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Add more to Support than having an Aura and Healing
deadman20
Posts: 1,533 Arc User
Ever since CO's existence, the role of Support has been a lackluster experience. This is mainly due to the lack of ways to play in a supportive manner. A majority of Support setups focus on healing strength and boosting with an Aura. Crowd Control can be used to allow exploitation of enemies, but the end result of using it in a supportive manner is simply more healing via Sentinel Mastery or debuffing resistance or damage output, something which is redundant with the way most builds are commonly set up anyway. However, this isn't quite about specs and their functions.
What Support builds truly lack are strong dedicated Buffing powers, things which augment allies directly as opposed to weakening the enemy or allowing for their exploitation. The powers we do have available are weak in their buffing potential and/or fall right back upon simply just healing allies. Illumination and Howl are prime examples of this failure in buffing powers. They provide a negligible bonus to the friendly target. Howl's Furious giving 1% Critical Chance is an example of this weak buffing structure CO is standing on, and the buff itself falls back on healing the affected when they take damage. This circles back to the failure of the way Support is structured in CO. There are more ways to design Support than simply slapping on some healing.
However, there is another conflict to bring up, and that is the relative power of simply existing as a Support. The absolute best way buff allies is to slap on an Aura Passive and exist. There's no interplay to this, which is boring. The negligible power of buff-other powers makes them pointless to take over grabbing a heal or another attack. Their strength is even further dwarfed by the raw power simply existing provides when the player uses an Aura Passive. This should NOT be an excuse to hold off on adding strong buffing powers. In fact, I would say that Aura Passives are TOO powerful in the bonuses they provide and should be toned down.
Aura Passives also demand that the player stacks Presence over anything else to give meaningful bonuses to allies. This is another critical error, as it essentially means that the strongest supports stack everything into Presence with little reason to invest in anything else. Stacking Presence even loops back to providing needless bonus healing, both as a stat itself and with the primary form favored by healers, Compassion.
All in all, there's no reason for a Support player to focus on anything other than Presence, having an Aura or two, and boosting healing to the max. There are no strong buffs that warrant the player's attention, and CC is less a Support tool than it is its own item that can be used for its own ends. Without significant changes in these departments, I feel that Support will always be a lackluster role with little diversity in its application.
What Support builds truly lack are strong dedicated Buffing powers, things which augment allies directly as opposed to weakening the enemy or allowing for their exploitation. The powers we do have available are weak in their buffing potential and/or fall right back upon simply just healing allies. Illumination and Howl are prime examples of this failure in buffing powers. They provide a negligible bonus to the friendly target. Howl's Furious giving 1% Critical Chance is an example of this weak buffing structure CO is standing on, and the buff itself falls back on healing the affected when they take damage. This circles back to the failure of the way Support is structured in CO. There are more ways to design Support than simply slapping on some healing.
However, there is another conflict to bring up, and that is the relative power of simply existing as a Support. The absolute best way buff allies is to slap on an Aura Passive and exist. There's no interplay to this, which is boring. The negligible power of buff-other powers makes them pointless to take over grabbing a heal or another attack. Their strength is even further dwarfed by the raw power simply existing provides when the player uses an Aura Passive. This should NOT be an excuse to hold off on adding strong buffing powers. In fact, I would say that Aura Passives are TOO powerful in the bonuses they provide and should be toned down.
Aura Passives also demand that the player stacks Presence over anything else to give meaningful bonuses to allies. This is another critical error, as it essentially means that the strongest supports stack everything into Presence with little reason to invest in anything else. Stacking Presence even loops back to providing needless bonus healing, both as a stat itself and with the primary form favored by healers, Compassion.
All in all, there's no reason for a Support player to focus on anything other than Presence, having an Aura or two, and boosting healing to the max. There are no strong buffs that warrant the player's attention, and CC is less a Support tool than it is its own item that can be used for its own ends. Without significant changes in these departments, I feel that Support will always be a lackluster role with little diversity in its application.
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So, can you think of any buffs that people would care about that don't fit into the following categories?
1. Causes buffed player to deal more damage, either through damage bonus, crit chance, or severity.
2. Causes buffed player to take less damage, either through damage resistance, dodge/avoidance, or damage shielding.
3. causes buffed player to produce or receive more healing.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
The way CO is designed doesn't really allow for anything useful to be more complex than those categories. There are ways to make those effects play out in more unique manners though. A direct reduction of active cooldowns and/or charge times would be an interesting buffing concept. It "technically" fits into all the categories you listed though depending on how the buffed person uses it. There's also the damage-return effect the Primus Spark Shield device has. A buffing power that absorbs damage and returns what it absorbs back at the enemy would be nice. We really only have an Advantage for that effect via Bionic Shielding, and that can only trigger as many times as the healing part of the power does.
Celestial Cleansing could probably take a looking at since it doesn't feel like it's affected by anything other than the ranks put into it. Cleanse-type powers could be more widely available and warrant more situations where they would be viable. The power's Breakfree advantage being affected by superstats could be useful, and allowing it to reduce the number of stacks of an active debuff instead of only a single debuff would be a neat addition. Like, if during Teleios Ascendant you're playing hot potato like normal, using a Cleansing-type power would cool the potato down significantly. 3 stacks of a stacking debuff at R1, 4 at R2, and 5 at R3 for example.
Following Cleansing-type are Resist-type abilities that can prevent certain debuffs from stacking on the ally like Bleed or Fear or Feedback-type which perform helpful functions should debuffs get applied. There needs to be more things that do something other than simply add more healing.
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Yep, and that's the problem.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
If you recall, we had Skarn's Bane which did that...I used that as a Support tool...until it was removed completely and replaced with a version which applied Bane innately...and then what we have now...Hexed on full maintain.
Everything in CO about the role of "Support" leads people to HEALING.
Even at a core level, the icon is a + sign.
Current endgame experiences work because auras are as strong as they are...and even then...they can fail quite badly.
I don't think we need to complicate Support Role by forcing Support players to take various different powers to strip certain debuffs from players (assuming you'd want powers to remove specific status effects)...as that's bound to be nerfed or mitigated some way when it proves to be effective (or overly effective depending on your PoV).
Also if you take note of how powerful Ebon Sigils used to be before it was toned down...previously varied support was pseudo encouraged...but now its been more shoehorned into the following:
Can you heal? Yes.
Can you buff my damage/cooldowns/stats? Yes.
Can you rez? Yes.
Great, do those things and we'll get through the fight. K? Sure.
Debuffing power has been placed into the hands of DPS and Tanks who are actively fighting, whereas those who opt to specialize in Crowd Control are brought out to fill in a niche situation which has been carefully carved out in endgame for them to fit into. Outside of that they'll get by dealing damage or pseudo support.
In many ways, I think the relative straightforwardness of healing, DPSing and Tanking is beneficial...those of us who want to try more exotic supporting/DPSing or tanking situations have the free form system open to them to do so.
Also be sure to understand that you're speaking from the perspective of what I assume is an endgame support toon who has geared up and is content with their gear and supporting build.
So what you may find to be an issue, may not be the case for others.
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Aura of Arcane Befuddling - All enemies in 100ft suffer from increased charge time, increased energy cost, and reduced perception
Aura of Primal Inelegance - All enemies in 100ft suffer stat reduction
Aura of Ebon Conservation - All enemies in 100ft deal less damage
Make this work on bosses, ALL BOSSES, and give these something that benefits the person slotting it.
Also you could design an aura that renders all enemies in 100ft more vulnerable to status effects and debuffs, like being able to maintain a CC effect longer.
^ Whilst that looks cool...
I bet enemies would then be auto ramped up everywhere to ensure that IF this aura was used it wasn't a cake walk...which makes that aura somewhat problematic (based PURELY on the way I've worded it above)
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Wanna buff players so they take less damage? Debuff enemies with something that makes them deal less damage.
Wanna buff players so they deal more damage? Debuff enemies so they have less resistance.
Both of these things are useful everywhere, are probably part of an attack that does damage ( damage also useful everywhere ), and don't force support even further into the "just shut up and click on players" playstyle.
Yep. And then they rebalance all encounters to assume that all of these auras are always present, and then we gotta spend even more time standing around waiting for roles to show up u3u also there's some fairly severe overlap with the auras we already have. Remember, making enemies do less damage is the same as making players resist more damage!
Keep buffs passive, and debuffs offensive. It's the Championerican way s( u 3 u )7
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
*Increase the speed of you and your allies
*Grant you and allies CC resist
*Remove debuffs
Whoever you are, be that person one hundred percent. Don't compromise on your identity.
Now see I like that cause you know I like zooming around all crazy but... if that's all the buff does then that's kinda... questionable for a power point. They have actually added "makes you faster" to some powers, but it's always a secondary effect.
I keep seeing people say that CC resist is useless cause it doesn't actually reduce the amount of time that you're held or something... if that's the case then CC resist would need to be updated to be more useful before anybody would care about a buff that grants it. CC resist actually being useful in that way though would mean that a buff like this could be very handy...but might need to come packaged with something else. I mean, Fire Shield got that advantage that actually eats stuns off you and nobody was even hype about it, and some other powers actually got the ability to remove holds on other players and again.. no hype.
People don't generally seem to care if they have debuffs... and if they do, it's a debuff that Celestial Cleansing can't remove which means the devs don't want us removing it ._.
Also technically not a buff. This would be classified as a Cleanse.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Whoever you are, be that person one hundred percent. Don't compromise on your identity.
If they ever go with the debuff removal stuff for support builds, another thing they'd need to decide on is how debuffs information is shown. It would be quite a hassle if a healer has to click through all players in all teamups to see who has what debuff. Either debuffs would need some big obvious vfx, or the UI needs something new.
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So then I wonder how much CC resist a buff would need to grant before the reduction is enough that people would care. It's unfortunate that we don't actually have a way to test more than a tiny amount .-.
Yeah. A PBAoE cleanse that hits a bunch of targets and has a cooldown would be my preferred method. That way instead of the support having to search for players with the debuff, you simply announce "cleansing in 5 seconds, come to me if you have X debuff" and then make it their responsibility to crowd around you. It even gives an opportunity for something to design fights around that requires people to pay attention to zone and work together.
Also I believe Panta tested Celestial Cleansing for the green debuff and found that it no longer is cleansible.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
This is exactly how quite a few buffs in City of Heroes worked. And folks did exactly as you mentioned when teaming. You actually described what happened in that game perfectly. LOL. It could work here.
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Control also has some scaling with PRE, though in its case it's tied to a very specific role during a very specific set of fights that require their expertise.
Contrast this to many of the buffs/debuffs featured in sets. There is no statting that determines how much damage reduction is inflicted by effects such as Fear, Disorient, Regret... Always a flat 10% here, a flat 6% there, regardless of whether you're running in a support or dps role, or focus statting in something like END or PRE or STR or whatever. There is an extremely thin subset of effects that do scale though (Despondency apparently scales with STR as a debuff. Elusive Monk is a buff that scales with DEX...) But more often than not these are, as shown, tied to stats that aren't usually associated with support, and are almost exclusively utilized in personal contexts - enabling you yourself to survive things better, or kill things deader, etc.
Is that a paradigm we should challenge?
Well there's four different paradigms being presented:
1. Auras scaling with pre
2. Control effects scaling with pre
3. Most buffs/debuffs not scaling with anything
4. Most buffs/debuffs being personal in function
1 would be interesting to change, say making auras scale with just your super stats, or different auras scaling with different super stats. My Ebon Aura toon could become even more of a "support dps" than she is now.
2 is already not quite so locked in, since you could make a very strong CCer stacking Int. It's actually something I plan to do if they ever fix Congress Of Selves.
Changing 3 would certainly make the choice of what stats to put points into more interesting, especially if the scaling enabled effects to get really strong - of course, we would quickly figure out how to abuse the hell out of that.
4 is really only somewhat the case, since if I'm debuffing something's damage output then anybody it hits benefits from that, and all resistence debuffs benefit anyone dealing that damage type to the target. So in that case I think things are fine the way they are - most effects should be this way, with only a few effects being actually group-based effects.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.