It seems that you don’t think beyond the numbers, about the underlying logic of Cleric buffs…
Let me rephrase it for you so that you may understand me.
Let’s compare e.g. Cleric and Wizard buff effects.
Take for instance Ein Sof and Haste.
Ein Sof increases the maximum HP limit of your character.
To have e.g. Haste have a similar effect, Hastes effect would have to change to increase only the upper movement speed limit from 60 to e.g. 90.
So, the buff Haste by itself does nothing, it just allows you to go beyond your 100% limitation.
This would only benefit players that can break through the limit with skills/items/etc.
That’s a reason why I say some Cleric buff concepts are bad.
Ein Sof by itself does nothing.
If I don’t have a healing/recovery skill in the party that can fill up those extra parts of the HP bar that are initially empty, chances are large that you don’t really have a benefit from the initial skill effect (even if prolonged with Melstis to 91 seconds duration at level 17, you can only use 3 alchemist HP pots and 2 NPC pots to fill your extended HP bar during this time, which will in many cases not be enough to fill up the extra 340% HP-bar).
Revive and Ressurection are another example. The better your equipment is, the lesser the effect of the skill becomes (i.e. inverse scaling to gear), meaning they are most effective with no CON and naked, while a geared player with enough CON&defence will never face death [unless he facetanks everything in a long battle and thus breaks his gear], so the skill becomes potentially 5-15 dead/wasted skillpoints on the character that could’ve been invested into something else.
Imagine you’re playing any Archer/Swordsman and one of your skills deals only 10000 fixed damage.
In the beginning it would be great, but later the points would be dead/wasted.
It’s exactly the same problem with Revive and Ressurection.
It only covers for someone elses lack of something (HP/defence), so it isn’t support but instead promoting lazyness, wrong stating& undergearing for content, while people who properly play the game have no benefit from the skill.
If we take e.g. Thaumaturges Swell skills for a support comparison, while their effectiveness decreases with everyones gear progression, it still has an immediate effect on attack&defence of the party.
This is a good example of how to scale a useful support skill so that it still is relevant for game progression instead of becoming useless.
Also, your concept of support skills seems a little warped.
In your eyes everything that increases/decreases something looks like a support skill?
Debuffs are not support skills, they are debuffs.
Debuffs can be beneficial in synergetic relationships (e.g. Hexing causing curse ailment, which increases dark property damage), but by themselves they do not benefit the players. If e.g. the party is full of Priests with 1 Bokor[that does not have Effigy/Damballa], the 50% dark property boost does nothing.
How is this support? It’s just an assumption that someone might benefit from this.
Reality is different. It takes a lot of planning and setting up the right party (which is very difficult because people tend to have dozens of different builds that may synergize with one Class but don’t with another of another player and/or his skills/attributes/weaponry/etc.) to get a beneficial outcome for everyone.
That’s where I draw the line to support skills. Support skills are supposed to be always helpful for the party.
These augmentations have to benefit everyone (like e.g. Haste,Swell Left Arm,Spiritual Chain being useful for most content of the game).
The 3 categories of support are:
- status boosts
- mitigation skills (damage/status ailments)
- recovery skills
Since we’re talking here just about the first two categories I have to say that Cleric is pretty bad in category 1 (status boosts) and only excels in mitigation (damage&status ailments).
And, as I said, mitigation is redundant if you play/stat/equip properly. So with continuous progression in gameplay experience and gear, Cleric becomes obsolete as a supporter [“the walking pot”-problem, Cleric being just a convenient addition that covers for the lack of something, with people playing full-“support” builds as subs to run content like e.g. ET or Belcoper Nest more often; maining a full-support build is not viable for farming,etc, but that’s another design flaw of TOS…] and is just a “convenient” addition[e.g. people in shout looking for thauma/Chrono because of the buffs, but instead of looking for a specific Cleric they just want any “healer” so that they don’t have to git gud, improve their equipment and/or spend money for pots].
