Matchmaking without the Trinity: how would you do it?

[Connor]

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.

I totally get why people would be incredibly wary of the addition of a full-on support role, but as an optimist I like to think that there's enough players expressing interest in it that it wouldn't significantly increase DF wait times. It's one of things where nobody could really know unless they actually done it, but naturally it'd far too much of a risk to implement a 'support' role as a distinct thing by itself.

Personally I'd love to see a job where the whole focus would be to boost the damage / survivability / etc of others instead of dps'ing, if not purely because it's be a great change of pace from the usual dps-frenzy that all current jobs/roles have in the current game.

My main problem with adding a dps/healer/etc that focuses primarily on supporting others is that I honestly don't think the developers could do it. Currently they believe this is exactly what Bard and Machinist are, 'support' jobs whose focus is to support the party. But I don't think there's a single player here who would take a great-support but middling-dps Bard/Machinist over one with high personal DPS. Not to mention the fact that they have such limited 'support' that very rarely gets touched anyway because of the damage penalties on anything that doesn't increase raid dps (the sole reason for this being because if Foe Requiem / Hypercharge had a damage penalty nobody would ever use Bard/Machinist). Both only have a single ability that can increase another's dps, but it's incredibly limited by large MP requirements or cooldowns and requires no forethough or strategic use. The entirety of their 'support' is available at the press of one button and that's all we get.

I fear that even if they added more 'support dps' they would be the exact same, dps with a single button that's somehow supposed to completely distinguishes them from normal dps. I honestly believe the only way they can implement support jobs into the game properly is if they design them as a full-on support, because in my eyes there's nothing 'support' about Bard or Machinist at all.

I know I constantly sound like a raving, deluded lunatic on these forums, but as someone who has wanted to play a support class in this game since I first levelled Bard in 1.X, their implementation of them is a constant source of disappointment. I know many probably just see my posts and think 'play a different game', but I've always loved this one since it was my first ever experience with an MMO, so I still hope that one day they can finally find some way to implement real support jobs.