I believe one of the many design flaws in game atm, is the lack of “supporting” abilities for all classes.
To define supporting abilities, they are abilities like rogue smoke bombs that hide our team and reduce their damage taken, being able to take a big chunk of damage from another character, reflecting spells cast on your team, momentarily increasing the team’s health, giving health stones, providing portals, giving mana gems, lust/tw/frenzy, intervening your team mates, swapping places with a team mate etc etc.
World of Warcraft is an MMO game, it’s belt entirely upon co-operation and teamwork to overcome challenges, be it trying to take down a raid boss, killing a rare in the open world, helping a fellow faction member under attack from the opposing faction, trying to win a BG or an arena etc etc.
Yet I can’t help but notice the extreme lack of being able to " support " the team, now there are a couple of very nice support abilities in game, however I think they’re not enough.
There isn’t much emphasis on teamwork in Wow, and often enough I don’t feel as a player I’m able to cover for my team that much or provide some cool clutch support to them.
Today I was doing a Tol’dagor and at the final boss, I disengaged and took the boss’s bullet midair from the healer to save them, I really liked that and it felt like that’s what an MMO game should be about, yet as wow progresses it feels like we are losing the ability to support our team rather than gain new ways of doing that, If that ability was a targeted ability rather than a projectile I wouldn’t have had any power to help my healer, either they act or they die.
Some classes in WoW aren’t even able to provide active support that can result in clutch moments.
Wouldn’t it be nice if mages could trap a team mate in an iceblock providing immunity every 3 minutes? or if a mage could every minute blink a team mate forward, just thinking about these two you could use the blink on a stunned team mate, or to block an attack from an huge hit coming their way.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if death knights could use anti magic zone again, and reduce magic damage taken for their team again, or if they could grip their team mates back to safety? how about sacrificing a chunk of their health to heal a team mate?
Wouldn’t it be cool if a rogue could shadowstep/grapple to a team mate and then using smokebomb to obscure casts away from them? or if every minute they could cloak a nearby team mate?
Wouldn’t it be cool if a warrior could parry an attack that was going to hit their team mates? or if they could raise their shields and take the brunt of attacks coming towards their team mates? howabout grabbing a friend and leaping away with them?
Wouldn’t it be nice if shamans could momentarily provide a bloodlust on a targeted member, or if they could redirect targeted spells to a totem, or if they could shield their teams or reduce the damage they took via a totem, or if they could provide a small speed boost via a totem, or if they could provide a small heal/mana regen via a totem, or if they could incase a teammate in stone, reducing the damage they take.
The list goes on, I think having abilities like these that emphasize on team work would create a much healthier environment, and shift focus away from just dpsing without being able to provide much support to the team.
I think the combat system would be much better off if team mates were able to truly help each other and create clutch moments, it would also add a very cool different type of skillset to the game that isn’t just rotation.
I’ve always favored taking a rogue that actively tries to control rather than one that does more dps however doesn’t try to control our enemies.
I really wish blizzard would change their direction about the game being more about numbers than skillful execution where there are many situations where you feel it’s just a numbers game and you are helpless and have to act in a certain way to succeed rather than have many abilities in your arsenal to deal with situations in unique, skillful and fun ways.