I share sentiment with most of the high level support players here. I mained bard as my first character as I saw the support shortage coming a mile away when this game started before I ended up making Berserker my main instead. I came with a group of 10 friends who started this, 7 of them have quit for good which leaves the 3 of us behind. Majority of them started and picked DPS characters and its insane how you can look at the ilvl and see a massive difference with damage and self sustain.
The most grueling, boring and painful part of being a support has to be the climb from T1-T2, T3 onwards it feels like the class plays itself, but T1-T2 you literally do pellets damage. My bard was the first character and main to reach 1340 up until I realized how boring, tiring and exhausting the class is. Yes 50% comes down to your party appreciating you only because you save them the need to add pots but in reality your only source of damage comes from 3 skills that ACTUALLY do any damage which is absolutely bonkers considering those 3 rotations are needed to build up your meter so you can —wait for it, serve your class purpose and heal your party. I have mained support in every MMORPG, but in Lost Ark I feel like you are being punished so hard in so many ways to stay content relevant.
Reached T3? Congrats, everyone needs you, cause reality is up until 1340 people don’t have a decent engraving set and whatever powerhouse they felt they were in T2 get’s wiped off the map to start like you were Lvl10 at the start of the game, only with the addition of higher damage with long cooldowns.
You want to improve yourself for your party? Guess what, everyone’s overpricing support accessories to the roof that the prices are almost on par for a DPS set. I spent 18k gold to get my berserker in a good place, meanwhile my bard requires 25k gold because it’s almost like people don’t want supports in their party at all. Seriously, who in their right mind would spend 25k gold just for literally 3 engravings that are the core of supports as opposed to 8+ engravings DPS can flex with ease and feel like it makes a difference?
Bottom line is, our damage is bottom to mid tier, once the DPS hits the floor and the boss has x5 or more HP? forget about even bothering to try. Our only source of relevance such as heals are tied to a meter which depends on a rotation of 3-4skills with LONG ASS COOLDOWNS and perfect engravings to keep people from dying to mechanics 5 year olds could see coming from a distance but ignore to dodge because “that’s why we have you as a support” (Literal line I heard from a party I joined). The real issue isn’t lack of supports, rather supports are so gimped in this game that they aren’t enjoyable. Even if they add 4 supports to this game, it won’t change a thing, heck FFXIV does justice to supports so people love playing them and you’ll never run out of needing one, but over here it’s painfully obvious that being a support would burn you out at a faster rate.
If I am correct however, this is an issue that affects the health of the game. Although the support shortage is not ideal, a dps shortage would probably be worse in this game.
It’s understandable for dps players to be concerned about the support shortage, the only people who I consider to be a problem are the ones who want to gatekeep proposed solutions while not being willing to offer some themselves.
Support accessory prices are terrible, but they only have other support to blame. Most 4x3 setups have stones with two non-class engravings, with the accessories being DS/BA. Only support get those accessory drops for class engravings. So support making gold off of other support. Can’t blame them tho because one they paid a lot for their own accessories and two it’s the market price.
I agree with most of what you typed here, but at least in the case for Artist, she does more damage than bard and paladin. She also has more mobility as well (more than bard, possibly more than paladin)
If they added more supports that were more similar to Artist I think more people would be willing to give the role a shot, at the very least supports would feel a bit better playing their class.
Based on how this game is designed, they should basically make a damage dealer, throw some support functionality on them, and tune the numbers up.
Imagine if a support like sorc existed
Meteor would leave a big damage up or healing patch behind
The frost zone could increase armor
Flame patch would increase damage done
Icicles would apply a shield
Etc etc.
Something that is fun to play first, then support second
EXACTLY this. I don’t even need to have a set of limbs to play support at this rate as I can literally have a birds foot for a limb and just rotate the 3 skills I need to, but imagine being in a 40min instance run spamming 3 skills that do 1/8 of the damage that 13 other classes can do better. That’s where I draw the line.
Like I will never understand why bards can’t have heals similar to paladins, why the heal can’t be like our atk damage buff where it auto targets moving people as opposed to a small circle that requires you to face check damage while standing in a small circle. I get that it’s a burst heal but it;s our only source of healing for a party that takes forever to build up. How they never made it into a giant burst heal in an AOE range vs making it into a circle is beyond me.
NGL, I would love the whole aggressive approach for a bard if it meant playing with an aggressive approach added extra benefits to the party aside from, run > place attack circle on edge of screen > run away > await cd > repeat. Like heck, give me a skill that the damage I deal would heal a certain % to my party members and I’d be happy.
The most fun I’ve ever had in world of warcraft in the 13 years I played was as a restoration shaman during late cata-mists- and early wod.
They had/have cool elemental spells for supporting like riptide, healing rain, chain heal (with the rolling thunder sound effect ), healing totems, etc
But also had cool damage spells like chain lightning, lava burst, elemental blast, thunderstorm, etc.
Such a fun and rewarding time. I hope they do similar class designs in the future instead of the typical boring supports.
Notice how the two newer support classes still can’t get past bard?
As my point stated. people that enjoy playing support will stick with the support. people that don’t like to play support will not play support even if there are 12 classes out of it.
I am super happy with my Bard, I am considering to create a Pala but I believe they do their job quite well. I do find my bard fun to play but doing Velganos the whole party dying to mechs or not being able to do the pizza and me not having enough damage to kill is a bit annoying and the other option would be to go for Soulfist or Sorcerer as those are classes I found to perform better. Not looking forward for Artist as it seems over complicated to play and partys don’t seem to choose it as a support as much vs Bard/Palla
I started as a Bard on EUC and moved to EUW because of the queues.
There I started with a Gunslinger, due to faster leveling and I played until 1365. I got addicted with the Glavier, which is acutally 1358.
As long as I can not create a new char in T3, I won’t consider playing a support and going through all this “boring” content again (I hate leveling!).
I’m not sure why some people seem to only argue late game content when talking about artist.
Artist released in January 2022, bard was one of the original classes. It’s completely understandable that people wouldn’t main swap so late after they have spent so much time and resources building their main. The sooner a new class is released, the higher the chances that people will main swap.
Lets talk about late game numbers. I will quote a comment I posted on May 5, 2022.
"I filtered to 1580 and got the same numbers as your picture. Something interesting I found is that compared to the overall numbers associated with the roles in that GS range (damage dealer and support)
Sorc makes up 5.67% of damage dealers in that GS range and Artist makes up 5.62% of supports in that GS range.
I’m really not a math person, but if I calculated the right numbers, people did push Artist to endgame at nearly the same percent as Sorceress even though artist is newer.
Bard however, is sitting at a hefty 75.73% of supports in that GS range.
Also at 1600 GS range,
sorc is at 6.2% of damage dealers
artist is at 6.7% of supports."
This is a picture from 15 days ago. You can see that supports are at 21% in the gearscore range of 1580 to 1625.
This picture is from today, you can see that support numbers are going up in late game content.
Clearly people complaining about lacking support is about late game content. see the Ops statement below
What I am arguing here is more variety = the likelihood that people who play supports will find one they enjoy and stick with it. This is just a nice dream everyone has until it is crushed by reality.
As other KMMO games with dealer and support only as an example, DFO, the game had only one support at the start, people were asking more, added 2nd class, people were still asking more, 3rd support came in, there are still not enough supports in end game content. at the end we had to make a rule in our guild that every 4th character you bring into late game raid have to be a support, just to force them to play it.
More variety will create one major problems.
Class discrimination
DPS is already facing this, since there are so many variants in the classes, and the ones that don’t perform well are going to be ignored most of the time when they finding a party, this will happen to supports, people will pick the best support classes to do their job, they will not care if you really enjoying it or not, if we had a wide variety of supports.
What I suggest, instead of bringing more variety is:
Specific gearing/ progression event that only target supports. so everyone who has not yet gotten resources to gear support will have the opportunity to do so.
I wonder why Artist is 1.45% on the list. is it because she is not fun/strong?
No, I believe it is because that most player like to play her, but doesn’t have enough resources to push her into late game content.
Let me just say this: don’t use korean server numbers to justify things on global server. We do not play on korean servers our numbers are different.
People try to justify class balance with korean numbers too, it’s not right.
There are a ton of sorcs, a lot of zerks and blades, and some of the other classes.
Most of the supports in game are actually somebody’s alt.
Even If we had like 5-6 support classes most people would just make “an alt” support.
Even If they give power pass to 1415 for supports i wont Play paladin or bard coz they are boring.We can Just delete all classes and Play zerk,blade sorc.We dont need more…
), healing totems, etc
