Combat Roles #7 - Support

The Support Role is often the least glamorous, but one of the most essential combat roles. You don't focus on dealing a lot of damage, you make sure your comrades can do damage and there are a few different ways you can go about doing that.

The first way is by providing healing for your party. You keep your party members standing so they can keep dishing out the damage. Clerics do this well, druids are ok, and bards are passable. 3.5/Pathfinder have both taken steps to prevent clerics from being nothing but healing batteries, so you can do more than in earlier editions of D&D, but often the party will continue to look to you for healing, so be prepared to have at least a little bit on hand.

The second way to play a support character is to buff your party members and debuff the monsters. This means you try to increase the likely hood of your friends hitting, doing more damage, or improving their skill checks while hindering your opponents. Flanking is the easiest way to help people hit, while Aiding Another can help your party hit or make the monsters miss more often. Increasing or decreasing damage will typically require spells which almost all the casting classes have access to in some way shape or form.

While not glamorous in the least, you do play a crucial role. The vast number of +1 and +2 bonuses you can hand out to your allies quickly add up, making them (and often yourself when all is said and done) into truly effective combat machines. After you've done your "buffs" you can often wade into combat with decent efficacy, but you should always be prepared to stop attacking to help an ally in need, with either more buffs or more healing.