The Designation of Quickness and Alacrity Supports

[ZephyrusSpring.5728]

7 hours ago, Dadnir.5038 said:

So you mean that support Harbinger lack boon output in shroud. I don't think I can agree or disagree with this. The gameplay of the necromancer require it to dance in and out of shroud and it's alright. Once Harbinger have vomited it's boons he only have shroud as an option anyway.

Now, to be clear, I'd love if the necromancer had more incentive to enter and leave shroud "faster". In fact it used to be an appaeling option in the vanilla game but that's something that the balance gradually left behind (There is remnant of this era in some trait: Spiteful spirit and Weakening shroud). Recently with the spear#4 skill, a glimpse of hope appeared for a resurgence of this gameplay, but at this point It's still better to take a wait and see stance.

First Scourge can get into shroud. While Scourge's F5 run it's course, Scourge is considered as if it's in shroud for all traits that ask the necromancer to be in shroud. Using F5 alos proc the trait related to entering/leaving shroud.

The second point is that it is dangerous to touch the Blood magic traitline. The amount of shared sustain and self sustain it provide is already right were it should be. More and it would be to much (and that's especially true for Harbinger which is already seen as an unkillable demigod in WvW).

The necromancer's core traitline are already all in a good place. Yes, ideally they could use some tweak here and there but objectively they are pretty good and, as such, they should be left alone. If something need to be reworked on Core necromancer: Minions and Death shroud should be the priority target.

Death shroud because no matter how many time they tweak bad thing, if they keep what make them bad they stay bad.

Minions because those utilities are simply to passive and the player is encouraged to use those passively. Objectively this need to change, I'd love to give boons to my party throught the sacrifice of a minion and I'd love it even more since I can slot 5 minion in my utility bar (That's potentially 5 different boons).

Alternatively, They can also rework lich form into a non-transformation skill that help necromancer support it's party. (Yes I hate this skill design and aesthetic and I'm just using this post to say the same thing I say about it since 2013).

That goes to show how much I know about Scourge.  I have tried to play all the necro specs but really could not get into Scourge at all.  Reaper I gave a proper college try with power, condi and WvW but ultimately wasn't a fan of getting knocked out of shroud.  Harbinger on the other hand is quite fun and I used it for a long time, but became disillusioned with it when I tried out a support build and brought it as a main healer through wing 3, and haven't really touched it since then.  That was my first proper exposure to necro's healing tools and man... you're like a bystander when you don't have a target to hit.  Sure you can spot heal with transfusion but that's only about 6k healing over 3 seconds.  It'd be like if Druid only had Rejuvenating Tides in astral form.  There's just not enough there to justify sitting in shroud, but Elixir of Anguish and Ambition can only give you a ~60% uptime on quickness so you have to twiddle your thumbs in shroud for the rest.

It's pretty much the exact same problem that Bladesworn suffers with.  In both cases, the design of the meta boon trait forces you to enter a mode that lacks a significant amount of support capability.  Though in Harbinger's case it is also lacking in boons outside of that mode.  Having to tie up 2 utilities to generate might leaves you with very few options on that last slot.  If one of the core trait lines or a weapon helped with might generation that could open up a slot for things like Well of Power or other elixirs.  I don't think reworking minions would do much good because the utility bar is already packed.  In the OP I said that a lot of the support capacity of Scourge comes from Scourge traits and you can see clearly that they have all the bases covered for boons and healing spread across the line.  That's the kind of thing Harbinger needs too unless they want to consolidate the stuff in Scourge into the core lines.

That's the conclusion I keep coming to.  Harbinger needs more support through traits.  Whether they're in the Harbinger line or in core is something worth discussing in a broader game balance sense.  I just think it would look stupid to have the Scourge and Harbinger lines both have might, healing and condi cleanse to prop up their support builds when those kinds of shared problems should get fixed in core lines.

[Kalthea.4326]

On 9/5/2024 at 11:23 PM, DeceiverX.8361 said:

Yeah.  Though short-form non-boon quickness as a unique effect like it used to be would still be a good implementation for the PvP modes for said burst patterns on some classes.

If everyone runs around with permaboons, then there's no actual point to said boons as it becomes the new baseline of stats and combat speed/cooldowns; and let's be frank: stuff like Quickness and Alacrity therefore just reduces combat clarity, especially in the PvP modes.

Reality though is ANet either just disagrees or doesn't care, and the PvE community collectively loses its mind if numbers ever go down and/or if the full swatch of an encounter's mechanics have to be interacted with rather than facetanking damage and skipping/burning half the phases.

I think a good chunk of it is the designers think themselves cool and innovative by "reinventing" the support role and responsibilities away from "healer" to everyone contributing to the mass of bonus stats everyone else gets... when all they've really done is just make everyone a bland buff caster where nobody can deeply specialize while retaining efficacy, because boons are so out of control they stat-check literally everything outside their concept, while offering limited to not interactivity of other mechanics.

Given how these complaints have been made since HoT, and how resistant ANet is to undoing bad ideas--especially in the PvP modes--I don't think we'll see this change ever made.

At least someone understands what I mean for once. The usual response to me is quite negative, cheers ❤️

[A wild AP Possi.5692]

15 hours ago, Mell.4873 said:

My take on the contradiction between the boons you apply for your elite vs the boons you want on your elite is that it works great. 

Druid for example would benifit alot more from Quickness so in a group setting you need to make sure you have someone always apply quickness for you like a Firebrand and then you help them by lowering there cooldown. 

This means you have loop that requires two player. If a class has the boon that is also required to produce more boons then it would defeat the purpose of being in a group.

Chronomancer had this issue early on. 

I hope I correctly understood your point and please correct me if I didn't. I agree that for some cases, there is a very unfortunate contradiction between the boon you want on your specialization and the boon you generate. My go-to example is Willbender and I have written a lengthy post over on the guardian forums about why I think WB should have Quickness (in short: 1. WB has many channeled skills which benefit from Quickness way more than from Alacrity and 2. Quickness plays greatly into the multihit mechanic that WB builds revolve around). I would even say that swapping Quickness and Alacrity on Firebrand and Willbender would be a great improvement gameplay-wise. Of course WB still benefits from Alacrity and in a group, you would still want that other boon support to provide Alacrity.
I am glad that we can cover both Quickness and Alacrity on each profession, yet I would love to see those boons being distributed with respect to how useful the boons are to the respective specialization and its playstyle.

[Mell.4873]

5 hours ago, A wild AP Possi.5692 said:

I hope I correctly understood your point and please correct me if I didn't. I agree that for some cases, there is a very unfortunate contradiction between the boon you want on your specialization and the boon you generate. My go-to example is Willbender and I have written a lengthy post over on the guardian forums about why I think WB should have Quickness (in short: 1. WB has many channeled skills which benefit from Quickness way more than from Alacrity and 2. Quickness plays greatly into the multihit mechanic that WB builds revolve around). I would even say that swapping Quickness and Alacrity on Firebrand and Willbender would be a great improvement gameplay-wise. Of course WB still benefits from Alacrity and in a group, you would still want that other boon support to provide Alacrity.
I am glad that we can cover both Quickness and Alacrity on each profession, yet I would love to see those boons being distributed with respect to how useful the boons are to the respective specialization and its playstyle.

I think you understand my point but what you described is a good thing. Swapping Firebrand and Willbenders boons around would defeat the purpose of even being in a group. 

Again if I go back to Chronomancer, the biggest problem that this class is it provides itself both boons which just allowed it generate more boons. This has been the main reason for it to be nerfed in the past. 

[ZephyrusSpring.5728]

19 hours ago, A wild AP Possi.5692 said:

I hope I correctly understood your point and please correct me if I didn't. I agree that for some cases, there is a very unfortunate contradiction between the boon you want on your specialization and the boon you generate. My go-to example is Willbender and I have written a lengthy post over on the guardian forums about why I think WB should have Quickness (in short: 1. WB has many channeled skills which benefit from Quickness way more than from Alacrity and 2. Quickness plays greatly into the multihit mechanic that WB builds revolve around). I would even say that swapping Quickness and Alacrity on Firebrand and Willbender would be a great improvement gameplay-wise. Of course WB still benefits from Alacrity and in a group, you would still want that other boon support to provide Alacrity.
I am glad that we can cover both Quickness and Alacrity on each profession, yet I would love to see those boons being distributed with respect to how useful the boons are to the respective specialization and its playstyle.

I remember writing about how Willbenders should have quickness but I guess it got lost when I revised that part.  Part of the purpose of this thread was to talk about whether the current meta boon providers are providing the appropriate boon for their class.  If Dragonhunter was given alacrity then there’d be no reason to necessarily remove quickness from Firebrand.

14 hours ago, Mell.4873 said:

I think you understand my point but what you described is a good thing. Swapping Firebrand and Willbenders boons around would defeat the purpose of even being in a group. 

Again if I go back to Chronomancer, the biggest problem that this class is it provides itself both boons which just allowed it generate more boons. This has been the main reason for it to be nerfed in the past. 

I can’t get behind that design on team reliance.  That design is particularly problematic for boondps who tune their boon duration based on alacrity.  I don’t think it adds anything meaningful to have this unmitigatable cascade if either boon starts slipping.  That cascade would already happen naturally, there’s no reason to design it in a way that makes it more severe.

[Mell.4873]

48 minutes ago, ZephyrusSpring.5728 said:

I can’t get behind that design on team reliance.  That design is particularly problematic for boondps who tune their boon duration based on alacrity.  I don’t think it adds anything meaningful to have this unmitigatable cascade if either boon starts slipping.  That cascade would already happen naturally, there’s no reason to design it in a way that makes it more severe.

What you want is for DPS to out preform any combination of boon + dps. Take Virtuoso and Chronomancer for example. It is possible to apply 100% boon uptime of Quickness and Alacrity with Chronomancer but it will not out dps a full DPS Virtuoso with no boons.

If what you want were to happen to Guardian it might be possible for a hybrid to out perform the real DPS. Right now very few boon DPS gain the boon they need to both produce more boon or dps. 

[ZephyrusSpring.5728]

3 hours ago, Mell.4873 said:

What you want is for DPS to out preform any combination of boon + dps. Take Virtuoso and Chronomancer for example. It is possible to apply 100% boon uptime of Quickness and Alacrity with Chronomancer but it will not out dps a full DPS Virtuoso with no boons.

If what you want were to happen to Guardian it might be possible for a hybrid to out perform the real DPS. Right now very few boon DPS gain the boon they need to both produce more boon or dps. 

Your response makes me think I’ve misinterpreted what you’ve said.  Was it not that “the metaboons should intentionally be assigned opposite of what naturally suits the class”?  I thought the point you were making was to encourage teamwork among metaboon providers or something along those lines.

Sounds great on the surface.  The old stat traits like spotter sounded great too.  When you dig right into it, what positive gameplay loop are you trying to encourage?  And what gameplay loop are you actually encouraging?  People already share metaboons because you can’t do both on one spec, so what additional facet of positive gameplay is there to glean from the meta boons being assigned oppositely?

If I’m totally on the wrong track then please lay it out clearly.  I’m struggling to follow your logical steps.

[A wild AP Possi.5692]

8 hours ago, ZephyrusSpring.5728 said:

I remember writing about how Willbenders should have quickness but I guess it got lost when I revised that part

Unfortunate! I'd be very interested in your opinion on the quickness/alacrity on firebrand/willbender topic. Care to briefly elaborate?

[ZephyrusSpring.5728]

6 hours ago, A wild AP Possi.5692 said:

Unfortunate! I'd be very interested in your opinion on the quickness/alacrity on firebrand/willbender topic. Care to briefly elaborate?

Everyone has a natural affinity for quickness and alacrity, but supports particularly align with alacrity to help them with boon generation and panic button availability.  It's important not to let this natural affinity for alacrity cloud your judgement when determining which boon suits a class better.  Druid naturally wants alacrity because it embodies a support so strongly, but due to the particular design of its metaboon trait it also wants quickness in order to generate more alacrity.  It wouldn't care as much about quickness if the trait worked in a different way.

Willbender is in a completely different league here.  It's not just some trait that makes them want quickness, but the core design of the virtues.  Getting as many hits out in the active window of a virtue is the entire goal, and so quickness is the perfect fit.  Because most boons stack in duration there isn't a major difference whether Willbenders can activate their virtues more often or squeeze more hits into their active window.  Getting alacrity from somebody else would still be a major upgrade for reasons above, but if the alacrity starts slipping it won't necessarily drag your quickness down with it which is currently a problem for alacrity Willbender.

Firebrand I don't know as much about.  I don't think alacrity affects the cooldown of tomes so it doesn't naturally align with alacrity as much as other supports.  That in itself is reason enough for it to provide quickness, but also getting through 3 additional weapon bars surely takes a while!

[A wild AP Possi.5692]

4 hours ago, ZephyrusSpring.5728 said:

Willbender is in a completely different league here.  It's not just some trait that makes them want quickness, but the core design of the virtues.  Getting as many hits out in the active window of a virtue is the entire goal, and so quickness is the perfect fit.  Because most boons stack in duration there isn't a major difference whether Willbenders can activate their virtues more often or squeeze more hits into their active window.  Getting alacrity from somebody else would still be a major upgrade for reasons above, but if the alacrity starts slipping it won't necessarily drag your quickness down with it which is currently a problem for alacrity Willbender.

Thank you for the elaboration! I 100% agree on the Willbender part. In my opinion, what plays into this conundrum even further is that power alac WB uses many channeled skills (e.g. Whirling Wrath, Zealot's Defense, Whirling Light, Flash Combo) and even heal alac WB on hammer is close to unplayable without quickness due to the majority of multihits and healing comming from the auto-attack chain and its baked-in protection symbol.

On the Firebrand topic: Yes, quickness is useful to chain your skills which you have a lot of due to your tomes. However, many utility skills for both hFB and cFB are instant-cast skills (all of your mantras and shouts except "Feel my Wrath!") which do not gain ANY benefit from having quickness. Given that shouts and mantras are the major boon providers for boon support FB builds, alacrity would be way more useful to keep up itself and other boons. 

And going back to the tome skills, wouldn't you say that you would have your tome skills available more frequently with alacrity rather than having an increased casting speed with quickness? Keep in mind that all of the tome skills are non-channeled skills. To specify that point: Once you cast your tome skills such as Scorched Aftermath (AoE burn field), Êternal Oasis (33% healing increase to others for 8s) or Valiant Bulwark (reflect bubble), there is no gain from quickness once they are cast. I'd say I would rather have their damage and utility available more frequently rather have the miniscule cast time decreased. 
Alacrity does not affect the tome's dormant timer (the time it takes to have its passive available after tome usage) as far as I know but I feel like that point really struggles to outweigh the issue I described above, even considering you can keep one of your tomes' passives permanent with either of the FB's grandmaster traits.

[draxynnic.3719]

I think part of the reason for willbender being given alacrity (keeping in mind that it was originally given alacrity for its own use, realising that it makes sense for a certain combination of traits to give group alacrity came later) is that willbender has a degree to which it wants to always have at least one of its virtues active - in order to maintain Lethal Tempo if nothing else. When playing solo or in competitive, alacrity helps with that. It also enhances willbender's characteristic mobility, since the alacrity speeds up the recharge of virtues and any other mobility skills they have (and they probably will have them). If the alacrity was replaced with quickness, than in situations where you're not using Battle Presence to spread it to allies than it simply becomes a "do more damage" feature, while the effect of alacrity is more interesting.

Another consideration would be that willbender being able to generate its own quickness would make it burstier in competitive modes, while alacrity might reduce the time between bursts but doesn't make each individual burst attempt faster.

So it's possible that while one could argue that for the boondps or healdps builds specifically quickness would work better, those builds existing at all is something of a happy accident. For willbender as a whole, alacrity was probably the right choice.

[A wild AP Possi.5692]

1 hour ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

I think part of the reason for willbender being given alacrity (keeping in mind that it was originally given alacrity for its own use, realising that it makes sense for a certain combination of traits to give group alacrity came later) is that willbender has a degree to which it wants to always have at least one of its virtues active - in order to maintain Lethal Tempo if nothing else. When playing solo or in competitive, alacrity helps with that. It also enhances willbender's characteristic mobility, since the alacrity speeds up the recharge of virtues and any other mobility skills they have (and they probably will have them). If the alacrity was replaced with quickness, than in situations where you're not using Battle Presence to spread it to allies than it simply becomes a "do more damage" feature, while the effect of alacrity is more interesting.

Those are all reasonable points and I'm glad you bring them up. Alacrity is of course great to enter your virtue stances more frequently while I'd argue that quickness allows you to utilize these stances more effectively because it helps with mutlihitting. I'd still argue that hitting fast is also a very willbendery characteristic and quickness plays into that greatly. 

The PvP topic is also a good one to adress and I am not entirely sure what opinion to have on that one. Sure, quickness allows for stronger bursts, which may be a balancing concern. However, I'd say the counterplay potential is higher in a scenario where your bursts are less frequent (but stronger)  because you allow your enemy to ready their defensive CDs and dodges as well. Additionally, lack of alacrity translates into less frequent usage of your own utility skills. 

At this point, I will not come up with a definitive and objective conclusion to whether it should be quickness or alacrity because I believe there are very reasonable pros and cons to both, which we elaborated on previously. I am mainly a PvE player and my subjective opinion is that Willbender without quickness feels rather slow and clunky in an open world that tends to be rather fast-paced. But that's just my impression.

Cheers!

[ZephyrusSpring.5728]

6 hours ago, A wild AP Possi.5692 said:

On the Firebrand topic: Yes, quickness is useful to chain your skills which you have a lot of due to your tomes. However, many utility skills for both hFB and cFB are instant-cast skills (all of your mantras and shouts except "Feel my Wrath!") which do not gain ANY benefit from having quickness. Given that shouts and mantras are the major boon providers for boon support FB builds, alacrity would be way more useful to keep up itself and other boons. 

And going back to the tome skills, wouldn't you say that you would have your tome skills available more frequently with alacrity rather than having an increased casting speed with quickness? Keep in mind that all of the tome skills are non-channeled skills. To specify that point: Once you cast your tome skills such as Scorched Aftermath (AoE burn field), Êternal Oasis (33% healing increase to others for 8s) or Valiant Bulwark (reflect bubble), there is no gain from quickness once they are cast. I'd say I would rather have their damage and utility available more frequently rather have the miniscule cast time decreased. 
Alacrity does not affect the tome's dormant timer (the time it takes to have its passive available after tome usage) as far as I know but I feel like that point really struggles to outweigh the issue I described above, even considering you can keep one of your tomes' passives permanent with either of the FB's grandmaster traits.

Naturally supports want their skills up more often so they can more readily cover active defences like aegis and stability.  Due to this, it’s easy to think that every support should be the alacrity provider.  However, somebody has to cover quickness and so we need to look for any reason to assign it instead of alacrity.  Now obviously we’re discussing putting quickness on willbender so there’s certainly some leeway with putting alacrity on firebrand.

I don’t play firebrand so there’s a few things I’m ignorant about.  From what I understand, tomes and pages operate as a separate system which doesn’t interact with alacrity, similar to thief’s initiative.  Skills in the tomes have a cooldown as well as a page cost, so I’m curious to know how much those pages limit your capacity to use tome skills.  You certainly make a good point that they use a lot of instant cast skills though.

I honestly do not feel strongly about it either way.  I figured it was worth putting up some resistance to you to coax the idea out a bit more.

[Barraind.7324]

On 9/5/2024 at 4:48 AM, Dadnir.5038 said:

this inconspiscious character is the straw that broke the mentality of only pushing toward dps. A truly breathtaking transformation of the meta, in the mind of the players, the healer was no longer needed only for it's boons but also for healing. It took 8 years for players to consider the "healing" part of what we knew as "healer" as something potentially important in PvE.

This is just skipping over the fact that Druid existed and was more than capable of handling all the healing needs for an entire raid. 

Its easy to overlook what "healing" is provided by your healer when its already being mindlessly provided by a spec that also brings spotter, one of the most important build-arounds for a few years, that saw power builds carrying a "spotter" and "not spotter" set of gear. 

[Tinker.6924]

I feel like every class should have at least 1 dps support spec and 1 healing support spec but to want that from nearly every elite spec is just ridiculous

[ZephyrusSpring.5728]

Perhaps it would be constructive to go through the list of pure dps specs and analyse how well they've filled out their design space for the purpose of providing flavour to their pure dps role.  That can include selfish defensive tools for the purposes of PvP.  I'm looking carefully at the different ways each spec can be played and how well they mesh with the core tools (which is usually where a lot of support capacity comes from).

Spellbreaker has been discussed a lot in this thread.  I think it is fairly plain to see that the utilities leave a lot to be desired, and the trait line doesn't give you a lot to work with.  In PvE there's really only one Spellbreaker build because the class is way to reliant on cc through Attacker's Insight.  If Body Blow was ever buffed to be any good we might see a condi or hybrid Spellbreaker come into its own.  In PvP it is the source of constant headaches and, depending on who you ask, is the reason a lot of core warrior tools continue to be nerfed.  Honestly I don't think the current rendition of Spellbreaker has achieved the vision of what a boon-controlling anti-mage could be in this game.  As for how well it provides flavour and options in a pure dps role: yeah nah there's not much there.  When you play Spellbreaker you play the Spellbreaker build.

Dragonhunter is in a similar camp.  The utilities are more generically useful but they're pretty bog standard as far as trap design goes, with Fragments of Faith being the only one that isn't some version of "surprise your foe with damage or cc".  The trait line is pretty lackluster as well with the grandmaster traits doing most of the heavy lifting in regards to, well, doing anything.  This line was obviously designed in a time when core guardian was very strong.  The reliance on blocking attacks really limits the effectiveness of some of these traits, particularly the way Defender's Dogma is designed really kills the possibility of any condi builds in PvE.  From what I can find it seems like traps used to have bleeding on them, but not any more.  If anything the design space of this spec has shrunk since release.  There's no capacity for Ares cosplay to be found here.

Vindicator already has a large portion of its design space used for support capacity.  The spec has literally been designed as a 2-in-1 to offer strong damage options through Archemorus and support allies with Saint Viktor.  It has been purposefully designed as a support from the outset but fails to fit into the established meta.  Combining damage with evasion allows the spec to fill a more defensive role naturally without needing a suite of "do X when you block" traits that many other specs have.  This spec does seem to have a strong conflict between healing and boon generation though, with this conflict present at both the adept and grandmaster trait tiers.  This excess of support traits heavily limits the spec's capacity for condition builds which is a shame because the utility skills offer some potential for it.  Vindicator came pretty close to being the perfect example of a spec that can do anything, and I still have hope that it could one day reach that potential.

Soulbeast is another spec with a lot of design space purposefully used for support.  The way it extends from core ranger makes it an even stronger candidate than Vindicator for achieving what I would call design perfection.  This spec already has strong power and condition builds in PvE, and has been an ever-present menace in PvP.  All of the utilities are very strong, with their capacity for selfish defence being extendable to the rest of the team through Leader of the Pack.  Strangely, even with a lot of design space consumed by support the trait line still finds room for selfish traits like Second Skin.  Soulbeast easily fills multiple pure dps roles with room to spare, with many even calling for nerfs to its PvE power build and PvP builds for different reasons.  I really can't stress enough how well that demonstrates a broad usage of the design space.  I would argue there is still room for more by making better use of Live Fast and Essence of Speed to generate quickness for the team.  Along with a reshuffle of the traits to bring the minor passives in conflict with the previous two traits I strongly believe Soulbeast would make for a great support spec.

Holosmith has explored its design space fairly well with a lot of different options and styles on offer.  The spec supports melee and ranged playstyles with strong options for power and condition builds.  There's no shortage of defensive tools and the ECSU and PBM traits really expand on the spec's core skeleton in a way many other specs do not.  Interestingly, the devs have made special consideration to diminish the spec's support capacity with a restriction on Hard Light Arena.  Though the trait line appears rather full with strong options, I think there is still room for an interesting support build through a combination of Light Density Amplifier, Heat Therapy and either Thermal Release Valve or Photonic Blasting Module to provide support to your team while losing heat.

Daredevil is not a class I have a lot of experience with, I want to reiterate that.  Their utility skills offer a diverse variety of effects for dealing damage or defending themselves, with a couple clearly being designed for competitive modes.  The trait line does not appear to share the same level of diversity as the utilities though.  The master tier in particular is quite poorly designed and could easily be replaced with entirely new traits.  @Vidit.7108 Your input would be appreciated on how well the current iteration of Daredevil brings the vision of an acrobatic rogue to life.

Weaver extends core elementalist by adding a boat-load of new skills which combine the design spaces designated to each element into single skills.  The design of each element isn't one-note though, so this spec is one of the strongest examples of how adding support capacity comes at the cost of other things.  For example, water is designed as a healing element but also encompasses ice which is designed as a strike damage plus vulnerability type element.  When designing each combined skill where should you use water and where should you use ice?  The spec therefore offers a massive variety of combinations through each weapon to cover different playstyles and strengths.  The utility skills are nothing special, with Weave Self somewhat forcing a particular playstyle in the absence of better elite utilities.  The trait line is also not particularly inspired, with most traits following the simple "gain stats or boons when X" formula.  I would have liked to see traits interact with the dual element system a bit more, such as one that causes your active elements to flip when using a dual skill e.g. fire/air flips into air/fire.

The good news is there is a reasonable limit on how much healing you need to bring and that is covered fairly well in core elementalist for the sake of Tempest, and so Weaver's dual skills don't need to bring a whole lot of support.  Aside from the upcoming nerf to Elemental Refreshment, Weaver already offers fairly good team support and would work if it had a boon to share.

Reaper is a very selfish spec not only in the way that it supports only itself but also that it has been designed to fight multiple targets by itself.  The nature of reaper's shroud forces you into a melee playstyle which also suits the utility skills being shouts.  The trait line offers some interesting synergy with chill but the master tier traits are very similar and the upcoming buff to Soul Eater is likely to send the other two into the trash compactor.  This spec shows that support for a condition build doesn't always have to come in the form of a direct condition damage buff.  This spec has largely used its full design space to good effect, I don't think there's enough room to adequately fit a support build unless something dramatically changed with core necro.

Virtuoso has already been discussed extensively in this thread.  The utility skills are in a bit of a limbo like Spellbreaker's, being overshadowed by core utilities for the most part.  The spec uses the majority of its trait line to offer support for condition and power builds, as well as more defensive tools for competitive modes.  I believe there is still room to replace, combine and move a few traits to adequately fit a meta boon in a way that is balanced with the rest of the game's meta design.  Virtuoso is an example of how the pure dps design can take up the space that could otherwise be used for support.  In another world line this could have been the bard spec instead of the psionic dagger spec.  Give that a bit of thought.

So in Summary, three specs (Holo, Reaper and Virt) have reasonably filled out their design space enough that it would be difficult to add anything new.  Three specs (Spellbreaker, DH and Daredevil) are rather lacking in their overall design and could easily fit more without much fuss.  And three specs (Vindicator, Soulbeast and Weaver) already have dedicated enough of their design space to support and simply don't fit into the existing party meta for various reasons, the primary one being that they don't have a meta boon.