Editors note:
This document was originally written by Battlemaster Twilus Galeheart of the Rising Winds, and was presented as part of a battlegaming class taught at Battlecry 2023, Grand Duchy of Midgard. The text was published on 9/4/23, during the v8.5.3 Saucy ruleset. The content of the text is presented here unaltered, except for minor formatting changes.

Support Casting

Written by: Battlemaster Twilus, and taught in person at Battlecry 2023 alongside Battlemaster Snaps, and Battlemaster Migal

Introduction

Becoming the best support you can involves choosing the playstyle that is right for you. If you aren’t a good shot, you may wanna stay away from bow or spellball support builds until you put some time into target practice. If you aren’t the most athletic or good at fighting, you may wanna stay away from flank support builds or midline support builds until you can more consistently come out on top in physically demanding engagements. Choose a style you are most comfortable with and try mastering it to the best of your ability.

Support Basics

Field awareness

• Timeliness
  • React to your goals in a way that is efficient. Your release and resurrections should cut the times in half at least to be efficient.
  • Use downtime to recharge spells and prepare spellballs.
• Auditory/visual cues
  • Listen for threatening spells you can either prevent or fix after they resolve.
  • Listen for states being called by allies or enemies.
  • Look for open hands/charged spellballs/enchantment strips.
  • Pay attention to things you can fix or disable within at least 50 feet.
• Be proactive 
  • Ask allies and enemies what states they are in at all times.
  • Be ready to save allies as soon as you notice them being cast/engaged on.
  • Ask enemies what enchantments they have before every engagement.
  • Ask enemies for their armor values.
  • Ask for the enemy’s active ongoing effects or charged spellballs.

Spell selection

• Cost effectiveness
  • Use per life spells in situations where per refresh spells would be overkill.
  • Use spellballs in situations where you can get a guaranteed hit vs a ranged spell.
  • Use rechargeable spells in situations where you’ll have downtime after the engagement.
• Time management/economy
  • Use ranged support in situations where you don’t have time to support with touch spells.
  • Use swift in situations where you don’t have time to get the whole incantation off.
  • Use ambulant in situations where you need to get a touch spell off on someone far away.
  • Use innate to get back a spell that will save someone in a clutch situation to avoid the charge time.

Target priority

• Immunity/enemy class knowledge
  • Best tip: Know the Rulebook like the back of your hand, knowledge is power!

• • Be aware of common immunities that aren’t default on a class and common on the fields you play on. (ie: AON Druid with lycanthropy is immune to command.)
• Player skill priority (allied or enemy)
  • Use your disabling spells on the enemy players that are most threatening in a given engagement first.
  • Use your release, heals, resurrects, and mends on the allied players who will be most useful to you in a given engagement first.

List building

• Have enough tools for the job (spell minimums)
  • When playing a support build, make sure you have enough of a spell for it to be effective on your list (ie: as a support, always have at least 2 releases.)
• Spell versatility
  • Make sure to have a diverse set of schools of magic on your list so you have enough different tools for the various situations you will encounter, and to avoid common immunities where possible. (ie: don’t stack too many spells of a single school of magic, take both spellballs and verbals where applicable.)
• Cost effectiveness
  • Take more per life spells in games where you will have short death timers and a nearby respawn.
  • Take more powerful per refresh spells in games where you need strong magic power to win objectives.
  • Take more rechargeable spells and spells you can experience in games that will go longer and have a good amount of recharge downtime.

Playmaking

• Shot calling
  • Call out people you have applied states on. 
  • Inform allies to take advantage of space you’ve made.
  • Spot out flanks and inform your team of incoming threats.
  • Make your team aware of important information in general, as a support you have the widest view of the field and have time to gather info for the team.
• Get in there
  • As a support, as long as you don’t put yourself in too much danger, get into melee combat where possible to try and open up shots for your melee fighters and tie up your opponents by forcing them to block or mess with their footwork by putting them between your ally and yourself. 
  • (Trading your life to take limbs or players out and reset your per lifes can be a major boon to helping your team on pushes simply by existing. Never just take a death or have an ally kill you to get your per life abilities back when possible.
• Morale boosting
  • When your teammates make good plays, help them out and tell them they’re doing a good job, morale boosting is a very underrated part of teamwork.

Class choice

• Game vs. team composition class selection
  • There’s a big difference between picking your class based on the game type vs. picking the class to fit into a given team composition. It’s important to recognize the difference between picking based off of a game type vs. what a team comp needs. (ie: you may pick a bard with a lot of space control spells for a capture the flag game to defend your flag vs. picking bard to fit into a team comp that needs recharge spells to function for a specific task.)
• Playstyle selection vs. class selection
  • Picking a class doesn’t necessarily lock you into a playstyle. Oftentimes it’s more so that teams are lacking a playstyle rather than a specific class. You can play a backline support playstyle as any caster and be effective in that role, same goes for midline, flank support, pocket support, and sometimes even off-tanking. You can play the style you want to play in a given game no matter what caster class you choose, in most circumstances.

Positioning

• Backline
  • Backline positioning is all about supporting your team from the rear and taking spells that help against flanks and provide lots of general support. This is also where a lot of enchanter builds like to position, but not all enchanter builds fit here.
  • Useful spells you should have for this playstyle are releases, mends, heals, and resurrects. Other useful tools include dispel, minor crowd control spells, banish, greater release, and other things to help you deal with small flank skirmishes.
• Midline
  • Midline positioning is all about being the centerpoint of the team, supporting your frontline and helping them push or hold locations while keeping a watchful eye on your backline and weak points in your line to support at a moment’s notice. This is where a lot of your heavier crowd control builds like to play.
  • Useful spells you should have for this playstyle are a good amount of general support like release, heal, mend, and the like, while making more room for crowd control spells that disrupt and disable the enemy to give your team positional advantage, this style needs to have as diverse of a set of magic schools as possible due to common immunities on frontliners and the likelihood that enemies will be enchanted, also requiring a good source of dispel if your build allows it. Keep your frontliners healthy, assist them in combat and keep your team grounded.
• Pocket
  • Pocket support is mostly for very specific games where you have a certain player in mind, that you are likely enchanting to make them very powerful. The style can vary depending on caster but you often are tied to their hip and keeping them out of danger and helping them take down targets wherever you may be positioning on the field, either midline or flanks.
  • Useful spells for this style can vary greatly, but you usually want some general support spells along with very focused stuff to help the person you are supporting in specific, as well as specific enchantments for the build idea you are running. It is typically quite open ended, and has room for some more exotic choices.
• Flank Support
  • Flank support is less niche than pocket, but isn’t the most common build. This style runs on the side with powerful flankers, taking tools that allow you to break through flanks and keep your flankers safe while assisting them in combat.
  • Useful spells for this style are hard crowd control, spells that give your team a quick safety net in one way or another, disrupt enemy fighter’s equipment or positioning, anything to win engagements fast, and most importantly, equipment.
• Range control
  • Knowing the threat range of your spells and making sure you’ll be able to finish a spell cast at a given range.
  • Casting spells at players outside of range to prevent them from advancing on you without finishing the spell as to not expend it.
  • Making sure you are close enough to allies to save them if you have ranged support to assist. (ie: staying within 20 ft of an ally if you have greater release in case they get crowd controlled.)
• Life Management/Self Preservation
  • Depending on the support style you are playing, sometimes you need to be less risky than other builds because the threat of you being alive is what is preventing the enemy from spamming a lot of hard crowd control spells and wiping your team. This is especially true for most healer builds. Position safely where necessary.

Class Specific Support Skills

Healer

• Swift management/Rez management
  • As a healer, you need to make sure you aren’t using swift on your resurrects unless it’s absolutely necessary to, if you use them in situations where it wasn’t required you will often run into situations where the only way you could have gotten a rez off was if it was swift-ed, and you have none left. This is still somewhat true for priests as well but on priest your swift is more limited in scope. Swift responsibly healers.
• Rezbot Respawn target priority (communication)
  • As a healer, make sure to use your spawn resurrects on other healers and potentially monks first, to aid you in bringing the team back up, and bring people up first who will give your team the most impact when they’re alive.
• Summon Dead + Rez interaction
  • With summon dead, the summoned target doesn’t stop moving until they reach you no matter how you, the healer, move after it’s been cast. You can use this to summon them and move back and start the rez before they reach you to avoid using swift. Most commonly on a priest, with a more accessible ambulant, you can summon dead and ambulant the rez as they’re following you.
• Charge micromanagement
  • Healer has a lot of base rechargeable abilities especially as a priest build or a necro build. Make sure you are very commonly abusing downtime to recharge your plethora of rechargeable abilities on healer. But don’t avoid your duties as a healer to charge unless the spell you specifically need it out and needs charged.
• Necromancer positioning
  • Necromancers need to be very aware of threats on the field and not taking too many risks because when they die, all of their Greater Undead Minion enchantments fall off, make sure to position safely and be wary of ranged projectiles being sent your way.
• Experienced Greater Release
  • As healer, experiencing greater release is a must, it gives you very consistent and powerful ranged support that you can easily get back with per life innate or per life steal life essence if you’re running priest, as priest will prevent your innate from being used on greater release.

Bard

• Proactively recharging allies
  • As a battery bard make sure you are constantly asking your allies if they need anything recharged.
• Tempo
  • Bard is the class that has to rely on making plays to gain tempo the most, which, in shorter terms, is using powerful spells you have a limited amount of early to gain a lead in shorter game types or games with an objective that can end the game early.
• Spacemaking/Zone Control
  • Bard can use lots of spells that make it easy to manipulate enemy movement. You can use Awe, Terror, Shove, and Lost to make enemies move from a given location to make space for your team and control an area.
• Looking for opportunity to attack
  • As Bard gets access to worn armor and songs that augment your combat abilities, bard can look for more opportunities to look for engagements for melee combat than other casters when using the build for it.
• Proper Song use
  • It’s important for a bard to get used to switching between multiple songs quickly, often referred to as “Song Juggling”. (ie: noticing someone is approaching you with an iceball so you turn on song of freedom to tank it, then you notice an archer positioning to shoot you so you quickly switch to song of deflection.)
• Suppression
  • Since Bard has dervish, you can stack verbals very high, and bard can take the largest stock of suppression if they build for it, which given the right game type can be a very effective build.
• Sleight of Mind
  • If you find free space on your build, consider picking up sleight of mind, it is an underrated support spell and being able to passively prevent dispel can be very handy.

Druid

• Enchantment choice/economy
  • When running an enchantment build, make sure to cater to the most useful style of enchantments for the given team and game type. If playing a support summoner, consider taking a balanced set of enchants that include important ones for specific players you know won’t likely lose their enchants easily, and another set that includes some more throwaway enchantments like druid’s poison since it is per life, or even a couple of barkskin.
• Naturalize Magic
  • As a support druid it is imperative to take naturalize magic because you have access to the most frontloaded set of dispel in the game to restore the balance of the game by burst dispelling several targets in quick succession.
• Offtank/Distract/Peel/Aggro
  • Avatar of Nature builds are very good at filling a flanker or offtank role and pulling aggression away from your team through trickery with teleport and stoneform. With the added help of magic armor, various crowd control spells, and good melee equipment you can waste several enemies’ time and allow your team to make plays elsewhere.
• Informed enchanting
  • Make sure to know your allies and give your high value enchants to players that are most likely to get value out of them and can avoid getting dispelled.
• Bow support
  • A more niche druid build, however you can tie up melee users with your ranged support, break weapons with arrows and force bolts, and support with this more unique style.
• Mending
  • Druid is the caster that has the most mending tools in the game so it is important to take a good handful when playing support, and even consider experiencing greater mend. When mending armor that needs more than 2 points of damage repaired it is more efficient to use greater mend to repair it.

Wizard

• Support Hybrid
  • Wizards can very easily fit in a good few support spells into their builds while still having a functional core of a more aggressive build around it, and can often fill multiple roles in a given game.
• Applying Various States
  • Wizard is the caster that can most consistently and practically apply the most states to enemies so they can take on scenarios in many different ways and should account for that.
• Immunity Avoidance
  • Wizard has access to a large collection of spells with different schools, and can get around enemy immunities with ease, so be sure to take a diverse set of spells.
• Toolbox
  • An archetype-less wizard has access to many many tools and is often the best way to play support wizard with a mix of spellballs, verbals, a couple enchantments, and many tools for different scenarios.
• Most Accessible Dispel
  • Wizard’s dispel is charge x3 by default, which makes it quite easy to get back, and therefore you should take it on any wizard build you can as you will likely be getting called on for dispelling targets a lot of the time, and rightfully so.
• Equipment Manipulation
  • Wizards have spellballs that destroy equipment, Heat Weapon, Shatter Weapon, Pyrotechnics, and Destroy Armor, which all assist in equipment destruction or disabling. This playstyle can be quite powerful and is known as a “Disruptor” or “Disabler” support style.
• Player Displacement
  • Wizard is very good at making people move with shoves and throws,as well as astral intervention into banish. Try out a build like this alongside battlemage and you’ll find it to be a very effective support.
• Void Touched/Enchanter
  • Wizard has a couple of high power enchantments that are worth protecting, and you can play wizard as a pocket support for someone with Void Touched and keep them enchanted by suppressing dispellers.

Scout

• Heal/Release/Tracking/Dispel
  • A little nod to scouts here, you have a lot of support tools for various situations, and keep in mind you can fill support roles especially on flanks and midline.
  • All of these abilities are extraordinary, which makes them incredibly unique in the fact they can support void touched and pro mag players. This also means they can do so while fighting, as they wont need a free hand.

Advanced Tech

• Incantation timing/manipulation
  • Changing the pace at which you are casting a spell to throw off an enemy’s timing or doing so to make sure an ally reaches you in time to receive the support of a touch spell.
• Spell Threat (free shove)
  • Casting a powerful spell at someone with the intention of not finishing it, often causing them to move back, essentially giving you a free shove.
• Swift Spellballs
  • An underrated use of swift to quickly get out a spellball to dispatch targets who get too close.
• Greater Release Interactions
  • Preemptively casting greater release on a barbarian before they die and changing the pace of your spell to remove their activated fight after death as soon as possible.
  • Freezing a wizard in elemental barrage with an iceball and greater releasing them but only removing the effect of elemental barrage and keeping them frozen since greater release allows you to leave on states of your choosing.
• Heal/Rez last line
  • You can convert a heal or rez into the other spell because they are the same incantation until the last line.
• Insult
  • Insulting an enemy support as a form of your own support to prevent them from casting support spells on their allies.
• Priest Ambulance
  • Since priest ambulant is so much more plentiful you can use the heal/rez last line trick while moving to run to someone in need, in an anticipatory fashion.
• Battlemage Positioning Baiting
  • As a battlemage since you never have to stop moving while casting, you can often miss-position yourself as a bait and get enemies to over commit to ruin their positioning and punish them for it.
• Ambulant Support spells
  • A very underrated use of ambulant, to use it with release as someone is being cast on, especially as a battlemage wizard, to save them just as the enemy spell lands.
• Insub shenanigans
  • Using your own spells to go voluntarily insubstantial, such as with lost or astral intervention + banish, allows you to use them as off the wall escapes in desperate scenarios.
• Spellball tech
  • Just a tip to build good spellballs. Make sure they have a good weight and a short tail to make sure they fly true and don’t get pulled by the wind as much.
• State stacking
  • Comboing either the stopped or stunned state into a different harder crowd control to make things easier to land in scenarios where you are against a nimble opponent you want to disable.
• Wounding legs or arms to disable
  • As a bow support you can shoot the legs of someone who is running, or the free hand of a caster to prevent a cast. You can also do the same thing as a wizard with wounding.
• Stun griefing
  • If you stun an armored target, you should ask their armor points and hit them exactly enough times to remove all of their armor, and then leg them. That way they are very damaged and will likely have to take a death at their own discretion, which will force them to lose persistent enchantments.
• Elemental barrage spellball combos
  • You can use specific orders of spellballs on targets while in elemental barrage to make the most use out of your spellballs. (ie: enemy caster with a shield and no armor should be hit with a lightning bolt or entangle to stop them and then 2 fireballs in a row to make sure their shield is destroyed and then they receive a wounds kill hit)
• Touch release swift trick
  • When touch releasing an enemy, you can stop casting it after the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd line to begin casting it again but with a swift to throw off their timing.
• Self shove heart of the swarm
  • While in heart of the swarm, even though you are stopped you can actually shove yourself to move around 20 ft at a time, which can help with repositioning the now mobile respawn.
• Precasting
  • Casting a spell preemptively before it is needed to finish it right as it is needed, this has many many applications. (ie: casting release behind someone who is being awed to save them from the upcoming forced movement.)
• Support shielding
  • As a class with resurrect, using your shield to cover the torso of your dead teammate to ensure they don’t immediately die to an arrow after they are brought back to life.
• Drawstring dagger
  • Crafting a dagger with a drawstring that can attach to your wrist in some fashion so you can drop it while still having it on your person as a sword and dagger caster to free up a hand for casting.
• Take 0 Costs
  • Always make sure to buy cancel, free heal on healer priest, and all equipment you can as a ranger druid.