Quote Originally Posted by Connor View Post
Not really sure where this assumption that a 'support' role would be played by such a tiny percentage of players that it would cause the entirety of the Duty Finder to become near-inaccessible. XIV has a pretty big playerbase and as long as they developed a support role to be fun and worthwhile I don't think it would be as bad as people assume. Not saying it wouldn't increase the wait times, but nobody can know for sure unless they actually implemented it, otherwise it's just theory. The entire thing could be circumvented by having support and dps sharing the same slot in 4/8 man parties. They've already split Melee / Ranged so it's not impossible for them to have different levels of the same slot / role.
Support roles have a long documented history of being the least represented role in RPGs by huge degrees. Most players are about being the "hero" or the one that does a lot of damage. The trinity formula represents the most prominent roles, where even then, there's a significant difference in activity between them (tanks and healers nearly always being lowest).

Recalling my time in the earlier days of XI, purely support roles like BRD were the most sought after jobs in the game. Even if you were mediocre at it, people wanted you to join them. They were such an important role for groups to have, but they were very rare to find people willing to play it. Obviously even rarer to play it well.

Your mentioning of them taking up DPS slots is indeed likely to be the best approach on the matter. Introducing a full fledged support role to the DF is not a good idea. It's very possible to create a support job that focuses primarily on damage boosting, since "support" can reflect any role.