Why do we still have enmity?

[Jandor]

One thing I imagined a long time ago is a debuff tied to the gap in enmity. Basically, enmity would be separated in "Floors", and your tank stance would put a "Tunnel vision" debuff that increases direct/critical hit rate for anyone that is below your Floor (the wider the gap, the stronger the debuff). This way, even if you're top enmity, you'd still want to build enmity to give more and more stacks to your comrades and make their DPS skyrocket, which would in turn, make maintaining the gap more difficult, etc...

Could be tied to a slightly revised enemy list instead of a buff/debuff system.



It would still be functionally the same behind the scenes, I'd just rather not have yet another little symbol on the boss bar to keep track of.

Angry red square means it's looking right at you, therefore your chance of DH/Crit is lower.
Calm green dot means the enemy barely even registers your existence, plenty of opportunity for critical strikes.

Tanks would get tools to reverse or otherwise alter these effects.

[Doozer]

They should either give thanks the current healer treatment (get rid of damage, buff defenses and give tanking abilities) or remove tanks and make them dps classes.

lolwut

/10char

[Kaitoo]

Why do we have actual areas with mobs that are so non-dangerous that you can auto afk walk by and the areas are empty?
Just one of the things they plugged in the game without really understanding or utilizing in cause "its a mmorpg! must have this in it!"

[Reynhart]

Could be tied to a slightly revised enemy list instead of a buff/debuff system.

You already have numbers and bars next to your name to indicate the hate order of your target, you could easily use those numbers to indicate your floor instead.

It would also give some indications when the floors are stable and thus, you could focus a little on your personal DPS, if enmity and DPS are not optimized by the same rotation.

[Kalise]

Is this thread implying that Enmity is actually a thing that Tank's pay attention to in the current state of the game?

Where enmity is a non-factor so long as DPS/Healers press Diversion/Lucid Dream on CD and Tanks Circle-Shirk during a fight...

Enmity has been a non-factor for Tanks in MMO's for years now, since it's a terrible mechanic that is made "Relevant" by being unfun due to limiting DPS classes ability to deal damage because of them having to worry about not causing too much enmity.

As far as Tanking goes, it has never been interesting. It's either something you completely ignore (As it is just passively applied in copious amounts), or something you spend every single second spamming out. Or if you take TESO's approach, it's really annoying because you just spam a skill that forces enemies to attack you for a period of time repeatedly (Which was one of the reasons I quit that game, Tanking was just boring... Pressing one of 2 Taunt skills every 12 seconds...)

[Argyle_Darkheart]

[Enmity is] either something you completely ignore (As it is just passively applied in copious amounts), or something you spend every single second spamming out.

That's simply not true; you yourself even say as much earlier in your post.

Now, I'm not saying that enmity management is currently all that interesting, but it doesn't fit into either of the two extremes you've outlined.

[Dzian]

Enmity has been a non-factor for Tanks in MMO's for years now, since it's a terrible mechanic that is made "Relevant" by being unfun due to limiting DPS classes ability to deal damage because of them having to worry about not causing too much enmity.

Think that's partly down to MMOs being dumbed down so much over the years. Some of the old school MMOs enmity was actually pretty fun to utilise and work with.

Even the old school days of final fantasy XI. Where you could for example use trick attacks to do insane spikes of damage and pass massive amounts of enmity to a specific party member. And also had various other tools to manipulate it.

Also in things like FFXI enmity wasnt static it was a dynamically changing value. Would go up as well as down. So if you got smacked for 1000 damage you would pretty much lose 1000 enmity. and it also had a natural rate of decay over time.

By comparison in newer mmos it's just something that goes up and up and up and up to infinity basically and like many things in MMOs the only reason they get boring and unfun is because they get dumbed down so much and over simplified

In XIV you can seem the same with basic resource management and why they're getting rid of TP. Because it's been dumbed down so much over time its become pointless when since 4.0 you basically never run out...

or even stats. even the basic stats are boring because the system has been dumbed down amd simplified so much that the only stat that actually ever matters is I-Level.

the more you make things simple the more they become unfun..

[Reynhart]

As far as Tanking goes, it has never been interesting. It's either something you completely ignore (As it is just passively applied in copious amounts), or something you spend every single second spamming out.

Problem is, when a mechanic is not interesting, removing it is not automatically the best solution, because people will only complain about something else not being interesting, until you strip your game of everything.

On the other hand, you could tweak the mechanic to make it interesting. And this game is just full of those.
Main stats are boring because each job only focuses on one of them, that is automatically granted by gear anyway, you could fuse all of them (except Vit) into "Power" and every job would work the same. Change them so that jobs would benefit from more than one.

Substats are boring because the only thing they do in the end is increasing your DPS, so that you could literally remove them and adjust the attack power on each item to reach the same results (Except maybe some very specific sweet spot on speed). Give them a different effect so that specific builds work better on different target. What comes to mind is armored ennemies and a critical hit that could ignore defense (Like in Dragon Quest), nimble ennemies that would require a different value of accuracy (Back when it existed), speed that would actually affect all your CD and also your movement speed, useful for fights that require lots of movement, etc...

Materia melding is boring because it also only affect your DPS in the end. Make more of them so that you could actually create builds like you did in FFVII. We're afraid of button bloat ? Why not have "All" materia that would transform your skills into AoE instead of doubling down everything. Why not have "Counter" materia ? Why not have "Ressources+" materia to build your gauge faster ?

And yes, enmity right now is boring because it requires no thought process and doesn't change anything gameplaywise.

[Kalise]

That's simply not true; you yourself even say as much earlier in your post.

Now, I'm not saying that enmity management is currently all that interesting, but it doesn't fit into either of the two extremes you've outlined.

When did I state something contrary to that?

Enmity is not utilized by Tanks outside of a 2-3 GCD's at the start of a pull. After which it is completely ignored because oGCD skills are spammed on CD to "Manage" it (With stuff like Lucid Dream/Refresh being used primarily for MP and just happen to also completely negate Enmity needs)

Think that's partly down to MMOs being dumbed down so much over the years.

Nah, even old school MMO's had enmity being terrible.

Stuff like Everquest/vanilla WoW simply had Tanks spam out Enmity skills 24/7 and its only interaction was DPS would have to slow down/stop DPS when their enmity got too high (Which is a decidedly not fun mechanic for DPS and something that doesn't really bother the tank at all because they're just spamming as much as they can)

This was to the point where back in the day in WoW, people had to wait for Tanks to build up stacks of Sunder to have enough enmity before people could start attacking. With also times where if people got some lucky crits in a row, they'd then have to stop attacking and wait for the Tank to catch up in enmity.

Meanwhile other classic MMO's such as Anarchy Online, simply had Tanking classes generate a bunch of hate by doing their thing (Or would have makeshift Tanks by having someone who would generate aggro easily through things like Healing while having some decent defence "Tank" stuff)

Enmity has simply never been an interesting or engaging mechanic. Even "Fun" tools to manipulate it (Such as Tricks of the Trade/Trick Attack) were simply just damage buffs that diverted enmity but where often redundant for their enmity generation outside of maybe making pulls easier.

There is simply nothing interesting that can be done with such a binary mechanic. Where it's a case of "You have highest enmity and the thing is attacking you" or "You don't have highest enmity and the thing is not attacking you". With maybe some occasional mechanics that cause special attacks to someone who's second on the enmity list or bottom of the enmity list, but that's just further binary actions.

Which is why TESO literally does just make it a binary mechanic. Either the enemy is taunted and thus forced to attack you or it isn't and it will attack whomever tf it feels like.

(Also, in response to a prior poster claiming that damage is also binary, that is not the case. While the result is "Enemy is alive" or "Enemy is dead" and thus binary, dealing damage is not. The more damage you deal, the more damage you deal and the faster the enemy dies.

This scales infinitely, up until you have enough damage to kill the enemy in a single attack. With Enmity, it doesn't matter if you're 1 point above everyone else or 1,000,000 points above everyone else, the enemy will still be attacking you.

Thus once you generate enough enmity to maintain a lead over everyone else, more enmity generation is literally useless as it won't do a thing)

[Reynhart]

(Also, in response to a prior poster claiming that damage is also binary, that is not the case. While the result is "Enemy is alive" or "Enemy is dead" and thus binary, dealing damage is not. The more damage you deal, the more damage you deal and the faster the enemy dies.
This scales infinitely, up until you have enough damage to kill the enemy in a single attack. With Enmity, it doesn't matter if you're 1 point above everyone else or 1,000,000 points above everyone else, the enemy will still be attacking you.
Thus once you generate enough enmity to maintain a lead over everyone else, more enmity generation is literally useless as it won't do a thing)

Probably being the prior poster you're talking about, I've presented a system where enmity would not just be "enemy is attacking you" and thus not binary anymore.

Enmity has simply never been an interesting or engaging mechanic. Even "Fun" tools to manipulate it (Such as Tricks of the Trade/Trick Attack) were simply just damage buffs that diverted enmity but where often redundant for their enmity generation outside of maybe making pulls easier.

Except that Trick Attack was better paired with Sneak Attack for another damage buff, that required hitting the back of the target. Problem is that pairing the two would result in massive damage and massive hate spike so that if the tank didn't know how to manage enmity (That would decay overtime), you'd take the risk of killing a DPS, or the stragery would be for the tank to purposefully lose aggro to the DPS for a short time so that the Thief could hit the back of the ennemy while being in the tank's back too...So your capacity as generating enmity would actually affect how your team would perform.