Guild Wars 2

Supporting in this game outside of ressing will give you no sort of benefit outside of, well, making your teammates stronger. Which might not be a huge problem if you’re in a premade or something and your teammates will share drops with you, but for the most part you’re getting the short end of the stick in most of WvW and PvE.

Why? Because loot in this game works so that you have to hit a creature once, or more than once in some cases, to get credit for the kill. It doesn’t matter if you were dropping down buffs and heals like crazy, you apparently don’t deserve any credit for the kill if you didn’t do damage. This problem is huge if you’re trying to be a support in a boss fight or something, you will barely get any credit for killing the boss if most of what you did was support, which includes recovering downed players, even if you were the biggest factor in taking the boss down. Heck if you didn’t hit the boss twice, you won’t get any credit at all.

Well you might say, “No one in GW2 is purely a support/tank/controller, every character has some offensive abilities,” and you would be mostly right, but the thing is you don’t get “assists” like in MOBA’s if you didn’t damage the enemy, but you did greatly assist in its death. So if 10 minotaurs are attacking your friend, and you hit 2 of them, and heal your ally and buff him, you will only get credit for killing 2 minotaur. Also, the guardian in WvW is almost purely support in zergs, since he has no viable ranged weapon. He will get zero drops and zero credit for things he does when his few damaging spells, like wall of reflection, are down.

TL;DR: If your build has less focus on damage and more on other things, you will get less rewards overall than someone who focuses more on damage.

EDIT: Apparently debuffing an enemy won’t give you credit towards its death either O.o

I’m an support Elementalist myself so I have not much issue’s since I have enough AoE abilities. I say bring weapons with AoE abilities when farming events and don’t focus too much on supporting with buffs etc, esp when there is like 5-10 + people doing an event things die too quick before they can dmg anyone…. well except when most people forget about those exploding undead chickens…

But I agree on the WvW esp what I heard for gaurdians it’s problemmatic. I think as well that those PvP marks or any loot should be auto looted in your inventory. Since in the heat of battle it happens a lot you miss those bags of loot.

You already somewhat answered your own question because a support role in GW2 isn’t only defending or healing. Doing damage is part of whatever role you are playing just in a lesser sense. If you are in a zerg only trying to put down healing fields…well you are doing it wrong but you already knew that ofcourse.

I think you got a fair point and “participation” should be handled in a more correct way. Just like Necromancers complain about low participation on world bosses because they have to compete for bleed stacks.

But what stops you from switching to a DPS role for dynamic events and a support role for Explorable dungeons where they are definitely needed? It’s only 3 silver and a weapon switch.

Read my tl;dr, you will be getting less rewards than your dps friend. If someone went FULL DPS, they would be rewarded tenfold for it, even though “they are playing the game wrong” according to many of you. The loot mechanics currently, if they could speak for themselves, say you’re doing it wrong if you aren’t AoE’ing everything to tag them and doing tons of single target damage to bosses.

EDIT: I’m also just giving feedback on how the loot mechanics are flawed, no reason to instantly flame it. This was brought on by me and many others doing boss events and getting silver or bronze if we revived people/did channeled support skills/etc.

the uprising.6317:

Read my tl;dr, you will be getting less rewards than your dps friend. If someone went FULL DPS, they would be rewarded tenfold for it, even though “they are playing the game wrong” according to many of you. The loot mechanics currently, if they could speak for themselves, say you’re doing it wrong if you aren’t AoE’ing everything to tag them and doing tons of single target damage to bosses.

EDIT: I’m also just giving feedback on how the loot mechanics are flawed, no reason to instantly flame it. This was brought on by me and many others doing boss events and getting silver or bronze if we revived people/did channeled support skills/etc.

Nobody is flaming you, we did mostly agree on what you said…

If you want to play the game purely to “get the most drops” you will be forced to play an AoE role like a Greatsword guardian right now. Creating a loot system where the system calculates your “participation” on the mob indirectly (healing, protecting) is difficult to achieve but is of course desirable. So what you say is true.

I just don’t think we should go back to the greed/need system or anything like that.

We are not flaming it, just giving some advice

Al thought I agree on major boss fight event’s It’s a bit harder for support builds too gain golden medals.

I have to agree with the original post. A player who isn’t dealing damage is a player being penalized. There’s just too much emphasis on dealing damage and not enough on support and control.

The other day I came across a champion mob that was tearing apart a handful of players. By the time I arrived only two of them were left standing and they were running around in a full panic. I was able to get the champion focused on me and “tank” it, but at the cost of sacrificing a lot of my personal damage output.

My actions bought the others the breathing room they needed to get the downed players back up and into the fight. It also bought my friends (who were further down the map selling at a vendor) time to arrive on the scene. I continued to keep the champion focused on me until we all defeated him.

I received a silver medal. That’s nice, but my friends (who arrived minutes after I did) received a gold medal. I guess, between keeping the champion focused on me and controlled, I just didn’t do enough damage to earn a gold medal (where as they all did despite being in the fight for less time than I was). The lesson I learned here is that I should have just brought out my big guns and joined the messy chaos with everyone else rather than bringing some order to the scene. I thought GW2 was supposed to be about teamwork, though?

Same problem with those defense missions where dozens of mobs come running up to a defense point. Attempting to break their charge with some crowd control is, apparently, a waste of time because it goes unrewarded. If you’re not laying down the AOE death along with everyone else, you’re not going to see any loot drops. No real encouragement for teamwork there either.

I would really like to see actions other than damage dealing to count for something, both in terms of medals on events and earning drops from mobs. I want to participate more in support and control roles, but not if it’s going to be a thankless job.

the uprising.6317:

TL;DR: If your build has less focus on damage and more on other things, you will get less rewards overall than someone who focuses more on damage.

EDIT: Apparently debuffing an enemy won’t give you credit towards its death either O.o

It just takes a single hit to an enemy to have the chance of getting loot. There are no pure support/tank roles in the game, so everyone gets loot.

@Edge: Yes, it’s a bit different when it comes to DEs, unfortunately.

I heard there was a similar problem in RIFT in that only dps would get rewarded, which would be a bigger deal in that game because I think they have actual dedicated healers and such, and they fixed it subsequently, so I don’t know why we can’t fix it.

I love being the guy who manages to just barely kite around some nasty champion for 8 minutes, throwing in damage/support here and there, and generally putting in 10x more effort than everyone else combined…and getting a silver.

My D/P thief is really, really good at mitigating the damage people take and burning down single targets. I can bring a lot to a group by blindspamming and focusing on tougher, more durable enemies. But I am far better off just running around autoattack tagging everything because I’m likely to get bronze/silver otherwise.

you only need to get a single hit on an enemy to get credit for when it dies, and if you’re trying to be a dedicated tank or healer you kind of missed the point….