Dedicated support missions

[blp.3489]

I think it would be nice if there were some minor events that were dedicated to players playing support builds, and helping them practice and improve.  For example, some sort of escort event where you had to support the NPC rather than DPS the mob.  Say the NPC has a special weapon or ability that lets them do massive damage to an enemy with a massive health pool, but the NPC is somewhat fragile, so the best way to play it is to act as a support to the NPC via healing and boons and such.  I've never played anything overtly support oriented because in the OW it usually seem to be better to just have more DPS and support abilities seem to only randomly be applicable.  Instanced content is of course an entirely different story.

[Infinity.2876]

Yes diffinately open world needs something that supports can do on their own or with 2 or 3 other players.

[Khisanth.2948]

2 hours ago, blp.3489 said:

I think it would be nice if there were some minor events that were dedicated to players playing support builds, and helping them practice and improve.  For example, some sort of escort event where you had to support the NPC rather than DPS the mob.  Say the NPC has a special weapon or ability that lets them do massive damage to an enemy with a massive health pool, but the NPC is somewhat fragile, so the best way to play it is to act as a support to the NPC via healing and boons and such.  I've never played anything overtly support oriented because in the OW it usually seem to be better to just have more DPS and support abilities seem to only randomly be applicable.  Instanced content is of course an entirely different story.

This is an absolutely terrible idea. You have just described an event where you never want to see any other player show up because of target limits and priorities.

[Omega.6801]

I think you can dedicatedly support other players on whatever event you find in the open world. World Bosses and metas will make sure that there will be other players for you to support.

[kharmin.7683]

10 minutes ago, lokh.2695 said:

I think you can dedicatedly support other players on whatever event you find in the open world. World Bosses and metas will make sure that there will be other players for you to support.

Agreed.  I often run my druid during World Boss runs.  Sometimes water elemental, too.

[Sobx.1758]

^yup, basically this, you already have events where you can play support. It's just that you can support players instead of npcs.

[Khisanth.2948]

The problem with playing support in open world is that it is a gamble. Sometimes it works out but other times you would have been better off with a more selfish build and fight stuff directly.

[SlayerXX.7138]

3 hours ago, blp.3489 said:

I think it would be nice if there were some minor events that were dedicated to players playing support builds, and helping them practice and improve.

You sadly can never do that. Player would just afk farm.

 

34 minutes ago, lokh.2695 said:

I think you can dedicatedly support other players on whatever event you find in the open world. World Bosses and metas will make sure that there will be other players for you to support.

That is true, but also not really exciting. In the mass of player you never feel the impact of your contribution. Except massrezzing people in tarir after they died to the traitor.

 

You would need a solo instance with 4 reasonable strong NPC and no way to abuse it. With that you could gage what impact supporting has on a fight. Because right now you have to go hard on team content to even get a feel what impact boons have because the skill and gear of your teammates vary a lot.

Edited April 17, 2022 by Albi.7250

[blp.3489]

46 minutes ago, Albi.7250 said:

That is true, but also not really exciting. In the mass of player you never feel the impact of your contribution. Except massrezzing people in tarir after they died to the traitor.

This.  I tried being support oriented in the DE Meta and I have no idea if it was helpful or I just lowered group DPS by not concentrating on that.  I don't even know if anybody need the boons I was sharing or if everyone already had them and it was a waste.  Likewise for healing.  Maybe that's just because I don't know what I'm doing support wise, I'm not sure where to learn.

[blp.3489]

1 hour ago, Albi.7250 said:

You would need a solo instance with 4 reasonable strong NPC and no way to abuse it. With that you could gage what impact supporting has on a fight. Because right now you have to go hard on team content to even get a feel what impact boons have because the skill and gear of your teammates vary a lot.

If it has to be in an instance that's fine with me.  I don't know how many other players are but I'm very willing to do content with no loot if it helps improve my knowledge and skills. Perhaps a solo instance, like an optional branch in a story would be good.

People often mention that the game doesn't teach you things, and trying to learn support by playing in a mass of other players of unknown composition isn't easy.  With DPS you just need to solo a creature you are familiar with then compare to previous experiences with that creature.  Support seems much harder to isolate and judge.

[Sobx.1758]

10 minutes ago, blp.3489 said:

If it has to be in an instance that's fine with me.  I don't know how many other players are but I'm very willing to do content with no loot if it helps improve my knowledge and skills. Perhaps a solo instance, like an optional branch in a story would be good.

People often mention that the game doesn't teach you things, and trying to learn support by playing in a mass of other players of unknown composition isn't easy.  With DPS you just need to solo a creature you are familiar with then compare to previous experiences with that creature.  Support seems much harder to isolate and judge.

And what exactly do you think could help you learn support? When it's mostly just about providing certain boon coverage and in some cases providing sustain with barriers/heals?

[god fragment.5716]

Support builds are not designed for open world. Open world is designed so that any build will do, so you can play support builds in open world if you think it is the most fun. Role specific content would undermine this concept and as a bonus point: How would you design a DPS specific event that a dps player with 3k dps can complete, but a support player with 4k dps can't? (Because if support would get its own OW content, it would be unfair for dps to not get it as well.)

[SeTect.5918]

7 hours ago, blp.3489 said:

I think it would be nice if there were some minor events that were dedicated to players playing support builds, and helping them practice and improve.  For example, some sort of escort event where you had to support the NPC rather than DPS the mob.  Say the NPC has a special weapon or ability that lets them do massive damage to an enemy with a massive health pool, but the NPC is somewhat fragile, so the best way to play it is to act as a support to the NPC via healing and boons and such.  I've never played anything overtly support oriented because in the OW it usually seem to be better to just have more DPS and support abilities seem to only randomly be applicable.  Instanced content is of course an entirely different story.

As support you can complete events solo too. Because every build deals dmg. Even if some builds do it far lower. 

But not every build can support. 

 

Why would you create events where every pure dps is fully useless Because you currently have events where supports are slower?

"Make X useless Because currently Y is worse" is not a solution. 

Also agree with @Khisanth.2948and @lokh.2695.

You can already support others in events. 

 

Also I bet you have a dps build for Story and map completion or whatever. every support has a dps build but not every dps has a support build. So better dont exclude dps from events while supports can still participate in all events. 

For Story or map completion you also need a dps build or do you want to put a npc with giant dmg that u can support, just everywhere? 

If you have a support build but no dps build, its your own fault because you need that for 90% of the game unless you have a player permanently running next to u.

A dps build is probably the first thing you should do. Or not even pure dps, but any build with "okay" dps. 

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

We don't have pure support events.  However, there are events where support skills really come in handy.  In DRMs, for example, the ability to give the escort NPCs quickness or superspeed really shortens how long it takes to do those events.  Another example is the Vermignus event in Ember Bay, where buffing the golem makes the event go faster and healing it makes the event much harder to lose.  In a way, we do have stuff where buff builds can be used o deal with event mechanics.  It is just not that common, for a few reasons already listed in the thread.  

[Vayne.8563]

There are events where support can be useful.  But having an event just for support makes little sense, because if you make it so everyone is support, and everyone is healing, you'd have to scale healing in such a way that everyone was needed. It's different than scaling damage.

There are some escorts in the world where if the boss dies, you lose.  In Orr, the escort to temple of balthazar fails if people can't protect the 7 pact soldiers.  They wipe you have to do that whole leg of the event chain again. In Tangled Depths, you have to protect the tank which can be healed, in the Scar Lane event chain.  

These events do exist in the game, you can look for them. Then it's more like an actual fight. DPS guys dpsing guys down while you support and heal.

[blp.3489]

Thanks for the suggestions of events that already exist.  To be clear, I was never envisioning a major map meta event that DPS players would be upset about being excluded from, just some obscure escort event, like the ones that have been mentioned which I had not thought of.

I don't have a good feel for the magnitude of healing possible relative to typical DPS, for example whether it is practical to keep the 7 pact shoulders alive while dealing reduced damage to the attackers.  NPCs often don't deal any significant damage so I presume you have to get some DPS in or it would at best become a stalemate.

I have always played pretty "greedy" builds because I usually wander around alone and just join groups in an ad hoc fashion.  With the advent of the DE meta I realized that I don't know much at all about support and am not sure how one would learn about and maybe get proficient at it.  The way they are pushing Strike missions it seems like getting proficient at support might be one way into that content.

[Xerxez.7361]

15 hours ago, blp.3489 said:

This.  I tried being support oriented in the DE Meta and I have no idea if it was helpful or I just lowered group DPS by not concentrating on that.  I don't even know if anybody need the boons I was sharing or if everyone already had them and it was a waste.  Likewise for healing.  Maybe that's just because I don't know what I'm doing support wise, I'm not sure where to learn.

 

Fractals, EoD Strikes, & Raids are great places to learn how impactful supports actually are. If you have arcdps as well you can check the uptime on the Boons or the amount of Healing you're producing.

[IrishPotato.6327]

34 minutes ago, blp.3489 said:

 

I have always played pretty "greedy" builds because I usually wander around alone and just join groups in an ad hoc fashion.  With the advent of the DE meta I realized that I don't know much at all about support and am not sure how one would learn about and maybe get proficient at it.  The way they are pushing Strike missions it seems like getting proficient at support might be one way into that content.

 

What class do you play?

[blp.3489]

38 minutes ago, IrishPotato.6327 said:

 

What class do you play?

Right now I'm playing mostly Tempest and playing around with Mechanist, I played a lot of my WvW as a necromancer, and I started out as an Engineer and still have the most hours played as that.  I've got one character of each profession except warrior.  I have not got the Revenant, Ranger, or Mesmer to level 80.

[SlayerXX.7138]

1 hour ago, Xerxez.7361 said:

Fractals, EoD Strikes, & Raids are great places to learn how impactful supports actually are. If you have arcdps as well you can check the uptime on the Boons or the amount of Healing you're producing.

Only if you are healing, player skill varies way to much on these(besides maybe Raids) and you don't really notice if you are good at giving boons or teammates are good at playing.  Arcdps is a great 3rd party tool you have to manually update each patch.

 

Many players know boons are strong, but if you don't have a constant group to do the same content multiple times there is no way to get a feel for boons. Players could stop giving boons out for 30 seconds and observe how that changes the Strike encounter, but that doesn't seem to be a nice way to go about these things.

 

On a Side note: Training grounds could really need some Dps NPC for things like Boon sharing, One wolf pack, venom sharing etc..

 

Edited April 18, 2022 by Albi.7250

[Sobx.1758]

1 hour ago, blp.3489 said:

Thanks for the suggestions of events that already exist.  To be clear, I was never envisioning a major map meta event that DPS players would be upset about being excluded from, just some obscure escort event, like the ones that have been mentioned which I had not thought of.

I don't have a good feel for the magnitude of healing possible relative to typical DPS, for example whether it is practical to keep the 7 pact shoulders alive while dealing reduced damage to the attackers.  NPCs often don't deal any significant damage so I presume you have to get some DPS in or it would at best become a stalemate.

I have always played pretty "greedy" builds because I usually wander around alone and just join groups in an ad hoc fashion.  With the advent of the DE meta I realized that I don't know much at all about support and am not sure how one would learn about and maybe get proficient at it.  The way they are pushing Strike missions it seems like getting proficient at support might be one way into that content.

As I said before, in squads like this, you support people by providing certain boons and/or helping with the sustain. Players in those squads are usually divided into smaller groups/parties of 5. If your job there is to provide certain boon (like quick/alac/x might stacks), first check if you can provide it to 5 targets. Then check if you can keep it up on yourself. If you can, then you know it's enough to provide the boons to your subgroup.

If you want to check for sustain options, check if your heals/barriers can be applied to others. If they can, move to Aerodrome Waypoint -> training area. Get to the "Arena console", pick "adjust environment" -> "toggle arena damage" and pick one of the options. Get in the damaging arena and check if you can keep up. That's about it and it's probably a better way to check for it than having some random event.

[Xelqypla.6817]

2 hours ago, blp.3489 said:

With the advent of the DE meta I realized that I don't know much at all about support and am not sure how one would learn about and maybe get proficient at it. 

I run support Specter on world boss events.

I try to find a group a little away from the mass and keep my Boons up (which means their boons are up) while DPSing/avoiding mechanics. This allows me to get better/fine tune my build and no one is affected if I fail.

[Infinity.2876]

On 4/17/2022 at 5:14 PM, Albi.7250 said:

You sadly can never do that. Player would just afk farm.

 

Like he said You would have to make some npcs do an escort and make it so you can't damage enemies then make it so that the event loses if you don't help, like most events.

The problem being that specter auto attack support is really powerful as well as fire brand having all helpful boons for support but that's due to class balance and not something discussed in forum

 

I do agree tho afk farming is for Terraria.

Edited April 19, 2022 by Infinity.2876