Break the Trinity System Please

[Duelle]

And if you have to ask yourself why, you are missing the concept of subjective fun, despite how some people feel "If its not fun then quit!" is an incredibly narrow and close-minded approach to games, I'm not saying rewrite everything, but adding more is rarely a harsh problem.

Balance trumps subjective fun, because while balance can allow for subjective fun, subjective fun doesn't always allow for balance.

You may not enjoy the idea of being a support class, but there are more than enough players who would. In a game entirely about the community and enjoyment, what harm, if balanced properly, is there in adding another type of roll that will just enhance the enjoyment of some of the community?

The crux of my argument is that it messes with party dynamics and group comps in a way that is detrimental to the community as a whole. You have to factor human nature into these sort of things, because you know the support classes will follow the trend of being the least-played yet balanced to being the most needed. That's not a good thing for the game in the long run. As I said, look back to princess Red Mages and princess Bards.

If you think uppity tanks or healers are bad, the aforementioned two monstrocities were worse by several orders of magnitude.

In the same light, you may not like being a healer, but other players find enjoyment in that role. Its not rocket science, and its purely a subjective thing much like fun.

Except healers don't create any of the problems a support role does. Healers, along with tanks and DPS directly affect the battle, which is why the three work off each other as well as they do from a design perspective.

I think with how good the devs have done so far in the balancing act of jobs, they'd have no problem pulling off a Support role.

You're missing the fact that the reason balance between the jobs is in such a good place is because they stuck to three roles and blended support aspects into the three roles.

While it has been shown in past MMOs that having a dedicated support role allows for much more complicated mechanics, (see RIFT) the major problem is in bottlenecking for queues. Adding a support role would require that they increase party sizes to ~6, (tank/heal/support/3dps) which then would become 12-14 in a full party, and having such LARGE groups is really unwieldy from both a designer and player perspective. (just ask Blizzard)
No matter how cool some of us think it would be to play a dedicated buffer/debuffer, there are 4-5x as many people who just want to do dps, and it's already well-known how bad DPS queues are in every MMO ever.


Additionally, depending on how the role is taken into account in high-end raid situations, the support jobs would become either obsolete in certain cases (having one that specializes in CC in a no-CC fight or vice versa, again see RIFT or EQ) OR functionally identical with redundant gameplay, making you wonder why they exist at all. (WoW players do notice when they don't have the full collection of raid buffs, but ask how much they care which classes they bring to a raid)

The only meaningful workaround would be to design encounters to permit for more than one strategy depending on which support you bring, and wow if that isn't asking way too much of any developer just to add another role.

As a BRD player from FFXI, I will be the first to admit that I love primary supporting, but it is an extremely flawed concept. I played BRD, which has enjoyed the advantage of having been welcome in 99.999% of all content FFXI has produced. Ask a RDM player how they feel, or PUP, or DNC, etc. Support roles inherently compete with each other, and have no place in modern MMOs where balance BETWEEN classes is valued. Support abilities are best when distributed among all jobs, especially in a way that all are useful but never required.

..and did I mention it's unpopular? Everyone needs a BRD, few want to play one.

Gonna quote this for emphasis. It'll get ignored by some, but I'll be damned if I don't try to help people understand why things work the way they do.