Quote Originally Posted by mallleable View Post
Tanks, and healers are already fill the support role. Creating a dedicated 'support' role will leave parties lopsided, 5 supports, 3 dps. It also leave the DPS role pretty anemic, 9 supports, 4 pure dps.

I actually think we need more generalist DPS jobs, and fewer "support/specialist" DPS jobs. Like within each role, generalists should outnumber the "support/specialists," but currently they are trying to do a 50/50 split which I don't think is working. Melee DPS are doing well -- the only outlier is VPR kinda, but the both ranged roles are all over the place. We need more generalist ranged jobs -- we need more non taxed ranged jobs. Only 2 out of current 7 ranged jobs are not taxed for various reasons -- it should be more like 5 out of 7, and eventually 6 out of 8 when we get the 4th phys ranged.
Assuming the ‘supports’ were Bard / Dancer / Red Mage / Summoner that leaves Monk, Dragoon, Ninja, Samurai, Viper, Reaper, Machinist, Black Mage and Pictomancer as the ‘damage dealers’. Which is 4 to 9 support - damage. I wouldn’t say that’s unbalanced personally.
If we’re using ‘presence of a raid buff’ as indicative that a job is ‘support dps’, then literally everything except Black Mage, Samurai and Machinist is a support. Which I’d say means the game needs a pretty major rework anyway…

I disagree with tanks and healers being ‘supports’ too tbh. If anything they’re ’dps with extra steps’ (do a heal every 120 seconds then attack, do a self-defense buff every 60s then attack’. I mean, the entire healer playstyle is designed around not helping party members as much as humanly possible because DPS uptime. It would take as much retooling for ‘dps support’ to be a thing as it would ‘tank support’ or ‘healer supports’.

No job or role currently is designed around supporting the party outside of auto-activate 120s cooldowns that are intentionally designed to be as non-intrusive to the overall rotation of the job as possible.

I mean, I’d be the first to say healers/tanks could/should be designed around supporting. But I don’t think that’s the case at all in the current design