Balancing of Support Specs (in WvW, feel free to add PvE perspectives)

[nthmetal.9652]

I think you should take a second look at the balancing of the support specs. From a WvW perspective I see quite some room for improvement, as there is only one true king of support at the moment, and that IMO is druid.

Looking at the stats gathered over a few weeks now, it seems Scrapper is nonexistant, Tempest and Druid do. With its Meta build (Daggers) Tempest provides:

• Boons:
  • might (it can easily reach top might output for squadgroup)
  • vigor
  • alacrity
  • regenration
  • and some minor protection
  • and some minor swiftness
  • theoretically you can use staff and provide stab, too, however at quite some cost in the cleanse department
  • and superspeed
• cleanses
• heals
• rez potential with glyph at the cost of losing cleanses
• auras (but while they are not strippable, they are also not as impactful)

Druid with its meta-build seems to provide:

• Boons:
  • might (not quite as much as tempest, but still relevant)
  • fury (!) (something tempest severely lacks, unless you want to give up your support healing role)
  • alacrity (on same level as tempest)
  • regeneration (on same level as tempest)
  • stability (not really in a major way, but in a pinch it can help - and druid doesn't have to sacrifice anything to do so)
  • Resistance (!)
  • some minor resolution
  • some minor swiftness - still more than tempest typically offers
• cleanses - when played well, more than tempest
• roughly twice the healing tempest offers without the need to sacrifice anything.
• rez potential while temporarily sacrificing cleanses - but unlike tempest no permanent sacrifice is necessary

Both tempest and druid seem to offer roughly similar amount of CC. Dagger tempest shines a bit more, when your group is not well coordinated, and your commander doesn't know how to call out his movement, but in most coordinated scenarior druid clearly wins thanks to double the output in healing, higher cleanse potential, and some important buffs like resolution and fury, that complement what it already does, that tempest doesn't get access to. Vigor on tempest-side is quite important, but doesn't make up for fury and resistance access IMHO.

Druid cleanses are a bit more burst-heavy, but since in battles, attacks typically also occur in bursts, that isn't a disatvantage. Yes, Tempest offers a bit more constant cleanse and heal compared to Druid, but that sadly in reality only means you have potential, when it's not needed. Ideally your group should probably have both Tempests and Druids, but Druid lies quite ahead. (YMMV, feel free to change my mind).

Scrapper doesn't exist at all in this meta at all at the moment, which might be the design goal for the moment. It doesn't mean that it's a good design.

But then again, looking at Druid and Tempest, and comparing it with the primary support role - Firebrand - it's still pretty good. Even after all this time, there is still no other primary support, that can replace Firebrand. It would be nice, if we could finally get some spec variance here and establish a second primary support role.

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

Reason Scrapper is not in the play right now is cause their skills got nuked into uselessness a while back and it doesn’t provide anything unique to the table. Similar story with Elementalist. Elementalist has pretty much always been bad and it was only a matter of time that when Druid got fixed, Elementalist would fall behind because it was never ahead.

[nthmetal.9652]

Quote

Elementalist has pretty much always been bad and it was only a matter of time that when Druid got fixed, Elementalist would fall behind because it was never ahead.

What brings you to that conclusion? I don't really share that impression. It does bring some things to the table, and I think it does it in a good way. Support Tempest offers Auras, which cannot be stripped, and with staff it offers access to stability and superspeed (in addition to the superspeed offered by its stunbreak).

When looking at the boons, I want to categorize them into "premium" boons, and  "standard" boons. And here lies the problem: Without the need to sacrifice anything in its build, Druid gets these "premium" boons:

• fury
• resistance
• alacrity
• (minor !) stability

plus, as I stated above, rez power without sacrifizing anything in its build. All this is while not sacrificing anything.

Ele gets the following "premium" boons:

• alacrity (and even for Alacrity you sacrifice significant healing ability! You only get either to give alacrity on overload, OR heal on aura)
• vigor (although I find vigor debatable as "premium" boon, it surely doesn't compare in impact to fury or resistance.

For meaningful amounts of additional "premium" boons, like stability and superspeed, you have to go to staff, which means you sacrifice quite some cleanse potential. Which is fine! IMO this is well designed, you wanna do more major stuff, you have to sacrifice something. Tradeoffs.

The reason Druid is so good isn't, that it's well designed, the reason is that it brings all that it brings as a package without the need for choices. And to add insult to injury, it typically tops a well-played tempest in cleanses and in healing.

And I am aware that scrapper got nuked, it's part of my criticism about the current state of balancing.

That's also one of the reasons I am staying on Ele support. I think it is rather well designed with tradeoffs to tweak what you want to be doing, so I don't expect any major nerfs. ... But while saying that, I am aware that Spellbreaker support got hit like 4,5,6 times in a row, reducing it's most useful tool "the bubble", to basically nothing. But if that happens I can also always still learn something else 😄

Edited August 9, 2023 by nthmetal.9652

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

4 hours ago, nthmetal.9652 said:

What brings you to that conclusion? I don't really share that impression. It does bring some things to the table, and I think it does it in a good way. Support Tempest offers Auras, which cannot be stripped, and with staff it offers access to stability and superspeed (in addition to the superspeed offered by its stunbreak).

It's hard to say where to start...so i'm not gonna really bother going into details. There's just way too much and it's way too convoluted of a story to dispense to any reasonable depth:

First I've mained Elementalist (in particular Staff Tempest) for about 4 or 5 years maybe longer...thousands upon thousands of hours playing, mastering, calculating the optimal strategy of this build in particular for WvW. 

1) Aura's suck.

2) You don't expect major nerfs, because Elementalist already got majorly nerfed about 2-3 years ago. The things it was good at and taken into zergs for was healing, rezzing, and cleansing and these were sliced in half. Elementalist can do this transmutation build business, which requires you to swap out of water which requires you to be not doing decent healing (a fraction in comparison to a druid)...not to mention the healing weapon on dagger is not a good healing weapon to begin with.

Understand this...a healer does not do damage, they heal damage dealers that do damage. If you want to classify a healer as being a healer that is 75% of the time not doing healing, but instead screwing around damage dealing on minstrel armor because that's how their build works, then you are mistaken. It's this difference that draws the line between healers that can solo-heal a group of 15+ versus an elementalist that provides nothing but being a rally bot to the enemy...lack of understanding these basic principles and why people specialize into a particular tasks.

3) So what you are essentially seeing or trying to compare is the following:

A Druid which is actually geared to clear conditions and fully focus on being a healer...

vs

A Dagger tempest, which is a defacto damage dealing psuedo-healing cheerleader.

And a comparison to a Heal Scrapper...did it ever do damage in it's rotation? nope...it just AFK's in Healing Kit spamming 1...because any deviation from doing so, meant it's not outputting healing keeping its damage dealers alive...so what it better be doing in that time, is something useful (cleansing conditions) which was it's duel function as a healer. When those two things were nerfed in half...that's it was finally out of the meta cause that's what it means to really be a healer (on top of the other nerfs to it's more unique attributes)

Anyway what I'm saying is...just think about it. You are in Ministrel Set, in damage attunements 75% of the time(that's dumb) because Anet designed Ele in such a way to not be a good healing character. That's not a Druid problem...that's an Elementalist problem.

 

[Cuks.8241]

The problem in wvw is that you idealy want to have the same support setup in every group because you want align your CDs. For example if you call super speed, you want everyone to have it. And it doesnt really help if g4 have its superspeed up earlier. 

So I think were kinda stuck in this 2 specific support meta (fb + x) unless they actually strip the second support of any uniqueness and just let them bring comparable healing, cleansing and minor boon uptime. And move the more impactful, special effects like superspeed, stealth (which they already did) to dmg or special roles. Or if they increase the target caps of some abilities so you might consider bringing 1 special support that covers the whole squad (like veil for example). For example druid would be your primary 2nd support but if you brought 1 or 2 tempest you could upkeep frost aura on whole squad. 

[nthmetal.9652]

Also, I totally forgot: Dagger Tempest have to do their support in the thick of battle, not at range. Going range means staff, which reduces cleanses significantly (but is still a solid choice). Druids offer their support at range either way, again no need to sacrifice anything. In terms of risk / reward this also isn't right from a design point of view.

[MLinni.6109]

Yeah no. You don't play druid at big range in WvW. Important powers to dole out alac and might and heal are PBAoE (Like CA4 and 5) and you cannot afford to stay off tag like say a weaver.

Dagger tempest is very close to the commander, druid isn't that far off. Staff tempest gets a bit more leeway if you play it on celestial.

Imo the big strength of tempest is that it does everything at once. Use one power, it damages, it CCs, it heals, it gives an aura and all related aura benefits. Druid cannot do that and is much more shoehorned into healing when played on support. In CA you barely have any damaging abilities and CA5 roots you or is interrupted if you move now.

[nthmetal.9652]

Well, that's the same thing for staff tempest, if you want to grant alacrity, and as this is such a powerful buff, I'd say it should be used over the additional healing (but again: you can choose on tempest, but you HAVE to choose. Either alac, OR more healing - and while druid does have a similar choice from what I understand, from the view of tempest it's the choice of more healing and even more more healing) - still you do have additional range on your staff powers and can place them where they are needed without needing to be there yourself. Same for druid. As dagger tempest you do not get that choice.

You can play Tempest celestial, but for the additional damage to actually matter, you'd have to alter the build in a way that undermines your mission of cleansing and healing so substantially, that it doesn't work anymore. You can theoretically go damage tempest, still grant auras and boons, but there's a reason (almost) no one does that. So this additional flexibility is maybe a theoretical idea, but not a practical one because without major trait adjustments it doesn't work. Bottom line: There's not really any choice for tempest either. You basically and realistically get to pick between:

- alac or more healing via the major grandmaster trait
- stability+range or more healing/cleanse via staff vs dagger.

If you really want to go damage, you are much better off going weaver or maybe even catalyst.

There's also a white mage build, which offers quite some more healing, but the cost in cleanse is so substantial, that I cannot really recommend going down that route - when the result is still just heals that linger around the same levels as druid, but in turn you lag far behind in cleanses. It is more relaxed to play IMO, though.

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

In a zerg, everything is stacked on tag. The only exception are meteor shower Elementalists because they have to cast a very long spell (5 seconds) and can’t actually be on the tag running around to do its damage. The pros will do interesting pre-casts and proper teleport to cast Meteor Shower deep into the Zergs to perform the spell at a safe location.

But every other build in the game is all stacked in tag. All healers, all damage dealers…there is no not being on tag and if you aren’t on tag it’s because you made a mistake and went the wrong direction.

Druid and Staff Heal tempest sit on tag like everybody else.

No healer is running around in celestial gear either, that is a roaming build. Every healer in this game runs minstrels and for good reason….it’s BIS on practically every zerg healing build (unfortunately).

its BIS because stacking both healing modifiers and higher healing power together is the most effective way to get the most healing. That’s why you get the trifecta: monk runes, bountiful maintenance oil and Ministrels. Having both concentration and healing power make maintenance oil a strong healing modifier (15 - 20% depending on the build) and monks being the only rune that gives 20% modifiers on all your spells.

on meta battle btw idk what the dude who runs that website is smoking but it’s listed there for druids to bring Sigil of life. Sigil of Life is not BIS for Druid…it’s Sigil of Benevolence (like every other healing build in this game). 

 

Edited August 12, 2023 by JusticeRetroHunter.7684

[MLinni.6109]

The difference is that life affects self healing there as benevolence does only affect outgoing healing. It is true that after a certain healing power it gives a higher output for allies.

Edited August 15, 2023 by MLinni.6109