There is an imbalance in the playerbase between DPS and support which ideally should be 3:1 in this game (other games have other party sizes or gameplay mechanics like life/hit).
We need to incentivize supports to be played more. I’m working on my bard (1511 at the moment) to get to 1520 but my 3x 1520+ DPS will likely not get to play G5-6 Brel for weeks if not months due to the shortage.
I’m a brand new player…3 months or so, and leveled a Bard to 1470 right now, plus getting ults going for income. It is seriously the gold wall that is stopping me. I enjoy the raids, I absolutely cannot get a decent rng item drop to get the money to go to Brel.
There needs to be more incentive for veterans to join the matchmaking queue without looking for other parties in party finder. Procyons Protection for X amount of number of cleared attempts then is gone isnt enough.
People already warned AGS about this like a year ago but noooooo, let’s released dozen of DPS characters instead including Sorc which is one of the newest class. Now I doubt that anyone actually have the resource to push a new character to Brez.
I don’t think you can incentivise enough players to push supports high enough to meet the hardest current raids demand if they keep it as 1 support to 3 dps ratio.
The simplest fix is to just allow a supports defensive buffs to affect all 8 players if there is only 1 support in a group. This will have no effect on raid dps (b/c the supports damage buffs only affect their 4 person group still) so no balance will need to be done there. Plus players can still choose to form 2 support 6 dps parties which function like they do now (defensive buffs only effect each supports 4 player party) so people that prefer this group setup are unaffected.
This is also a good change as it means if there are too many support at some ilvl or some night people can still form groups quickly (2sup 6dps) and if there are too few supports at another ilvl or night groups also form quickly (1sup 7dps).
It should be high on SGs priority list too because they are losing huge amounts of money when thousands of players quit playing the game they otherwise would not have quit after waiting in lobbies for hours and having a very bad experience. The specific reason they quit is solely because the strict 1 to 3 support to dps balance which leads to a shortage of supports. Sure it seems good on paper as a game dev to have groups of 4 (where one is a support) but in practice this 1 to 3 balance is not working and it is more like 1 to 6 or 7 and the game should be changed to reflect that balance.
It just seems so simple that this is the best solution.
same boat…just about stopped trying
So damn true…
I have a bard at 1505 that is sorta my Main ( i dont really have a clear cut main since i like to play different classes at somewhat high lvls instead of one being super juiced). Main problem for me to hone more on it is that its unappealing. As a dps i can see my numbers steadily rising. Be it dmg or health/ defenses. Every upgrade ist welcome. As a support i feel no difference. Honing the weapon ups the potency of my buffs, but i see nothing of that. Honing my armor makes me more tanky which i dont care about since i dont die by dmg anyways. Health increases the potency of my shields. Again i feel none of that.
Playing a 1500 support feels just like a 1445 support.
Dude even my party waited for my support to get THIS WEEK to 1520. So what do u expect find a support in random party?
i mean at this point just say you want them to allow any support player to join the lobby without needing the ilvl or just allow the game to know if you on support to let you get the gear for free why even bother with honning ? just get into the raid for free don’t grind like other people noooo just get a free ticket to join any group any raid without putting an effort
Just make a blue crystalline aura that can be bought with real money only and gives a perma.blessed aura heal in raids.
Ez.
You do realize we got til April for Brel Hard right ? And then probably about the same amount of time for Illkkan. Dw you get to the next imaginary ilevel feeling soon enough
Don’t worry guys I’m working on a Bard.
Just got one earring qual 45ish for 50k gold yesterday, I’ll be there soon 
Well if we’re comparing Tera or other games, we should also take into consideration the time to get to 60-70 depending on the patch.You could powerlevel to 60 in the same times it takes you to progress to vern. Allowing access to dungeons ( raid equivalent ) to start your gear progression. Plus, the rates werent that bad. Even at HO. Lost ark kicks you in the dick twice and asks if you want more.
Also you had a daily limit of two entries per dungeon capping at 4 with aura right? I think that only applied to normal, and hard had a 2 per week limit. Its been a while, but that sounds right to me. I vaguely remember running multiple AAHM on my mystic, lancer, gunner, and slayer. Fun game. So, yea… that progression system absolutely shits on lost arks.
Also, side note. Lost ark slayer reminds me a little of Tera slayer. Hopefully it comes complete with its own meme slash. That would be sick. I was hoping artillerist would play like Tera gunner, maybe theres hope for a wing suite with the female version.
Being hyper generous, it would take roughly a month to hit HO if you had a dedicated group that could / would reject the roll and feed the mats to you. I dont have much experience with kaia gear admittedly, but the basis remains the same. If you had a HO priest, mystic, or lancer by then, you could very easily get to gear cap im assuming.
So nah, Tera never really had the same issue. Due to how the game progressed overall. Youre right. However, the difference is running a support alt up to max in tera didnt set your main back months at a time. So its not a fair comparison. Its like comparing gas mileage of a modern a hybrid to a car from 1905. Two completely different beasts.
Plus, lets be real. If you were making a support as part of a static i was in… and i sent you a metric ass ton of mats via mail… we would both catch a ban. That rarely happened in Tera, and if it did, they would appeal it within a day at most. AGS support takes roughly… a month? Nah, i wont risk that. Sorry.
Wasnt trying to make this long, but it ended up happening. Sorry. I do miss Tera. Im sad they closed it. Maybe i could find a private server, if you know of one hit me up.
why do you need 3 dps at 1521 instead of 2 dps and a support at 1521? You are part of the problem.
Because I leveled up my DPS mains a lot earlier and thus had a lot more materials. My Bard was a far more recent character relatively.
Unpopular opinion: There is no content in this game where you actually need supports for their healing. You can learn tells, fight mechs, and patterns well enough to avoid almost all damage in the game. Equating a support to a “money saver” or basically a “pot bot” seems to me as one of the primary reasons people don’t like support gameplay.
Supports in Lost Ark are not designed to heal you. You need only look at how Paladin and Bard heal to understand that. It’s AOE healing, not targeted. That is the primary difference between this and other MMOs re: support classes. Also, there is no holy trinity in this game. You have DDs and Supports. That’s it.
Since everyone tries to play this game as efficiently as possible (i.e. 5x3, near perfect stats, leggo gems), thinking “support equals healer” means you think that an entire subset of the player population should play the game in the most inefficient way possible. A support is there to buff your dps and reduce damage you take through shielding. That’s the only real “healing” responsibility that supports have. Otherwise, a support should be focusing on buffing the party’s DPS through direct buffs and uptime increases (such as shielding so you can ignore certain patterns or using Godsent Law/Rhapsody of Light/Draw : Milky Way to reduce damage so you can ignore a pattern). The moment 2/3 supports drop a heal (paladin is the exception), they become z dps effectively negating their worth to the party because as everyone has said “we already have hp pots”.
The reality though is that skill levels are different among players in every game and not everyone can play at a level where a support can only buff dps. Supports are in shortage because in every single MMO since the holy trinity was introduced there has been a healer shortage. Whether it was Lineage, Aion, Tera, EQ, WoW, or FFXIV, there were never enough healers to go around. Just try pugging a healer in WoW or FFXIV right now. It won’t happen easily. To say otherwise is some real rose-tinted glasses thinking. The gameplay of a healer or a support is:
extremely taxing - people will blame supports who do not heal enough when in reality those people should be avoiding mechs instead of unga bunga
unrewarding - in most cases, you are not going to mvp as a support (unless you are a paladin)
your effect on the party is not seen by you - you don’t know if the DB’s Surge hit for 120 mil or the Sorc’s doomsday hit for 140 mil unless they tell you. Personally, I’d advocate for flying combat text that shows supports how much damage they are adding to everyone’s big skills (user configurable). The only thing you can really see is healing numbers and that is boring af. I can see that by health bars going up.
If you are not rolling a support main or alt right now, then you are part of the problem. You can’t think that Artist’s release is going to majorly shift the number of supports in the game. Even in KR, Artist didn’t really move the needle on the overall support population. This will be even worse in the global release because Artist is coming with the release of Brel HM. You won’t even be able to play Artist effectively for 9 weeks (Farming all Clown upgrades and Brel normal gear), not to mention honing for ilvl.
Sincerely,
A support main who has a 1520 bard, 1519 paladin, and will roll an artist
Expecting people to dodge everything on the first weeks of a release is impossibly optimistic. Supports are very much required for the first weeks of Brelshaza with only a couple exceptions (massively overgeared players and veterans from other regions with experience).
Edit: that is unless some group is willing to prog for 15 hours or something per gate to get it perfect in the first week.
Most of us supports mains will prog with guild or static for new content.
Most of the people who are whining are those who do not have a active guild or friends.
However, I suspect they are just ranting because of long wait time for their ALTS since mains don’t really have that issue.
This proves my point though. Supports make things easier, but they are not needed for their healing. As you pointed out, there is a way around “needing” a support. Expecting people to notice normal patterns after hours of prog on one fight is not impossibly optimistic. It should be the standard. The fact that people justify their bad play because a fight is new blows my mind. We have every single resource possible to understand the fight, to learn normal patterns, AND people still spend hours wiping instead of trying to understand how to dodge normal patterns. We aren’t doing these fights blind and already have the strats given to us by KR players. A fight is no longer “new” after 4 hours of wiping. That’s just bad play.
Hell, I’ve seen DI Shadowhunters, Glaives, and Destroyers who have not practiced the Prokel fight while being some of the best PVP classes in the entire game. The number of parties looking for “Prokel dps” is just nuts. There is a training room which is actually more difficult than the normal fight (because you can’t use sidereals) that doesn’t even use your consumes, yet people are still too lazy to go learn and expect other people to carry them.
People throw themselves at bosses in this game until they get the exact perfect mechanics that are easy to dodge or get carried by people who overgear fights. Brel is the first fight we haven’t overgeared on day 1 that provides some level of difficulty.