Let's be blunt – it's well known that there is a fundamental problem with the current state of support classes in Lost Ark. Opinions on the severity of these concerns may vary, but almost everyone agrees that serious changes and improvements are necessary for the game to remain healthy.
Most online games with role-based parties struggle with balancing, as there is always a more popular role (usually damage dealers). However, there are many ways to significantly mitigate these issues without removing roles entirely.
But what exactly does a support provide? Unlike other MMORPGs, Lost Ark's support role does not focus only on healing and shielding, but also fulfills a vital role thanks to their powerful offensive buffs, and their MP regeneration, without which several builds cannot function. This generally leads to support classes achieving over 30% more damage contribution that a single DPS class can bring on their own, with even further scaling in Tier 4.
In this Community Chat, we will explore all aspects of support roles and how they impact the game. We look forward to hearing what the community thinks about this important topic!
Demographics
Before going further into this discussion, we would like to know how support classes fit within your roster and how you feel about this class archetype, as it is presented above.
The Dreaded Support to DPS Ratio
While earlier raids can be done solo or with a full DPS party, endgame content requires you to build a party around the 3 DPS + 1 support ratio, effectively forcing a 25% support distribution at most item level brackets. While this is not a hard rule, as there are exceptions such as bus runs, or people skipping their raids, it often leads to two situations:
- The distribution is exceeded, and some support players will statistically be unable to find a party.
- The distribution is not met, causing a support shortage, and 3 DPS players will be unable to find a party for each missing support player.
All this being said, how do you think this problem could be alleviated?
Support's Overloaded Kit
Support is objectively the strongest role in Lost Ark. While it requires strong and competent DPS players in order to fully utilize their kit, even in average situations it simply provides more damage to the party than any single damage dealer could, while also bringing defensive capability and strong utility potential to the table.
For some, this might feel unfair, especially due to the ease of playing support in contrast to the impact it has. What are your thoughts on this?
Support's Lack of Feedback
The lack of clear visual feedback for their performance has been plaguing support players for a long time. The main reason for this is that their buffs affect others' damage, and that does not reflect back on supports, and some form of indicator is arguably one of the most requested features among support players.
Having a clear measure of their performance can help players improve and learn more about their class, while also feeling the impact of gear progression as the game evolves. Do you think this is a problem that should be addressed?
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On behalf of our whole Lost Ark team - Thank you for all the feedback!