Guild Wars 2

I, personally, always loved playing a support role in MMOs. The Support playstyle generally involves focusing more on allies than enemies, and healing and buffing them against whatever enemies we come across. Its a rewarding playstyle that takes practice (in most cases), patience, and attention to both ally and enemy detail. In most games, support characters are rewarded for their hard work via loot bags, scoreboard notice, and the unending gratitude of their teammates.

In GW2, most support players are rewarded with little loot, a frustrating supporting experience (because everyone thinks you’re DPS if you’re not a Guardian or Engineer), and blame for not running “full Berserker like everyone else.” It’s not to say that there aren’t any rewards. There’s a cool little title “Combat Healer” that nobody really cares to notice, and if you’re putting out lots of heals in sPvP you’ll be greeted with “Chaos Archangel, Combat Medic!” which is honestly really effing cool… but not enough.

There are many people who come to Guild Wars 2 hoping to be able to play a viable support role. The “Holy Trinity” in this game has be turned into Damage / Control / Support with each category being either a primary, secondary, or tertiary aspect of any build. Aggressive playstyles are rewarded with more rewards while defensive playstyles gain … very little if not a tPvP bunker.

Here are some improvements I think would definitely help improve Support play in GW2. (Mind you, this is from a Mesmer perspective. I don’t have much experience with Healing Power’s influence on other classes besides Elementalist)

HEALING POWER
Healing Power is currently very underwhelming; why go Healing Power when you could easily spec Toughness or vitality for defense? To trait for high Healing Power one must sacrifice damage, and since healing power only effects the potency of heals (survivability) and Regeneration boon (Defensive Support) it makes a crappy defensive stat and a much more potent support statistic.

• Quicker Rezzing - When I started speccing for healing power, I assumed that I’d be resurrecting my allies from downed faster. I figured “Surely these green healing numbers of mine that are springing up over this poor fool’s corpse must be greater than the brute Zerker Warrior kneeling right next to me. I specced for healing!”. I was wrong of course, and I can’t help but wonder.. why?
  - I think that your revive speed should increase respective to your healing.
  500 Healing Power = 10%
  1000 Healing Power = 20%
  1500 Healing Power = 30%

• More Gear Choices - Givers Gear -while totally underwhelming and barely worth it- was a step in the right direction. More options, such as a Healing Power / Power / Precision set would open up new opportunities for support specs. Runes like Superior Runes of Altruism (please put in sPvP) /Water (please fix 6th rune bug) / Dwayna are great examples of how new support runes, sigils, and food could be implemented.

REWARDING SUPPORT PLAY
One of the best things about Guild Wars 2 is that you can find a reward for everything you’re interested in. People who like to farm, run dungeons, go full DPS, go full tank, WvW, sPvP, ect, can always find something that’ll reward them for their playstyle… except support. The biggest complaint about running support builds is the lack of reward for all the effort.

• Loot for Support Players - I don’t know the technical side of this, so forgive my ignorance, but there’s got to be some way to reward players who focus more on heals and boons for allies than trying to tag enemies.

- Healing allies for a certain amount of HP through a battle should earn bags/gold.
- Number of boons cast on allies should earn bags/gold.
- Peripheral damage done (Example: Granting someone Retaliation/Might) should earn bags/gold
- Rezzing downed allies should earn greater rewards.

If we could figure out a possible way to implement this into the reward system, there would be many happy healers.

• Should Have a Visual Indicator (Tag of sorts) - You can see a Commander anywhere on your map, which is hella important for WvW. Having an icon or glow or .. something that allows you to see the healers in a skirmish would save a lot of time and headache and help a lot with team coordination.

• Should earn achievements. - I wanted to make a thread about earning rewards in dungeons for different achievements. (Clearing a dungeon within a certain time / Clearing all the mobs / Never wiping / Healing a certain amount / Inflicting X amount of damage to a single boss in 5 seconds ) Achievements would make people WANT to explore a supportive role.

I tend to agree. Right now, the game is a zerg fest, with everyone running around in zerker gear trying to tag everything with a red name.

That applies to PvE and WvW.

IMO, support characters should be credited more.

Tagging seems to be based on how much damage you deal, or how many hits you get in. It’s hard to tell exactly what the criteria is but….

Support Characters gain credit for the next attack, a supported player inflicts. Obviously the supported player does not “lose” credit; its shared.

In other words, if you buff 5 people, who are all attacking Jormag, it will effectively count as you making 5 attacks against said champ. During the course of a battle, this can easily add up to counting as dozens or hundreds of attacks, ensuring you will get credit where credit is due.

I could see that working, but I could also see people exploiting that shamelessly. I think if you got credit for placing might/retal/regeneration on enemies would be a nice step, but it should reduce the damage requirement to obtain a bag from the enemy. If I’m decked out in Cleric’s gear, let my AoE heals count for more than my pitiful damage will.

I would like this added. I hate being a support without getting credit for it. :/

The Necromancer forum has been saying something similar. Encouraging berserker builds discourages cooperative play. I have been in several PUGs where the strategy was literally, run around and kill things as fast as you can but if you go down, we’ll just 4-man it and keep going.

I competely agree that Zerkers are too important in this game. The Damage-Support-Control trinity has kinda pretty badly failed. Please, just give more importance to support/heal/boons.

One thing I would suggest is adding criticals on boons/healing (with precision being the critical chance and a new stat “Critical Boon” which is the critical % given).

Example:
1) Elementalist gives regeneration to a nearby allie. The elementalist had 50% critical chance and 25% critical boon.
The ally receives one normal tick of 100 HP, then one critical of 125 HP (100+25%), etc.

There could be even more way to make support/boons more important. First, supporters should earn the same reward.

The way I see this is that it would offer much more diversity but there would still be no “dedicated” healers, but more support/control play.

The damage on the PVE side of this game is too spiky. As such, it is hard to know when to heal. As such, i wonder if not healing power should be changed into a recharge time reduction for healing related skills. This so that if you go deep in that stat you can more freely spam your heals, rather than fret about healing that small damage because you may be hit with a spike soon after and so be left with a much bigger health hole and a heal skill on recharge. Meaning you can’t really be tactical with your heals under the current PVE mob design.

If it were up to me, a berserker build would be rewarded with both greatly increased dps, and incredible glassiness so that it requires support builds to keep it functioning. This would (and does in other MMOs) encourage cooperative play.

The reason, I think, the holy trinity was specifically avoided in Guild Wars 2 was to avoid locking players into one profession that is unable to function without support from other professions. The mechanics for turning any profession into any type of build are there in the trait allocations. Theoretically, a thief can allocate traits to be a tank, maybe a blink-tank. It can do stealth resurrecting so why not offer massive stealth heals? A warrior can likewise become a combat medic, a tank, or a hybrid of the two.

As much potential as there is in the game mechanics, all jobs are tuned to produce the best results with a variation of a power build. That skews the entire PvE experience. In PvP, the situation is much more balanced. I do think the precision trees are a little weaker than the others because it synergizes with both power and critical hit bonus. However, I have not seen a profession that can boost a glass cannon’s survivability enough to make it attractive from a group dps standpoint. That is the most glaring hole in the entire game. Conditions, boons, and heals should be critical to a berserker’s game plan.

Afaik ANet stated that they don’t want to put professions into preset roles. Adding cleric/ priest, wizard/ warlock, paladin (ragnarok) was not their intention. They preferred a balancing in which every class could do every job. Some a little better there, some a little better there. You can see this from the equip prefixes (not pure power, but mixed stats with 30% difference) and trait lines (anyone has power, toughness and healing line). So generally, it’s as they wanted it to be.

Stats imbalance
As we know, ANet first balances PvP/ WvW and then creates new content. The stats Power, Prec and CrtDmg do scale pretty well. Getting 0 of them and full of them surely boosts your effectiveness by … x3 (?). Getting 0 healpower and full healpower boosts your healing by … 40% (?). Same for toughness and vitality. Condition damage is somewhere between. It surely boosts your condition damage by a great amount, but we all know its disadvantage.
Here you clearly see, that ANet prefers zerker. With any class.

Crediting
Crediting kills is hard (technically). Adding code so you get the additional damage from your might credited towards yourself it difficult. Same for healing. If your ally fell from a cliff and you heal him, what credits should you get? 1c per 100HP ? for falling?
Here I’d prefer to see the ragnarok system as well: Party Share. Any exp will be shared … for GW2, it’d be the damage. Lower the drops a tiny bit and share the tagging to all party members.

Reviving
I like the current system. Anyone can ressurect anyone and downed and dead is fair, too. But do increase reviving by healing power and increase credits for reviving. If anyone can revive, I want others to fight for reviving. I mean you want others to be downed so you can run and revive them before others do. There needs to be a way to encourage ressing and not ignoring them.

Combos
Increase combo effects. Currently it’s rather a “nice” than a “use this, so we can do that”. You spam all your skills regardless of combo fields. Better keep them and use them when they deal tripple damage, not + 10%.

and here i thought support was more than just healing/buffing . Silly me .

I agree generally with OP.
The only thing that concerns me is the glowing tag idea on minimap. I don’t think the benefits (which seems to escape me) is worth “cluttering” minimap/UI.
Still, the sentiment is there that support role needs to be recognized. I’m always missing out on loot because I’m too busy keeping people alive.