Don’t expect new support specs in Midnight

More support specializations are something that the player base had asked for quite a bit and more vocally over the last few years, and we were finally given that in Augmentation Evoker last expansion. Yet the fear was always that a support spec could be too good, and become required, and if that was the case what would it look like? We’ve of course seen Augmentation have some pretty high highs and some pretty low lows, but now that we’re heading into Midnight, what exactly is the future of support classes? During the Midnight Developer Q&A Livestream, Ion addressed this head-on:

So we’re not planning on currently expanding it to other classes, but we’re also not planning Augmentation to just fit into the existing niches. I think there’s a lot of excitement around the existing idea of support, and I think we’ve seen players embrace that fantasy, but I think we’re still iterating on evolving that specialization and getting to a place where we can find a happy medium; where we can kind of realize that fantasy and be effective as someone who bolsters the strength of your allies, without also becoming so effective that it feels required in groups and limits composition and diversity. I think if we are able to achieve that — hopefully when we are able to achieve that — I do think we would like to look and see what other ideas might apply a different fantasy to executing that concept.

Well, that’s a bit of a bummer. On one hand, at least they’re not scrapping the idea of support entirely; I think, in theory, it’s a great idea but it’s going to mean that people need to create some new expectations of the dynamics that a support class will bring (and yes, I am aware that we had these conversations early on when Augmentation was announced, but we’re still needing to have them now). On the other hand, Augmentation or other support specs will always suffer from the feeling that they’re either required from the standpoint that they make everyone else so much better — or, alternatively, they’ll be looked at as something useless, something that could be replaced with a top end DPS that doesn’t carry with it some of the weight that a support class brings. None of this is new, and we’ve been having a lot of these same conversations since Dragonflight when we were first introduced to our flappy, scaly friends, but unfortunately the development team hasn’t quite managed to figure out how to tame the beast that they’ve brought to life and it doesn’t seem like we’re anywhere near seeing that happen.

It’s also nice to see that the developers are willing to mess with the status quo and wont just give up on it because it didn’t work immediately. If nothing else, Augmentation has survived longer than Gladiator Stance (rest in peace, you were taken from us too soon), so you’ve got that going for you, which is nice.