Supports on the whole should be brought up massively to actually be able to support the party in whatever they have to offer whether they are healers, protectors, other utility like movement enhancers, or damage giving buffers.
This is a way to have strong supports and still have them able to solo content:
Introduce a passive to supports that boosts their final damage while solo/party of 1, these passives are all unique to each different support job to be tuned accordingly to that job, some will be on/off based on solo or at least 2+ in the party, while others the final damage bonus gradually decreases based on additional party members with 5 party members (6-man party size) removing the bonus completely for buffers that have buffs that affect everyone in the party.
Example Scenarios:
~ Lara will bring up her supports skills significantly where she is a proper healer (full heal party members 5 seconds or faster with 100% healing uptime with some way to ignore anti-healing), add in a party protection skill, with movement enhancing party effects as her core support utility, still has her 25% damage party buff too, but her main role is as a healer-enchanter so she gets 10% Final Damage while solo and this passive is disabled while is any party of 2 or more.
Meaning Lara will be tuned to deal roughly 90% of the damage of the average of other jobs and brought up to 100% while solo so she can still solo bosses.
~ For a dedicated party buffer example, let's bring up Blaze Wizard significantly for this with stronger party buffs and introducing new moment of power party buffs too.
In this scenario, since Blaze Wizard would give the party significantly more damage and affect the whole party, the damage tuning passive will be more extreme as well. Let's say the final damage passive while solo is 40% Final Damage, every additional party member in play will reduce this bonus by -8%, so in a duo-party Blaze Wizard's passive grants 32% Final Damage to self and in a 6-man party grants 0% Final Damage to self, a.k.a. no bonus damage to self from this passive.
Meaning Blaze Wizard, as a dedicated super party buffer, will be tuned to deal roughly 60% of the damage of other jobs in a full party and while solo can still deal 100% of the damage of other jobs so that they can still solo bosses.
This also prevents party buffers buff stacking as a meta as multiple buffers can give the party more damage, but more people are dealing way less damage themselves too. So you can make 1 non-support attacker deal insane damage, but everyone else is at half damage in this 6 man party, so the total damage may be weaker or a lot weaker as a result compared to other 6-man parties.
It is very good and healthy for the game to have strong supports as they both make the game more exciting and promote the social aspect to what is supposed to be a MMO game. The other part is that strong supports that actually fulfill that support fantasy can enable less skilled players that cannot boss or help new player get into bossing by creating a fake "easy" mode - mostly if the support has strong healing, protection, and/or other utility skills.
While buffers and dedicated buffers will aid in those with little time to play games in the weak to be able to have the little time they have to get done their weekly bosses, otherwise they cannot play at all. This is in scenarios where the characters in the party already massively overpower the boss and want it done even faster.
And this is a way for both solo play is always viable for every character while allowing for fun party play to happen, and to help create weak-to-week variance for those that party with random people every week.
Strong supports change up how that boss plays out with a lot of different support jobs, both of which currently don't exist and never existed in this game, and a lot of strong supports deepens the support pool with catering to different player playstyles and makes it easier for other players to find a support to party up with.
Basically supports opens up the game to allow for more players to partake in boss fights, where as in the current game these people don't bother bossing at all unless they can just one shot the boss fight. And more socializing with party play and a way to have boss fights be easier, without directly making the boss fight easier, boosts how much time people spend on the game since it allows players the opportunity to talk with other people.
