116803-should-support-focused-gear-be-more-obvious-to-players

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I've been finding a lot of players lately who haven't tried out the support side of their class specifically because they don't know what gear they need for it.  Literally, medics that have never healed, warriors who have never tanked, etc.  It's not that they don't want to, but they feel like since they don't have gear for it they'd fail.
 
It strikes me that people shouldn't reach 50 and THEN realize that they want different gear for the support side of their class.  At least, it shouldn't be as common as it is.
 
This got me to thinking:  If you know what stats you need, it's pretty easy to build a set of gear focused on tanking or healing just from quest rewards and drops as you play.  However, if you don't know what stats you need, it's likely that you'll simply pass over those rewards and sell or salvage them.
 
What if items with tanking/healing stats were designated as such in the game?  For example, if my engineer gets an armor drop with tech and insight on it, what if there were a note in the item details that said "This piece of equipment is particularly suited for a group support role?"
 
Would that be too much?  Would it maybe help players to discover support gear as they level up, and build gear sets so that they can get started healing or tanking right away?  Or would it not really help the problem?
 
I dunno the answer, so just throwing this out here.  What does everyone else think?	
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I've been finding a lot of players lately who haven't tried out the support side of their class specifically because they don't know what gear they need for it.  Literally, medics that have never healed, warriors who have never tanked, etc.  It's not that they don't want to, but they feel like since they don't have gear for it they'd fail.
 
It strikes me that people shouldn't reach 50 and THEN realize that they want different gear for the support side of their class.  At least, it shouldn't be as common as it is.
 
This got me to thinking:  If you know what stats you need, it's pretty easy to build a set of gear focused on tanking or healing just from quest rewards and drops as you play.  However, if you don't know what stats you need, it's likely that you'll simply pass over those rewards and sell or salvage them.
 
What if items with tanking/healing stats were designated as such in the game?  For example, if my engineer gets an armor drop with tech and insight on it, what if there were a note in the item details that said "This piece of equipment is particularly suited for a group support role?"
 
Would that be too much?  Would it maybe help players to discover support gear as they level up, and build gear sets so that they can get started healing or tanking right away?  Or would it not really help the problem?
 
I dunno the answer, so just throwing this out here.  What does everyone else think?
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			I mean, don't stats already kind of do this with the +whatever to your support power?	
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			I used to keep gear for support roles when leveling up, but my bag space became too valuable, so I ditched it until my characters get to 40, then I will start keeping it again, for the classes that I want to use the support role (I don't tank haha).	
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I used to keep gear for support roles when leveling up, but my bag space became too valuable, so I ditched it until my characters get to 40, then I will start keeping it again, for the classes that I want to use the support role (I don't tank haha).
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This is a good point.. when I first started playing Wildstar, I was so focused on the gameworld that I ignored stats completely. While I can understand the difference of stats now (haha.. barely), I would have liked an easy way to seperate the gear while leveling as a fresh player.
 
Maybe a small icon or symbol at the gear title could indicate it is ment for support (rough example):
 	
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This is a good point.. when I first started playing Wildstar, I was so focused on the gameworld that I ignored stats completely. While I can understand the difference of stats now (haha.. barely), I would have liked an easy way to seperate the gear while leveling as a fresh player.
 
Maybe a small icon or symbol at the gear title could indicate it is ment for support (rough example):
 
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The problem with that is everyone shares quest rewards, AND has different stats that are important. A change like that would require someone to go through literally every piece of quest gear, link it to every single class and denote if it is more support or assault, and then pieces that are neither (quite common) would get nothing and look weird.
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I think they should do away with named stats entirely, IE moxie is AP for this class, brutality is AP for that class, but moxie is crit for this other guy crap.
 
Gear should just look like this:
 
CLOAK OF DEADLY CLOAKINGNESS
Assault Power - 60
Crit Chance - 4%
Strikethrough - 1%
Armor - 1400
Health - 1780
 
and 
 
BOOTS OF INFINITE THREAT
Support Power - 45
Crit Chance - 1%
Strikethrough - 1%
Armor - 4400
Health - 2718
 
Role coded gear, clear indication of stats. Simple, effective.	
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I think they should do away with named stats entirely, IE moxie is AP for this class, brutality is AP for that class, but moxie is crit for this other guy crap.
 
Gear should just look like this:
 
 
Assault Power - 60
Crit Chance - 4%
Strikethrough - 1%
Armor - 1400
Health - 1780
 
and 
 
Support Power - 60
Crit Chance - 4%
Strikethrough - 1%
Armor - 1400
Health - 1780
 
Role coded gear, clear indication of stats. Simple, effective.
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Chua not like this idea. Is like dummy version of gear.
Chua quite happy to have different stats for different classes.
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Chua not like this idea. Is like dummy version of gear.
Chua quite happy to have different stats for different classes.
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Weeding through all the stats can bea  little daunting.  As a semi-new player (I started playign again recently after quitting a couple months afetr release) it's overwhelming trying to figure out the best set of things.  It's one thing to see "Oh this has support power, this is for tanking" and then havign all those other stats jumbles things up.
 
Really wish there was a way to at least save gear sets.  Storage is a PITA but that's not a HUGE issue. Tryign to just keep track of everythign and not have it lost in the mess of bag slots is honestly what keeps me from holding onto support gear lol.
 
Now that me and my friend are sittign in 5+ hour ques for dungeons while leveling, I might make an effort to grab some tank gear from quests now and give it a shot.	
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I agree with this, though I do like the color coded idea
 
 
No we don't? Explain
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We all use AP/SP/Crit/ST/Crit sev etc. They just have different assigned names per class. IE brutality is AP for warriors but brutality is strikethru for slingers. Feels like they put a bunch of names and the classes in a hat and drew random pairings.
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The problem with this idea is that people will have no idea how close they are to milestones with this layout. And the milestone feature is a cool idea imo, so don't get rid of that
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We all use AP/SP/Crit/ST/Crit sev etc. They just have different assigned names per class. IE brutality is AP for warriors but brutality is strikethru for slingers. Feels like they put a bunch of names and the classes in a hat and drew random pairings.
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This is true Mae, I remember now that one of the reasons I didn't know what to pick was because many of the choices were not clearly one or the other.. but I thought it had more to do with stat micromanagement (it still might actually.. don't quote me on this).
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Something I did not know as I leveled was that support power actually makes support skills deal more damage. I don't if/where this is ever explained to the player but it should be laid out plain as day. It may be easier to figure out as a tank but playing medic I assumed that the damage portion of abilities like shield surge or dual shock came from assault power and the healing elements were based on support. I noticed at later levels when weapons with high support power start losing assault power but my damage was increasing. 
 
For example when I would upgrade my weapon it would go from  200 AP / 400 SP to something like 250/500. I was only able to realize when I got a weapon with less AP than my previous but more SP. So to use the example it would have been something like 200/550. It made me think I had no use for assault power until I figured out that utility skills scale off both AP and SP, something that is also not explicitly presented.
 
There is a lot of responsibility on the player to work out the system but not enough of the information is presented in the context of the game. I think the Protostar games "dungeon" will help but they also need some other tutorial style content. Lots of players ignore the help tips, I know I did.	
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While i actually agree the system they designed is kind of goofy, It actually does make gear different for each class
Basically they made it so every piece of gear outside of some accessories is class restricted which is a bit silly imo.
It also leads to some strangeness like having the same stat multiple times on one piece of gear; like for an esper healer it is pretty common to get finesse, brutality, and crit severity all on the same item and they are all crit severity.
 
But just like making an addon that detects your class and color codes based on spec you could probably make one that just converts your visual of an item to raw stats if it was more visually pleasing to you
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Truth be told, I don't really remember accurate enough the leveling gear drops to give proper feedback. I would like however to see the different gear options better explained in-game for new players (and even old).
 
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Something I did not know as I leveled was that support power actually makes support skills deal more damage.
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I've been finding a lot of players lately who haven't tried out the support side of their class specifically because they don't know what gear they need for it.  Literally, medics that have never healed, warriors who have never tanked, etc.  It's not that they don't want to, but they feel like since they don't have gear for it they'd fail.
 
It strikes me that people shouldn't reach 50 and THEN realize that they want different gear for the support side of their class.  At least, it shouldn't be as common as it is.
 
This got me to thinking:  If you know what stats you need, it's pretty easy to build a set of gear focused on tanking or healing just from quest rewards and drops as you play.  However, if you don't know what stats you need, it's likely that you'll simply pass over those rewards and sell or salvage them.
 
What if items with tanking/healing stats were designated as such in the game?  For example, if my engineer gets an armor drop with tech and insight on it, what if there were a note in the item details that said "This piece of equipment is particularly suited for a group support role?"
 
Would that be too much?  Would it maybe help players to discover support gear as they level up, and build gear sets so that they can get started healing or tanking right away?  Or would it not really help the problem?
 
I dunno the answer, so just throwing this out here.  What does everyone else think?
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Truth be told, I don't really remember accurate enough the leveling gear drops to give proper feedback. I would like however to see the different gear options better explained in-game for new players (and even old).
 
 
This is news to me..
 
You mean that support gear for my alt engineer actually makes her support abilities hit higher dps? *confused* ... if true then I have been selecting gear in an entirely wrong way. :mellow:
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			Speaking from only my personal experience, support gear more obvious would be one thing to help the classes along.  The other would seem to be quest rewards for both roles as well.  It seemed like up until lvl 25ish I got all support gear and no DPS gear.  I swapped to Tank as my main role for my Warrior and started tanking like a boss...but then all of the quest rewards became DPS equipment and the very sporadic piece of support gear.  I think more gear reward parity between the two roles would go a long way towards helping as well. 	
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I used to keep gear for support roles when leveling up, but my bag space became too valuable, so I ditched it until my characters get to 40, then I will start keeping it again
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			There hasn't been a need to color code, label, or otherwise identify support role gear in any other game, why is it suddenly an issue here?  This sounds like a solution looking for a problem.	
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While I do not think anything needs to be altered on the gear itself I am hoping that as part of the 'tutorial' dungeon they are adding it will explain gear along with mechanics. It is confusing for a lot and some basic explanation of how this works would be great and this starter dungeon seems like the perfect place to address the issue.
 
Personally I hope the 'tutorial' dungeon has three quests for it one for DPS, and two support quests one for tanking the other for healing (though of of course only one of the quests being available to each class). Their role through the dungeon would show not only the dungeon mechanics, but the role mechanics, and the stats required for it with each rewarding a basic gear set to get people started for that role.	
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Speaking from my own experience and talking to people that have fallen into the situation the OP speaks of. I don't think it's that people aren't seeing or understanding the stat system, but rather the availability and the quality of support based gear. 
 
I can actually say that for myself leveling as a warrior tank that if I wasn't an armorsmith I probably wouldn't have bothered tanking. Weapons seemed readily available and hard to replace for some time, but armor for tanking seemed rather sparse or low quality stat wise...	
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Weeding through all the stats can bea  little daunting.  As a semi-new player (I started playign again recently after quitting a couple months afetr release) it's overwhelming trying to figure out the best set of things.  It's one thing to see "Oh this has support power, this is for tanking" and then havign all those other stats jumbles things up.
 
Really wish there was a way to at least save gear sets.  Storage is a PITA but that's not a HUGE issue. Tryign to just keep track of everythign and not have it lost in the mess of bag slots is honestly what keeps me from holding onto support gear lol.
 
Now that me and my friend are sittign in 5+ hour ques for dungeons while leveling, I might make an effort to grab some tank gear from quests now and give it a shot.
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In the non-armor slots the same piece of gear can be support for one class and assault for another. I frequently find bargains for overlooked "tanking gear" that makes perfectly good assault gear for my Medic...
 
I think there is more to be gained in encouraging people to explore their class by adding a separate gear paperdoll for each LAS with empty slots copying whatever is in that slot in your LAS 1. That would give you more room to store gear for a potential off-spec & making swapping to that gear automatic when you change your bar over.	
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			Sure helping players is nice, but do you honestly think someone who can't even figure out if an item is off-spec for them would stick around in WS or even get through attunement? 	
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			Do they have to get through attunement to be part of the game and put money into a sub? "Raider or GTFO" out logic needs to die in a fire.	
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			Support Power beefs up your support abilities!? Blasphemy!	
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If they incorporated the EToolTip addon in some fashion, I think this might be more apparent. It's an amazling little addon that does a compare with your current stats and equipment and shows you what you gain or lose with the addition of that gear.  It'll even take a stab at what milestones are gained or lost.  The only complicating factor are runes (where what you are wearing is runed, and the new gear is not).  That can tend to make newly acquired gear look worse when it might be a sidegrade to what you wear if properly runed.
 
But, it does definitely highlight increases to assault power, support power, etc.	
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Truth be told, I don't really remember accurate enough the leveling gear drops to give proper feedback. I would like however to see the different gear options better explained in-game for new players (and even old).
 
 
This is news to me..
 
You mean that support gear for my alt engineer actually makes her support abilities hit higher dps? *confused* ... if true then I have been selecting gear in an entirely wrong way. :mellow:
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Do they have to get through attunement to be part of the game and put money into a sub? "Raider or GTFO" out logic needs to die in a fire.
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I thought the fact that your abilities are divided into Assault, Support and Utiliy categories made it pretty obvious that Assault power affected Assault skills, and Support power affected Support skills.
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No, but what would a player do in this game who needs a tooltip to inform them which gloves are for dps and which are for support?
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I thought the fact that your abilities are divided into Assault, Support and Utility categories made it pretty obvious that Assault power affected Assault skills, and Support power affected Support skills.
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			I haven't really had time to read through all the responses (and won't till later) but just wanted to say the discussion and ideas are great - I hope the devs are reading this thread :)	
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Carbine, I demand Utility Power asap! ;)
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What would help most is having a second gear set, while leveling at least
the game throws so much gear at you that your backpack is just a constant mess
 
If you had a place to store it outside of all that it would be very easy to keep a support set in order
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There are Support powers that also assault enemies (besides taunting for example, or giving defensive boosts). I thought that the damage aspect was also calculated by the Assault power.. but I just learned that it is entirely covered by the Support power and nothing else.
 
This means for me that I don't have to over-complicate things by mixing my gear and just pick the pieces with the highest support as it will also increase my actual dps.
 
It is a relief knowing that you don't lose dmg output this way. :)
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Tagging support gear would be pretty simple actually. DPS stats like Finesse and Brutality vary from class to class, but every healer wants Insight and every tank wants Tech regardless of class, they are uniform in their bonuses across the board. The only problems would come from poorly statted items that are split between both Assault and Support roles, and those can just not be tagged as Support items because they're awful for everyone.
 
There's really no reason to believe that today's clueless newbie can't grow up to be tomorrow's raider, and there shouldn't be a stigma against giving players a fast and intuitive way to learn what they need to know in-game.
 
Lastly, yes, giving players the ability to set up multiple gear sets should be a priority.	
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Answers for the OP:
 
Q#. Should support gear be made more obvious to players?
 
A#: No. For example if the gear has insight/focus on it then it seems pretty clear to me that it's a support item. What else do you need? Flashing sirens and rainbow swirl colors on the item? If you can't figure this out then chances are that you can't figure out how to itemize gear on your character anyways.	
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Tagging support gear would be pretty simple actually. DPS stats like Finesse and Brutality vary from class to class, but every healer wants Insight and every tank wants Tech regardless of class, they are uniform in their bonuses across the board. 
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What else do you need? Flashing sirens and rainbow swirl colors on the item?
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I wouldn't be opposed...
 
In all seriousness, though, we're talking about something that helps a new player figure out itemization in the first place. IMO, anything that makes the game more approachable (without actually nerfing content) is a good thing.
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The problem is that making it really obvious what gear you need to choose removes the illusion of choice. At the moment, a lot of players get to feel like they are making significant decisions when choosing upgrade items and passing on stuff with stats they don't need. This is part of the rpg experience- otherwise they could just hand out gear that was something like "DPS Slinger, Support Warrior", etc.
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This is not true. For example, both Medic's and Stalkers use medium armor. Medics use Tech for AP, and Stalkers use Tech for SP.
 
Yes, all tanks use Tech for support, and all heals us Insight for support, but that doesn't make Insight and Tech exclusively support stats.
 
IMO, they should change Medics to use Moxie as their AP, that way all classes are using one of the 3 red stats for AP. Medic's are the only class that doesn't follow that Fin/Brut/Moxie are their attack stats.
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What we maybe have today is just the illusion of choice - if you understand the stats, there's pretty much only one viable route to go with gearing decisions for each role you may hold.
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With the way items are currently statted, preserving the illusion of choice for those that don't know any better is taking those who most need help and setting them up to fail.
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I suppose if all you're really asking for is for assault/support stats for your class to be colored differently on your tooltip, that could easily be done with an addon, but it doesn't seem like there's much demand for it or we would have one already.
 
There's this addon here that helps with this issue slightly:
 
http://www.curse.com/ws-addons/wildstar/221625-statcheatsheet	
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I think a lot of that lack of choice ties into the discussion in this thread, as well though.
 
What we maybe have today is just the illusion of choice - if you understand the stats, there's pretty much only one viable route to go with gearing decisions for each role you may hold.
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Isn't that with many MMOs though? Toward in-game you pretty much only have one or two choices to gear up for your role.
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Outside of EVE Online, yes, you're right.  Min/Maxing leaves only one set of viable choices no matter how many options we get.  It's just the nature of the beast.
 
Most of the customization is in the LAS, not the gear.
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