Fostering Skillful Play

[Sarick]

I can offer hundreds of crappy solutions. Hell, I have offered hundreds of crappy solutions to various problems over the years. None of them got used. You want me to take a stab at fixing tanking in general? Enjoy my unrefined first draft:

First, the whole enmity system would need an overhaul. One possible solution would be to split Cumulative Enmity (CE) and Volatile Enmity (VE) into seperate categories for seperate actions. So there'd be melee damage CE and VE, ranged damage CE and VE, magic damage CE and VE, cures delivered CE and VE, buffs delivered CE and VE, debuffs delivered CE and VE, and assorted CE and VE, and possibly even more specific categories for more diversity in monster behavior (such as fire damage CE and VE, or waltz CE and VE). Various enemies would be given certain enmity habits. One might hate magical damage, so his magic CE and VE would grow at an accelerated rate, and decay slower. In this case, use melees to damage him and have your tank magic burst off SCs in addition to his normal tanking duties. This forces you to specialize your tank depending on the foe you face, so tanking is more diverse from situation to situation. It also gives you the ability to specialize your DDs so they pull less hate (if hate builds quickly for melee attacks, switch to ranged and magic attacks and let your tanks be the melees)

Very nice...

The whole idea of splitting enmity into multiple fronts would most definitely change how players get hate. Having Melee/Magic/Other Would allow melee to cap out hate rather fast in it's category but not effect magic, Where as magic nuking would only affect nuking. Others would be outside directly affecting the target IE buffs and cures on someone who had hate (including yourself) would raise this. The enemy would base their hate target on the average or of the three or average divisible by two for all these combined right? If so this would allow PLD and a few others to tank better because they could boost enmity on multiple fronts allowing for a much larger variances of hate while making it harder to cap total average hate. Others would be limited if they only utilize just using one or two of the hate utilities.

Very very very nice that's fostering better play.

Now that I think about it I think there could be another way to fix enmity by altering it so as hate increases the ability gain it decreases exponentially so it's nearly impossible to ever cap hate unless you use tools or abilities that deliberately bypass this.

If SE wants to fix the AOE issues PLD must have a better way to create an AURA of protection that actually last, with a short recast. Something like boost every 15 seconds that stacks on others. This means the tank would need to work protect everyone else. If PLD is so powerful now then this aura effect could even transfer a portion of the damage to the tank. It would definitely give players a reason to put a real tank back into the party.