As I play through the expansions I am noticing that there are not a lot of abilities in the game that allow you to protect or shield your friends from bad stuff. There are quite a few abilities to help your friends hurt bad guys and quite a few abilities to keep yourself safe but not much to keep your buddy safe. Sure there are buffs that can passively scale up your mitigation but i would like to see high impact cooldown gated AAs or spells that keep your team members safe so they can do more of what they do. PAL, BRD, and DRU all seem like good classes to throw some of these types of skills to. For Paladin maybe a group rune with a short range that absorbs a ton of damage but lasts for only 3-4 ticks as that fits their guardian/protector of the weak theme. I imagine Bards having an AA ability that gives there group a short term automatic dodge buff. Druids could have a free cast ability that creates an aura for a short time that players inside resist all debuffs and block all spell damage. With more support style abilities you could create whole new play patterns. You could be excited to group with that one Paladin that always times his blocks perfectly so you never have to worry about that ambient damage and can focus on burning away.
Warrior has a short duration 18k group rune at 115 and the epic protects the group from spell damage for 2 mins. The enchanter also has group runes longer durations and much larger damage absorption.
One of a Ranger's main jobs is to pull aggro from non-tanks and either tank until someone grabs the mob from us or, well, you know the story. It would be cool if we got a /shield type ability where we take a % of a PC's damage -- maybe high enough % that we run the risk of dying or going OOM healing ourselves. (Every reward must have a risk.) Call it Ranger Rune.
Bring back /shield, give it to pal/shd and make it use the tank's mitigation instead of the flimsy thing you're protecting. https://everquest.fandom.com/wiki/Shield_(Warrior_Ability)
I actually like the idea of having a mob hit so hard that another warrior needs to /shield the tanking warrior in order to survive. As of right now, the only reason to bring a support role is for more DPS. I'd absolutely love to need clerics to cast their damage spells to get the 30k rune on their group in order for the tank to survive. Or have a need to click their breastplate on a tank. Or for a DPS check to be so high that everybody needs to click their ADPS abilities right and do good damage to win. Right now, even with the limited amount of defensive support abilities that we get, none of them are really needed, so some harder raids/group missions where we can actually use our full kit would be pretty dope.
