I think making a support class is a recipe for disater.

[Glorious Leader]

The problem will be if its worthwhile to take one over a 3rd dps then you've just lost a spot for that dps, have granted augvokers a permanent spot (bring the class) and have just made it harder for dps to find a group. It they're that good they become mandatory because people can't control themselves in this game.

[Narzok]

i think the far more interesting part are the API changes to count the extra dmg as the augmenter's dmg.

will the same apply to other party buffs?
and how will the API handle multiple of the same specc when you only need one?
let's say you have 2 DHs in your group. who gets the credit for the 5% magic damage?
only the one who first applies it? would be kinda toxic and promote pulling early to make sure it is your debuff that counts.

there is a high chance that a lot will change in terms of perception once stuff like BL and PI are no longer counted as the target's dmg, but rather the giver's dmg.

[Nymrohd]

The problem will be around balancing. It will be far too strong in groups with communication. And really struggle [on average] without. And that will be impossible to balance unless its heavily piloted on telling players when to use abilities to maximise enhancing others DPS/Healing.

Indeed with the current design and given that Ebon Might can be controlled via proximity, it should be possible to have your Evoker just move between different groups so that Ebon Might is on the group using CDs. So at pull and then on the 3/6/9min markers you should have the 3min CD people in a separate clump so the evoker can move there to buff them; similarly with people who have 2m and 1 m CDs. Which is probably very complex for most people to pull off, but when you can pull it off, it will be extremely rewarding. Meanwhile on your average raid group the performance will just be vastly lower.

[arkanon]

I could be WAY off base here, but part of me thinks this could be blizzard testing the waters. In particular, moving the game away from it's "hardcore" style and more I to a casual friendly style. Yes, before you say it, I'm well aware wow WAS the casual mmo, but it's nothing like that now.

It's a strange thing to add this late in the games development though, unless there are strong intention, no doubt about that. Yes, they had "support" specs in the early days with hybrids, pally and shammy are the most obvious ones, but druids to an extent as well.

What I find interesting is it wasn't that long ago they removed all the "buff player with..." Stuff specifically because it caused such drama. Drama with who would get it, who the theory crafting recommended etc.

Personally, I don't see this going well UNLESS this is phase one of a much bigger plan to move away from the hardcore scene and focus on something closer to GW2 or ESO. Time will tell I guess

[trimble]

I could be WAY off base here, but part of me thinks this could be blizzard testing the waters. In particular, moving the game away from it's "hardcore" style and more I to a casual friendly style. Yes, before you say it, I'm well aware wow WAS the casual mmo, but it's nothing like that now.

It's a strange thing to add this late in the games development though, unless there are strong intention, no doubt about that. Yes, they had "support" specs in the early days with hybrids, pally and shammy are the most obvious ones, but druids to an extent as well.

What I find interesting is it wasn't that long ago they removed all the "buff player with..." Stuff specifically because it caused such drama. Drama with who would get it, who the theory crafting recommended etc.

Personally, I don't see this going well UNLESS this is phase one of a much bigger plan to move away from the hardcore scene and focus on something closer to GW2 or ESO. Time will tell I guess

I don't really think you can effectly course shift after a decade... WoW has its built in audience and everytime they tried to expand it(first case was wrath that I can recall) it has blown up in their faces.

I don't get why the idea for companies is always try to bend an existing IP to gain a audience it could never have rather then make something new for that audience.

[Cynical Asshole]

Not sure why people from the PTR say Augmentors do low dps. Trust me, NO ONE will play a dps spec that is designed to do trash dps, however useful it might be to the group with buffs or other ways.

People want to see themselves melting that dps meter, not do the lowest damage in the group but find comfort in the fact that everyone else does a lot more dps because of their buffs.

If it's true that Augmentors do low damage, the spec is DOA, no one will be playing it outside some casuals that don't do shit and don't care about shit in the game, and some guilds who will have a couple of those for raids.

It's like Blizzard has no notion whatsoever of human psychology. It's amazing, really.

[Dancaris]

Only thing that makes me happy about support Earth-magic Dracthyrs - we can still have Erath shaman tank. And that is all I care about support specs. If they will be good - we can see 1-2 support roles in raids or m+. We can even have Disk priests be support too, they are SO close to that. And we can have Holy damage dealers, hooray.
If that experiment fails - either Evokers sits at Devastation and not picking Aug, or they remake to fully damage dealer spec. Or tank spec (nope, we must make my Tauren shaman be able to tank things with Sulfuras. I double dare you not erase my dream about tank shaman)

[Gaidax]

Eh, Blizz will cross that bridge when it comes to it.

I also think that probably they shouldn't try to reimagine the game holy trinity core after 20 years, but I am willing to let them try. At worst it will be shit and there will be changes - they sort of did it in TBC and it was meh, so they dropped the idea there and we somehow survived that too.

[arkanon]

I don't really think you can effectly course shift after a decade... WoW has its built in audience and everytime they tried to expand it(first case was wrath that I can recall) it has blown up in their faces.

I don't get why the idea for companies is always try to bend an existing IP to gain a audience it could never have rather then make something new for that audience.

Blown up in their faces? You know wows subs peaked in wrath, yes?

[Al Gorefiend]

The proper support class should do half the DPS of a regular DPS, but the support buffs she brings buff the DPS to a level they compensate for a missing one. The support is also buffing the tank and healer on top of it.

Honestly Discipline should become the next Support spec. Having a class with 2 healers always felt redundant. Imagine what Disc does now, maybe with less healing and more powerful utility like a Power Infusion with 3 charges, a battle res, PW: Shield reflecting 100% of damage. They already feel like they are heading in that direction as they currently the gimpiest healers every expansion.

Off the top of my head, I can think of lots of things a Support spec Priest can bring over healing.

[Soon-TM]

I don't see this going well UNLESS this is phase one of a much bigger plan to move away from the hardcore scene and focus on something closer to GW2 or ESO. Time will tell I guess

I was thinking along the same lines. As long as PvE design remains focused on the "competitive" scene, with raid bosses (and even some dungeon ones too) requiring perfect choreography and timings, optimal class composition, where a 1% dps/hps delta may mean the difference between a dead boss and a wipe, etc... Even a slight delta in performance will make Aug Evokers either mandatory or useless.

I mean, I do appreciate the "outside the box" thinking behind the concept of this new spec, it's something I really want to see - in principle. However, given Blizz's records, it's going to be a pain in the rear to balance, and I wouldn't be surprised if Aug was turned into a regular DPS spec come 11.0, similarly (broadly speaking) to what happened to DKs after Wrath.

[arkanon]

I was thinking along the same lines. As long as PvE design remains focused on the "competitive" scene, with raid bosses (and even some dungeon ones too) requiring perfect choreography and timings, optimal class composition, where a 1% dps/hps delta may mean the difference between a dead boss and a wipe, etc... Even a slight delta in performance will make Aug Evokers either mandatory or useless.

I mean, I do appreciate the "outside the box" thinking behind the concept of this new spec, it's something I really want to see - in principle. However, given Blizz's records, it's going to be a pain in the rear to balance, and I wouldn't be surprised if Aug was turned into a regular DPS spec come 11.0, similarly (broadly speaking) to what happened to DKs after Wrath.

Yeah, i could see that happening - like i said i just get the feeling they are testing the water here - see what the reception is, then decide what to do moving forward. As such, i expect the same as you - mandatory, or completely ignored.

[trimble]

Blown up in their faces? You know wows subs peaked in wrath, yes?

They added china and south america to the sub pool... why does everyone overlook that when simping for wrath?

[Biomega]

They added china and south america to the sub pool... why does everyone overlook that when simping for wrath?

Honestly, that's probably low on the list of problems when people bring up WotLK statistics. The points people try to make with those numbers are usually way more fucked up than just because of China/SA. The whole "Wrath had the most subs therefore that was when the game was best" meme crumbles to dust even without that particular bias.

[Relapses]

It's like Blizzard saw how the community reacted to PI and thought to themselves, "what if we made PI into a class?" And well, that's what we have. From what I've seen on the PTR it looks like it's still mostly a damage dealer so the support part of the kit seems to be relatively downplayed -- if it stays mostly a DPS spec then I don't think many people will care much, it'll just be like getting another PI. But if they really lean into the support aspect of the kit and just give it every fucking tool in the toolkit then I can see it easily becoming overrepresented in something like M+. I'm hoping they don't do this, but time will tell. As it stands it seems the best case scenario is seeing how many players are going to willfully give themselves a handicap to buff their friends.

[trimble]

It's like Blizzard saw how the community reacted to PI and thought to themselves, "what if we made PI into a class?" And well, that's what we have. From what I've seen on the PTR it looks like it's still mostly a damage dealer so the support part of the kit seems to be relatively downplayed -- if it stays mostly a DPS spec then I don't think many people will care much, it'll just be like getting another PI. But if they really lean into the support aspect of the kit and just give it every fucking tool in the toolkit then I can see it easily becoming overrepresented in something like M+. I'm hoping they don't do this, but time will tell. As it stands it seems the best case scenario is seeing how many players are going to willfully give themselves a handicap to buff their friends.

It seems pretty clear its support... numbers are early but its dmg is so low in groups that it would be between a disc and tank for output.

It gets buffs solo for world gameplay so you cant look at a target dummy unless you are in a party

[kenn9530]

The spec will be utter crap to play anywhere outside instanced group content and that's not a good thing for a new spec. People play tanks in world content a lot because they have exceptional defense and tank AoE tends to scale decently. Augmentation is definitely tankier than Devastation but that's where it ends.

You dont play healer specs out in the open world solo either unless you want to spebd 4 times as long killing when the dps spec even played badly kills stuff faster so you dont have a point at all, takes 2 secs to respec into something useful for whatever you want to do solo why would you play in a role that will be bad for what you are doing.

- - - Updated - - -

Not sure why people from the PTR say Augmentors do low dps. Trust me, NO ONE will play a dps spec that is designed to do trash dps, however useful it might be to the group with buffs or other ways.

People want to see themselves melting that dps meter, not do the lowest damage in the group but find comfort in the fact that everyone else does a lot more dps because of their buffs.

If it's true that Augmentors do low damage, the spec is DOA, no one will be playing it outside some casuals that don't do shit and don't care about shit in the game, and some guilds who will have a couple of those for raids.

It's like Blizzard has no notion whatsoever of human psychology. It's amazing, really.

Not everyone cares about topping the meters but the dps that augmentation adds to other players is the augmentations extra dps, if the spec does 50k on its own but adds an overall 100k dps then the augmentation evoker is the one doing 150k dps and the logs should reflect this, thats how performance and logs work, its not just about looking at a dps meter and being at the top.

[Relapses]

It seems pretty clear its support... numbers are early but its dmg is so low in groups that it would be between a disc and tank for output.

It gets buffs solo for world gameplay so you cant look at a target dummy unless you are in a party

Ah, gotcha. I wasn't sure where they were aiming in terms of damage. I feel like 80% of a regular DPS would be fine -- some tanks are already there.

[arkanon]

Ah, gotcha. I wasn't sure where they were aiming in terms of damage. I feel like 80% of a regular DPS would be fine -- some tanks are already there.

Not trying to derail but that's still something I can't get my head around - healers and tanks doing more than competitive damage. It just doesn't click with me personally.

[TbouncerT]

Disc priests have been half healer half dps for a LONG time, and yet we havent seen that removed or added to other classes.

So annoying they are adding another 'role' to the game. It should have been another healer and fit the spot where Disc is. It just seems like they're working on phasing out healers and making it Tanks and Support. Not to mention they are adding it to a class that can only be 1 race, and meanwhile they're making most if not all of the other classes have no race boundaries anymore.

With how the OW team is handling OW1/OW2, makes me worried about the WoW team kind of going the same route. Not sure about the Dabs team yet and I opted to not touch D4 until launch. I know they are separate teams, but that doesn't stop stuff from bleeding over to other teams. Just have to wait and see, we're all along for the ride.

Heck, Preservation is basically a way better Disc. DPSing most of the time with the occasional not direct healing spells. They can just heal and DPS lightyears better than Disc ever has, sadly.

At this point, they might as well rework Disc to fit this new 'role' type. Also wouldn't be surprised if they tried to add this to DH as their 3rd spec.

- - - Updated - - -

You dont play healer specs out in the open world solo either unless you want to spebd 4 times as long killing when the dps spec even played badly kills stuff faster so you dont have a point at all, takes 2 secs to respec into something useful for whatever you want to do solo why would you play in a role that will be bad for what you are doing.

- - - Updated - - -



Not everyone cares about topping the meters but the dps that augmentation adds to other players is the augmentations extra dps, if the spec does 50k on its own but adds an overall 100k dps then the augmentation evoker is the one doing 150k dps and the logs should reflect this, thats how performance and logs work, its not just about looking at a dps meter and being at the top.

As the person you're responding to proves, that is all that matters to those types of people. Most of them are like if you're not 1st you're last (silly but mostly true). If you cant top the meters then what's the point, right? Also, meters do NOT tell the whole story either.