How important are support roles in this game?

[MoJoe.9063]

I played GW2 for a while when it first came out, stopped playing before HoT release and just recently got back into it. I remember from the earliest days of GW2 how everyone was saying the game is just a dps race; there was no need to heal or tank in the traditional sense because everyone has enough sustain to keep themselves alive long enough to do their damage. Has this changed at all, or is damage still king?

 

In particular I'm looking to start running fractals on my guardian, and I'd like to try out a more support-oriented build. I figure that everyone else in the fractal will have better gear and knowledge of the fractal than I will, so I should be helping them carry me through it ;) But I need to know if there's any place in the meta for this at all, or if I will get instantly kicked from every group for not building full dps in berserker gear.

[Asum.4960]

Healing (and might bot) Druid and Boon Chrono are crucial to almost any group in any kind of challenging content.

 

While support Guardian isn't awful, the GW2 meta is pretty rigid, and it doesn't have a place currently.

[CptAurellian.9537]

Support occupies a stronger spot than back in Vanilla, since healing has become a thing (though not always necessary), might has rather moved away from combo fields and availability of many boons/buffs is much higher than it as years ago. However, the PvE support meta is pretty restricted. You have chrono for boons and utility and druid for heals, might and spirit buffs. Warrior is often still regarded as support due to banners, though imho it's little more than a dps profession with additional banner duty. The support other classes bring is usually negligible. Oh, and one thing has not changed: offensive support is what everyone wants, defensive support is mostly a nice-to-have thing.

 

As you play a guard, firebrand offers the possibility to play a supportive build, covering healing, quickness, possibly might/fury and some other stuff depending on how you build it. However, be aware that a support FB is usually not what people are looking for, because the alternatives (chrono+druid) are substantially stronger in most cases and make a support FB redundant if they're already present. So you might get some negative feedback if you decide to go for support guard.

[mercury ranique.2170]

To explain the role of supportroles in general and in GW2.

When it comes to being succesfull solo or as a team you need two things.

1: DPS

2: staying alive

 

Staying alive is often confused with survivability. The thing with these two is, that 2 is a goal that, once reached, you did a job well. While for 1, there is never enough. The more DPS, the better. In most game modes, you do not need to do a lot to stay alive, except damage mitigation (moving and dodging).

With some more recent gamemodes (specifically t3 and t4 fractals and raids), this has changed and made support roles more viable in those modes. I still would recommend keeping it to those modes. with a few side notes.

 

1: having a good healer in a zerg or in an open world squad for an expansion is never bad, as long as it is limited to 1 or 2

2: in PvP, there are so called bunker builds. They are not specifically build around support, but use simular systems to tank.

3: a good place to see supportbuilds and compare roles in different game modes is metabattle.com