (assuming they knew how, hybriding and knowing how to truly do it effectively are two different things).. they'd have less wipes and more than likely less deaths. They fail to understand this and continue to just throw dps at content instead of trying to find a balance.

It is not going to happen at all, they are not going to make grinding you can do by buying the content more important than gear you need to spam RB or be legendary for, not going to happen, ever.

I already do more damage than the fourth or fifth DPS in raids regularly as a healer. Remove the precision cap and I'd do more damage while using weapon mastery and still do my job just fine...

Using that rational they should remove power back mechanics because DPS are too worried that their loadout does not give enough power back instead of doing the most damage which is their role, people do that now and it's not an issue. It's not damage or role, you need to use weapon mastery anyway, I don't really care about AM in a role, but the ability to stack precision since you are expected to do that constantly to decrease power cost is not unreasonable given the anti-role climate in content lately.

Read the OP.
You missed what I was saying all together. I was replying towards the OP's comment about buffing existing powers and making the support powers AM do more damage. I was not referencing the existing support roles functions.

As far as bad DPS goes ...LOL there are many but there are a lot of bad tanks, controllers and healers as well. Mostly because many of the players do not understand synergy in between powers and teamwork.

If you want I can re quote you, but you started the post I quoted by saying AM for support roles is a huge no. That's when I tried to clarify this already exists and more than likely will continue but I will grant you that the OP did mention AM's with no restrictions (which I would assume would also mean power regen) which that of course would be a little silly and make the game too easy. To even further clarify that the OP said the only thing should differ between the DPS and Support AM damage would be modifiers not mechanics, thus referring only to power regen (since stats and modifiers make up the bulk of the difference between the two's AM damage potential).

Also, laughing at bad support roles is something that amuses me. For every one bad tank, troll or healer you find.. you can easily find at least five bad dps... this isn't a competition of finding bad roles... if it was support would still be way out numbered in terms of people playing the role wrong by the sheer number of folks who DPS only.

Not so. My league usually runs a hybrid support role and it's fine. Either the tank or healer makes a weak dps look worse. There are more crappy dps than good ones. Support roles have become super easy. It gets boring just standing there.

Why In your eyes is a damage support role not intended? They can spec into damage moves just the same. Plus alot of those damage moves work as a hybrid doing heals or giving power and doing damage. Heck back in the day as nature, I used to run 3 heals over time cause you can't heal 1shots. My other powers were robot sidekick, Swarm, and prec buff. I did as much or more damage and everyone's health was fine.

Completing content quicker always makes it easier on every role.

I meant no difference in the way AM works only damage wise not with Power return.

Still there are abilities that need their power costs reduced. Examples are: Epicenter, Backdraft and WithoutMercy.
There sphere pulls are first penalized with longer cooldowns and secondly with higher power costs compared to cone pulls with much better functionality like Ragebringer or Inescapbale Storm.

Clip Epicenter with Immunity skill and suddenly half power bar is gone. And I dont want to hear about power management from nobody, all I care when Im tanking is to buff, group adds and go back to blocking. If DPS dont have to deal with power management I dont see why tanks should.

It's 2016 and they are commonly referred to as "Score Board" chasers.