When supports are powerful they help keep the game balance and prevent constant balance patch chasing since they enable jobs to do things that they cannot do otherwise and brings out that job's true power.
This can be done through things like:
~ Slowing the boss down.
~ Stunning the boss in place.
~ Healing party members.
~ Restoring MP for party members.
~ Providing shields.
~ Providing increased damage reduction from all sources of damage.
~ Critical rate increase for archers to benefit from.
~ Defense reduction / more ignore enemy defense for low ignore enemy defense jobs.
~ Offering unique mobility effects.
~ Teleporting party members around.
~ Damage / Boss Damage for low Damage % total jobs.
~ % Stat and % Attack for those that have high flat stat and attack.
~ Critical Damage for jobs with low critical damage.
~ Final Damage utilized in such a way to benefit weak characters over strong characters.
~ Preventing death / restoring life count.
The list goes on with what you can do for supports and this space as not been explored at all with such a small pool of supports and supports being so massively weak to where they should be.
Stronger supports and a lot more supports will really help players do bosses and want to do bosses that either cannot do the boss because they are too hard or do not want to do bosses because of an annoying boss mechanic.
Now what will be below will be examples of what can be done to greatly improve and buff up support gameplay, in such a way that is not about deal big damage and blow up the boss as fast as possible, but rather done in a way to help players do long timer boss runs and/or to help out newer players get into bossing.
Bishop:
Category: Healer-Protector
Holy Power:
New Skill:
Passive: When Bishop heals a party member beyond 100% of their HP, grant the target +1% Final Damage per 10% HP that is over healed for 15 seconds, up to 10% Final Damage. Does not apply to self.
Heal:
Reworked:
Deal damage to Undead Monsters and apply a healing buff to self and party members for 15 seconds [increased with buff duration] healing for 10% HP per second.
Cooldown is removed.
Repeat casts would just refresh the healing buff duration and/or be used to kill Undead Monsters.
Holy Fountain:
Reworked:
Summon a fountain for 60 seconds [increased with minion duration] to heal self and party members near the fountain for 10% HP per second.
Cooldown: 60 seconds.
Dispel:
Reworked:
Cleanse all abnormal status effects from self and party members. After apply a buff granting immunity to abnormal status effects for 10 seconds [increased with buff duration].
Cooldown: 60 seconds.
Holy Magic Shell:
Improved:
Heal self and party members for 100% HP and grant a buff to that blocks attacks and reduces the damage from % HP attacks by 15% for 20 seconds [affected by buff duration].
Cooldown: 90 seconds
No longer has an on-target durational effect that stops the same target from receiving Holy Magic Shell again.
No longer has a limited amount of blocks, it is entirely durational now.
No longer can be enhanced further with Hyper Passives.
Holy Water:
Reworked:
Allows Bishop's healing skills to ignore all anti-healing mechanics for 15 seconds [increased further with buff duration].
Cooldown: 90 seconds.
3 New Hyper Passives:
1. Heal heals for +2% HP more.
2. Heal lasts for +5 seconds longer.
3. Heal can damage all monsters instead of only Undead Monsters.
The purpose for all this is updating the utility skills in such a way that create a better ease of use on the user while making them more potent so players are more likely to want to do 15+ minutes boss runs instead of trying to kill bosses in under 5 minutes. Also making it easier for all players to receive the utility effects easily since needing to know to use your up arrow to get healed from Holy Fountain is not intuitive for new and casual players.
Blaze Wizard:
Category: Buffer-Healer
Flame Bite:
Reworked:
Toggle: When using Orbital Flame, send out Flame Bite forward to deal damage to monsters and heal self and party members for 10% HP.
Attack Cooldown: 1 second.
Flame Vortex:
Reworked:
Toggle: When using Orbital Flame, send out Flame Vortex forward to deal damage to monsters and reduce their fire elemental resistance by -10% and all other elemental resistance by -5% for 30 seconds.
Attack Cooldown: 10 seconds.
Flame Tempest:
Reworked:
Toggle: When using Orbital Flame, send out Flame Tempest forward and backward to deal damage to monsters and heal self and party members for 100% HP.
Attack Cooldown: 20 seconds.
Controlled Burn:
Active Reworked:
Restore the HP and MP for self and party members equal to 100% of Blaze Wizard's Max MP. Healing from Controlled Burn ignores anti-healing mechanics.
Cooldown: 30 seconds.
Cinder Maelstrom:
Reworked:
Manifest flames imbued with the power of the phoenix to deal damage to monsters and applies a mark for up to 20 seconds that allows self and party members to deal 50% increased Final Damage on their attacks. If the target was a boss monster, then the mark disappears after it lost 8% of its HP during the mark duration.
The same target cannot be marked again for 80 seconds.
Cooldown: 90 seconds.
Burning Conduit:
Improved and Adjusted:
Range increased by roughly 50%.
Initial damage buff reduced to 20% Damage for Party Members. Blaze Wizard always gets 60% Damage at skill level 30.
Party members now receive the buff as a 10 seconds duration [increased further with Blaze Wizard's buff duration].
New Mechanic:
Whenever party members are struck by Orbital Flame while standing on Burning Conduit, they gain +2% Damage for 10 seconds, up to +40% Damage (60% Damage total).
[Note: The skill's duration and cooldown would remain the same. The applied buff is in addition to what it already does.]
There are two aspects here:
1. Dealing with the dead skills that Blaze Wizard has to make them useful for the first time ever.
2. Really push Blaze Wizard into a proper support class and allow them to be a buffer without worry of nuking bosses too quickly and really help out weaker boss struggle runs. Three things to help with this is granting Blaze Wizard party healing to help the party survive a long fight, and to help really weak characters to push past their limits with an extremely powerful final damage debuff and prevent bind and burst gameplay with introducing a hard cap to how much damage you can deal before the buff disappears. In addition to a ramping up Burning Conduit party buff is to help prevent the bind and burst gameplay.
Shade:
Category: Buffer (Debuffer)
Weaken:
Adjusted:
Shade's attacks have a 10% chance to apply a debuff for all attacks to deal +5% Damage for 30 seconds, stacking up to +30% Damage.
[Instead of 10% chance to apply 20% Damage debuff.]
Soul Splitter:
Adjusted:
Split the soul of struck monsters for 20 seconds, apply a mark on them causing attacks against the mark to deal 70% increased Final Damage, if the target dies while the mark is still active then increase the EXP by 100%. If the target was a boss monster, then the mark disappears if the target lost 10% of its HP during the mark duration.
The same target can only be marked once every 80 seconds.
(The on-target cooldown effect is shared with Blaze Wizard.)
Cooldown: 120 seconds.
Spiritgate:
Buffed:
Maximum debuff increased to 100% Critical Rate and 15% Critical Damage.
The idea here is increase Shade's overall damage giving ability to the party, but also reduce the bind and burst gameplay and to make that weaker. By increasing the critical rate and critical damage of Spiritgate further is to further boost the synergy with archers and low crit damage jobs allowing for these types of jobs to accel and give them a chance to shine.
Lara:
Category: Enchanter-Healer
Dragon Vein: Manifestation:
New Skill:
Use to create a Manifestation based on the type of Dragon Vein.
The Manifestation skills all become passive skills and this one new skill will be used to summon River, Sunlight, and Wind. This reduces the amount of keys to use Manifestation skills from 3 down to 1 to really save on keyboard space and make Lara simpler to use.
Manifestation: Sunlight-Filled Ground:
Buffed:
Horizontal range increased by 100% and vertical range increased by 100%.
Duration of the area increased to 30 seconds.
Healing increased to 15% HP per second (from 10% HP per 2 seconds).
[Stills provides 25% Damage to self and party members.]
Cooldown is removed entirely.
Manifestation: Wind Swing:
Improved:
Horizontal range increased by 100% and vertical range increased by 100%.
Duration of the area is 30 seconds.
For self and party members to take flight to become simplified to simply require the user to hold the jump key while inside of the wind manifestation to fly.
Cooldown is removed entirely.
Manifestation: Where the River Courses:
Reworked:
Now works in a similar way to its sunlight and wind counterparts with the same area size.
Duration of the area is 30 seconds.
Restores 4% MP per second while inside of the manifestation for self and party members.
New Effect:
While self or party members are inside of the manifestation, double tap one of four directional keys to quickly dash a set distance in that direction.
Cooldown is removed entirely.
The aim here is to really push Lara into a proper support role, but with very unique party utility that no one else currently provides. The other part is to make her party healing skill actually be able to heal because waiting 20 seconds to fully heal is so worthless that players do not even use it for the healing benefits and only for the buff that it grants.
This doubles up to also improve Lara's personal bossing as well which is something she desperately needs at the moment.
Lastly, the increased size of the manifestation skills is to make the skills usable for current boss design and patterns. While the removal of the cooldowns is to boost the ease of play on the Lara user.
Brief rundown for others to focus on:
Lynn: Category: Healer-Protector
[Powerful shield, heals, dispel, damage reduction, death prevention, etc.]
Kanna: Category: Healer-Disruptor
[Strong heals, binds, controlling the pace of battle, etc.]
Battle Mage: Category: Buffer-Healer
[Strong heals, dispel, buffs, etc. all stemming from the auras.]
Paladin: Category: Protector-Bodyguard
[Powerful effects to keep others alive, especially a single party member, Paladin revive could even restore 1 lost life count, etc.]
Mihile: Category: Protector
[Emphasis on his shield granting ability and further expand on this, etc.]
Zero: Category: Disruptor
[Emphasis on their ability to micro bind and add in ability to have very long binds, even get creative with more boss inhibiting effects like slows, etc.]
Ice-Lightning Mage: Category: Disruptor
[Make substantial changes to move this job to have an identity as a superior boss controlling supports with binds, micro binds, slows, and even a special status to prevent the boss from using mobility skills such as dashes and teleports, etc.]
Comments
I see the utility direction as a viable option in several things you mentioned, but something that needs to be realized is whenever you opt into niche strategies like extra binds or party buffs or general tankiness, just like the pure fd meta that supports are currently giving in our game right now, it's always going to come down to who can abuse the best strategy available, and those will always be the first clearing classes.
Coming from an end-game perspective here, for bosses besides the final two (EX: XKalos + HKaling), it hardly matters what you play for CKalos and below as long as you invest long enough into your character. But for the final boss or two in any given meta is significantly harder than all the other bosses you could think of. Which is why you can play anything up until that point, but at the very end stages only meta classes with peak gear can even clear (cause bosses are designed around the first clearing party in KMS reg server, which sets the bar for what we have to clear when it comes to our server). Non-meta classes in a support meta don't stand a chance, and the current power invested into supports is a large reason of why that is the case.
I like the idea of niche support strategies that are weaker but let a lot of classes have different ones, and just lower the boss hp to allow us to still clear. Then it's more about the fun and uniqueness of classes than being locked into taking what is best.
In terms of selfish damage roles you can do one of two things (or both):
1. Balance the selfish damage jobs to tone down the dominant picks and buff up the lesser picked jobs.
2. The lesser picked jobs you can scan over their kit and see if they could get some party utility or buffs added to the kit so that they can be strong at providing that damage role while also giving something a little extra to the party to tempt parties from taking them over the more popular purely selfish damage dealer.
For support balance, all of them need to be brought up a lot, and add in new support jobs as well. Once you have a good base for supports, then you balance them among each other if there is a drastic pick rate of one over another when it comes to party bossing (keeping in mind some jobs are more popular to play over another due to that particular playstyle, higher pool of players would result in that job being picked more for party bossing since there is a bigger supply of them).
The aim however is, for example, everyone that can provide healing to be able to solo heal the party so that parties will be happy with any healer if they are looking for a healer in the party. Though, Bishop and Lynn should be the strongest of healers, the others should be able to hold their own as a true healer which is a drastic improvement to where we are currently at where Bishop and Lynn are the ONLY healers and they are also underpowered as the strongest supports.
In terms of damage output, Heroic passive needs a massive buff because KMS interactive is doubling our damage. GMS interactive is even more extreme of a damage difference from Heroic worlds.
I do want to get more players into bossing as well, and stronger supports will do that. And long boss fights will set them up to do well for end game bossing too, so the utility over damage buffing approach will help grow the game, especially since support players have the mindset of helping others out already.
But with that aside, fundamentally, especially if you're going to optimize a party comp, all "damage buffs" are basically just an fd boost which doesn't really make them unique... You're still just going to take the best supports available (usually just straight up fd like Bishop's bene or Kanna's domain or BaM's buffs) + take the best damage dealers that can synergize perfectly with the best fd buffs.
Kanna's Domain + Bishop's being LONG is a large reason of why Night Walker with their condensed burst + long-lasting spear buff, Xenon with their short, condensed laser + lingering 60-70s of core overload fd boost, and Mercedes with their very condensed + long-lasting Spirits buff are king right now. Notice how they all fit the same formula of being very condensed for the Bishop support's WJ + bene, but still lingering enough to take advantage of the remaining long benediction + spirit's domain. They just fit too well into the kings of supports.
And while other utility like party heals/shields are cool as a concept and I'd like to see it, FD is just simply best. Burst is easier to execute than dps, so just make a big burst. If you kill a boss faster, you don't need other luxuries. That's a large consensus around a lot of members at the super end-game and you can see it reflected through their party comps.
The fundamental problem in my eyes is that supports are just too darn strong. Introducing new ones that don't at least match the current top ones aren't going to fly, and that basically amounts to: a support either needs a crazy fd buff or an extra long bind on the boss. The other utility is meaningless (currently).
And to make matters worse, if you make more supports that match current Bishop/Kanna, it's still going to be the NW/Xenon/Merc filling 1-3 dps slots and you'll just be taking 3 more supports, whether you create more of them with the remaining roster or not. Personally I don't see the same 3 dps + 40 other "supports" being a good fix to the game state and you still will have to compete for 3 party slots when my suggestion could allow any class to fill into a party of 6.
That's why I think they supports need to be nerfed (to the ground honestly lol) so that you can both have different dps classes that don't rely on such an op support synergy + open up more options for utility based support instead of FD stacking being so good.
---
P.S. I am aware that Bishop and other supports are getting giga-nerfed in the near future which is why I think you made the post, and I do support those changes that Nexon made there. That said, of course Heroic servers need to get buffed in some way or boss hp nerfed to compensate when our supports get nerfed. But I still do contend that the support nerfs are one step of many towards a healthier game state than how the current meta is
This was a lot of words.
Step 1: Bring up AND introduce a lot more supports.
Step 2: Once there is a large numbers of very powerful supports, then you balance the supports among each other.
You cannot fulfill Step 2 without fulfilling Step 1 first to a proper satisfactory level, and this will take a long time because the game is very down in supports and they ALL are extremely underpowered, every single one at their current power levels is very underpowered.
You focus the supports in proper roles among each other, some fulfill the same roles for different playstyles, but for the most part they fulfill distinct unique roles.
Once this has been established, and after players have played with different party compositions, given a long period of time. You then can balance the jobs and roles among each other, with the end goal of all of the supports be strong and roughly equal in power to each other and creating a diverse party composition scene.
The aim is for supports to allow more people to boss. They are significantly too weak to do that CURRENTLY. And all nerfing them will do is have less people do bosses.
The game really needs players to have an easy way to boss fights. The problem right now is that people are not bossing, they are skipping the boss fights or just not doing bosses outright. Players that want harder bosses can choose to not party with supports or try soloing the boss, everyone else that does not care about challenges should be allowed to choose an easier path so that they can actually do the content.
This means utility being strong and, when damage buffs are given, the damage buffs to not favour burst to avoid the stack a bunch of buffs and nuke the boss in one go. Strong utility will allow players to experience a 15+ minutes boss fight and now they can actually learn what the boss does, because right now they kill it in under 5 mins or they die out.
If they want to reward challenge runs, they could do something like 20% more mesos from the crystal or something if there were no supports present, solos excluded from this mesos bonus.
And less supports / weaker supports = less party diversity, not more. People would just pick the highest personal damage jobs with irrelevant supports.