Why do we still have enmity?

So as I'm going over the various changes to the tank role it's starting to feel like there's really no point in enmity even existing any more. If a tank can just sit there in the tanking stance with no penalty and there's no longer enmity-building combos or enmity-mitigation abilities-- Diversion, Smoke Screen, and so on-- why even have the mechanic at all?

Whether or not it was intentional, it seems like enmity has been set up to more or less handle itself in this expansion. If, hypothetically, Paladins had a trait that caused Shield Lob or Total Eclipse to make their current target automatically attack them, or Provoke was changed to something like, "Forces the target to attack you", would that be functionally any different than how things are shaping up to be at current?

I've always been of the opinion that threat management was a key component of the tanking experience and these changes essentially remove that by automating the process and making it effortless.

I'm concerned that it's not only will this not feel like tanking any more and be like playing another DPS class except you have to use damage mitigation cooldowns sometimes, but also that this will have the added effect of homogenizing the tank jobs to the point where the things that made those classes unique and valuable in different circumstances will be gone.

Paladin used to have the edge in off-tanking because of Divine Veil, Cover, Passage of Arms and Intervention. Now every tank will have a single-target and AoE mitigation ability and Cover has been nerfed back to it's pre-20% days. Warrior used to have the early-fight enmity gain potential, the best HP, and the top damage. Now there's no damage penalty on tank stances, Defiance is gone and all tanks have, allegedly, been tuned to the same damage potential.

If you are going to streamline a mechanic to the point of automation what's the point in that mechanic still existing?

Enmity is still a thing because other people aren't tanks. And mainly threat management is more of a non-tank thing, because it's easy for tanks to hold it usually, though sometimes a RDM in a low level dungeon or something can take it away at the start of a fight, so it's up to them to make sure they don't.

I think you're freaking out over nothing and everyone will calm down once we can actually play ShB.

honestly dont think tanks should be the ones to deal with enmity.
all 3 roles should have DPS upkeep one of their 2 priorities.
Tanks 2nd should be mitigation
Healers should be healing
and DPS have no secondary utility to groups normally in most MMOs, so honestly make all DPS have -enmity or +enmity abilities, and have them actually do something outside of just DPSing. (look at HW, and how SE focused on adding complexity to DPS, because tey knew DPS didnt have much to do, so they threw more complexity at them in their rotations.)

I never thought enmity is a key component of tanking.
It is part of tanking but neither a key component nor the key component.
It's more like the foundation tanking is build on.
No enmity = no tanking.
But managing enmity is not part of tanking just gaining and keeping, because for me enmity always was just a binary value, having or not having.

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Originally Posted by Legion88

But managing enmity is not part of tanking just gaining and keeping, because for me enmity always was just a binary value, having or not having.

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Technically, killing or not killing is also a binary value, yet you have lots of tools to manage how to kill more efficiently, and it could be the same for enmity. Healers and DPS should take enmity back from you if you don't put some effort into doing a proper "enmity" rotation.

Sorry for the comparison, but in FFXI, having a healer pop Benediction to bring everybody back to full was frequently a death sentence because of the massive enmity it created and it was kind of a great pride when the monster didn't even turn around for that when you managed to build enough enmity beforehand. Also, there wasn't a "force you to hate me" move, so taking enmity back from someone else could take time and had disatrous consequences, and tank swaps required far more coordination (Between two low-level NINs, for example).


Also, the game loves for tanks to build ressources and spend those on skills, why don't use enmity for that ? This way, you'd have to manage how much enmity you're allowed to spend without losing the target.

I liked enmity too, liked it was a thing the whole party managed as well.

But most didn't, and they were very vocal, so they got what they wanted.

Enmity has become less and less of a thing throughout the game's development, but I think the paradigm in Stormblood is actually pretty healthy; the only real issue is that PLD sucks at pulling the boss.

I can't say I'm happy about the direction Shadowbringers is going, with regards to enmity management, but I don't really care that much, honestly.

What is the point of being a tank if they even remove enmity?

I mean, as things stand right now you're pretty much a blue dps. You only focus on doing damage and press a button when the tank buster comes.
You only aim to get stats that boost your offence (anyone even remember parry nowdays?)
Everything else has been oversimplified or outright removed. Heck people will even call you a bad tank for using Tank Stance.

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.

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

Technically, killing or not killing is also a binary value, yet you have lots of tools to manage how to kill more efficiently, and it could be the same for enmity. Healers and DPS should take enmity back from you if you don't put some effort into doing a proper "enmity" rotation.

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Killing or not killing is not binary, living and death are binary. Killing is a process.
Also we are now at a point when we only have a enmity rotation, just like you seem to want it.

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

Also, the game loves for tanks to build ressources and spend those on skills, why don't use enmity for that ? This way, you'd have to manage how much enmity you're allowed to spend without losing the target.

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Sure. If you can balance a tank with the enmity and a tank not having the enmity and if you can make the enmity and at least the enmity overflow quantifyable. Go for it. I would like this idea would bring a nice twist to the system.

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Originally Posted by Legion88

Also we are now at a point when we only have a enmity rotation, just like you seem to want it.

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The problem is that we basically have a "swiss army knife" rotation. Whenever you are in the fight, this unique rotation will always fills all your goals be it DPS, enmity, ressource building, etc...And I feel that it's a little boring. For me, you should have to decide wether you need more ressource (To spend on your defense, or synchronize with a burst window) or more enmity, at the cost temporarily reducing your DPS, or if you can maintain your current DPS for the time being.

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Originally Posted by Legion88

If you can balance a tank with the enmity and a tank not having the enmity and if you can make the enmity and at least the enmity overflow quantifyable. Go for it. I would like this idea would bring a nice twist to the system.

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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...

On a sidenote, it would make recovering from death less punishing, since you'd be back at "Floor 1" and could gain a huge Crit/DH buff :p

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

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...

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

https://i.imgur.com/cBjedQA.png

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.

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Originally Posted by Ivellior

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.

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lolwut

/10char

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!"

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Originally Posted by Jandor

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

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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.

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...)

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Originally Posted by Kalise

[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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by Kalise

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.

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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..

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Originally Posted by Kalise

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by Argyle_Darkheart

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.

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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)

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Originally Posted by Dzian

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

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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)

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Originally Posted by Kalise

(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)

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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.

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Originally Posted by Kalise

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by Kalise

When did I state something contrary to that?

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Right here.

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

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Emphasis mine.

The fact of the matter is that enmity is currently managed. That it's to the point where tanks almost never use their enmity combo isn't really the point. Enmity isn't something you can ignore in its entirety, nor is it something you have to constantly monitor.

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Originally Posted by Kalise

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.)

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Originally Posted by Kalise

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)

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true pottery ~

> The_Distinguished_Anarchist

I saw you over in the healer forums too freaking out because Yoshi P said they wanted healers to heal more. Is this what you do? You just bounce between different boards complaining about things you don't understand?

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

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.

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Except that your "solution" doesn't really do anything about enmity control, other than make it so that Tanks simply spam out enmity 24/7 because it will provide the largest boost in rDPS.

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Originally Posted by Argyle_Darkheart

The fact of the matter is that enmity is currently managed. That it's to the point where tanks almost never use their enmity combo isn't really the point. Enmity isn't something you can ignore in its entirety, nor is it something you have to constantly monitor.

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It isn't managed though. Unless pressing Diversion on CD is "Managing enmity" since the other mentioned actions are done anyway. Circle-shirking happens when tank swaps happen anyway and people pop Lucid/Refresh for MP on CD anyway.

Outside of pressing Diversion on CD, no-one actually gives a damn about enmity because it's a non-factor.

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Originally Posted by Kaitoo

true pottery ~

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I like the part where you disregard other words in the post. Including the very next sentence.

You know, the part where I state:

"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)"

Which is literally in the quote you provided.

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Originally Posted by Kalise

It isn't managed though. Unless pressing Diversion on CD is "Managing enmity" since the other mentioned actions are done anyway. Circle-shirking happens when tank swaps happen anyway and people pop Lucid/Refresh for MP on CD anyway.

Outside of pressing Diversion on CD, no-one actually gives a damn about enmity because it's a non-factor.

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Serious question, have you done any of the Savage content this expansion, or either of the Ultimate encounters?

Enmity isn't as much of a non-issue as you would like to paint it; I can only guess why you're so insistent that it is.

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Originally Posted by Kalise

. 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)

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This is because enmity only ever goes up and up and up.

In older games it was a lot more dynamic so it did matter. If you only had a point nity lead then next time the boss hots you. Your going to lose that and then he'll turn to someone else where as a bigger lead would help but decays over time..

It's not to unlike life really. I could call someone at work an idiot and they might get really mad at me in that moment but few minutes later hes probably calmed down a bit.

Or hes turned around and given me what for and blew off some steam that way and then calmed down.. and all is forgotten

If it were like 14 I could call him an idiot and hed still be mega mad at me next year....

It's one of those things isn't it, everyone says enmity isn't an issue at all, often leaving out the so long as everyone does their bit to manage it factor.

Well, yeah, so long as everyone is managing everything correctly HP isn't an issue either, neither are enrage timers, or any other mechanic for that matter.

The difficulty in this game comes from harder encounters requiring you to play closer and closer to perfect, enmity is admittedly a rather low hurdle to clear on your way to perfect play, but games do benefit from having some easy hurdles to clear at the start.

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Originally Posted by Kalise

Except that your "solution" doesn't really do anything about enmity control, other than make it so that Tanks simply spam out enmity 24/7 because it will provide the largest boost in rDPS.

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Not necessarily. Depending on how Floors are calculated or how enmity tools work, you could switch between optimizing Enmity or DPS.
For example, let's imagine that the effect of Provoke is to put you at the beginning of the next floor.

• If you know you won't be able to generate enough enmity to reach that next floor by yourself by the time Provoke is available, you'd better do your DPS rotation, then use Provoke, and start buiding enmity from that next floor.
  
• On the other hand, if you have some skills that would allow you to reach that floor by yourself, you'd keep your enmity rotation, and only use Provoke once you reach the next floor, thus gaining two floors at the same time.

It's still a bit raw, but I'm pretty sure you could polish this kind of mechanics to make enmity more engaging.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

This is because enmity only ever goes up and up and up.

In older games it was a lot more dynamic so it did matter. If you only had a point nity lead then next time the boss hots you. Your going to lose that and then he'll turn to someone else where as a bigger lead would help but decays over time..

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Except...

Older games had the exact same mechanic of enmity only ever goes up.

It didn't "Decay". Only certain boss mechanics would force enmity resets (Which would just lead to you doing your pull rotation again. I.e. In games where it mattered, people would stop DPSing and you'd stack your Sunders. In games where it didn't matter, you just spammed your stuff like normal after maybe a taunt)

Even if it DID decay... It would have no effect other than arbitrarily increasing the amount generated to being "X + Y per second" where X is the amount of enmity per second the highest DPS on the list is and Y is the amount of decay.

This is due to the fact that the reason why Enmity is such a non-factor is because the only people that should be getting hit are Tanks. When there's only 1-2 Tanks in a party, then having complex enmity mechanics that can make other people potentially get targeted makes no sense.

For enmity to actually be an interesting mechanic, it would need to be created from the ground up as a unique mechanic as opposed to an independent modifier to justify Tanks doing less DPS/HPS than DPS/Healers (Since that's really the only reason why enmity mechanics actually exist. Otherwise you could simply make it based on DPS/HPS output since that'd have the same effect and then there would be no binary nonsense because as I mentioned, DPS scales infinitely until you one shot an enemy)

Though, it's hard to design something interesting when it still has to focus around the binary system of "Is attacking the Tank" or "Is not attacking the Tank" due to the way Holy Trinity games function.

Games without the Holy Trinity, tend to be able to have more interesting enmity mechanics because it's less important for enemies to be constantly focusing on a singular "Tank" character.

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Originally Posted by Jandor

It's one of those things isn't it, everyone says enmity isn't an issue at all, often leaving out the so long as everyone does their bit to manage it factor.

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Though... When "So long as everyone does their bit to manage it" happens to be "Press your MP recovery skill on CD to recover MP... Also dump your enmity" "Press Shirk after you Tank Swap" "Press Diversion alongside your other burst CD's" it does heavily mitigate how much it matters.

If it wasn't, then it wouldn't be so easy for SE to simply delete Diversion and give Tanks an enmity toggle while deleting enmity skills and modifiers (Such as on Onslaught)

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

Not necessarily. Depending on how Floors are calculated or how enmity tools work, you could switch between optimizing Enmity or DPS.
For example, let's imagine that the effect of Provoke is to put you at the beginning of the next floor.

• If you know you won't be able to generate enough enmity to reach that next floor by yourself by the time Provoke is available, you'd better do your DPS rotation, then use Provoke, and start buiding enmity from that next floor.
  
• On the other hand, if you have some skills that would allow you to reach that floor by yourself, you'd keep your enmity rotation, and only use Provoke once you reach the next floor, thus gaining two floors at the same time.

It's still a bit raw, but I'm pretty sure you could polish this kind of mechanics to make enmity more engaging.

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So... If I'm understanding this right, you can visualize this as some sort of Limit Break gauge type system. Where each bar is a "Floor" of enmity.

So, Tanks generate enmity and fill up the bars which provide DPS boosts. While DPS fill up the bars and then lose the DPS boosts.

With the idea being that, enmity combos can fill up bars without using Provoke, while Provoke takes you just to the next bar.

So that the idea is that the reason why you wouldn't simply just spam enmity combo's 24/7 is because at some point, maybe, you might hit a point where the bar fills up so slowly that you won't be able to fill it until Provoke is back off CD anyway so you may as well just spam DPS until Provoke is back off CD...

But, somehow, swapping to that DPS combo over the enmity combo won't cause you to generate such a low amount of enmity that you start to lose some of your lead... Which of course wouldn't then mean you just spammed DPS combos 24/7 and Provoked on CD because reasons?

To say nothing about how this system works with Tank swaps? Who's going to get aggro? What happens if both tanks are simply spamming Provoke on CD to generate "Floors"? How will the actual basics of what enmity is supposed to do actually function? Or will this literally be just another completely unrelated mechanic while enmity continues to work as current and be a non-factor?

Enmity was never an issue, threat is easy to hold, just stay in tank stance and gg. The problem comes in the form of having to also push dps for raid encounters and the stances were just clunky at best. The reason it still exists is because you still have to have tank swaps. I can't think of any currently in ffxiv, but there are some bosses in wow who are immune to taunt and the tanks actually have to find another way to deal with the tank swaps.

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Originally Posted by The_Distinguished_Anarchist

So as I'm going over the various changes to the tank role it's starting to feel like there's really no point in enmity even existing any more. If a tank can just sit there in the tanking stance with no penalty and there's no longer enmity-building combos or enmity-mitigation abilities-- Diversion, Smoke Screen, and so on-- why even have the mechanic at all?

Whether or not it was intentional, it seems like enmity has been set up to more or less handle itself in this expansion. If, hypothetically, Paladins had a trait that caused Shield Lob or Total Eclipse to make their current target automatically attack them, or Provoke was changed to something like, "Forces the target to attack you", would that be functionally any different than how things are shaping up to be at current?

I've always been of the opinion that threat management was a key component of the tanking experience and these changes essentially remove that by automating the process and making it effortless.

I'm concerned that it's not only will this not feel like tanking any more and be like playing another DPS class except you have to use damage mitigation cooldowns sometimes, but also that this will have the added effect of homogenizing the tank jobs to the point where the things that made those classes unique and valuable in different circumstances will be gone.

Paladin used to have the edge in off-tanking because of Divine Veil, Cover, Passage of Arms and Intervention. Now every tank will have a single-target and AoE mitigation ability and Cover has been nerfed back to it's pre-20% days. Warrior used to have the early-fight enmity gain potential, the best HP, and the top damage. Now there's no damage penalty on tank stances, Defiance is gone and all tanks have, allegedly, been tuned to the same damage potential.

If you are going to streamline a mechanic to the point of automation what's the point in that mechanic still existing?

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Maybe paladins don't want to offtank? But were forced infinite because of their kit, now anyone can be mt or ot. Before the arguemen t of so play warrior if you want to be mt gets thrown in... I dislike warrior play style. Drk is ok, but I've always been a tank naturalist in games.. sword and board just feels aesthetically right.

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Originally Posted by Kalise

But, somehow, swapping to that DPS combo over the enmity combo won't cause you to generate such a low amount of enmity that you start to lose some of your lead... Which of course wouldn't then mean you just spammed DPS combos 24/7 and Provoked on CD because reasons?

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The lead is mainly counted in Floors. If you don't have enough time to finish a floor before using Provoke, the enmity you'd have gained by your enmity combo is wasted. If, during that time, one of the DPS gain one Floor, you just can't do anything about it, since he would have gained that Floor anyway.
As for spamming Provoke on CD, is also depend on the rest of the toolkit. Of course, if enmity becomes a proper mechanic, we can expect tanks to have several skills to manage it. Also, if Provoke became available when you're on the verge of gaining a Floor, you'd obviously delay it after you've gained that floor to gain another one right away. Exactly like DRG wouldn't use Life Surge if the next weapon skill is True Thrust.

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Originally Posted by Kalise

To say nothing about how this system works with Tank swaps? Who's going to get aggro? What happens if both tanks are simply spamming Provoke on CD to generate "Floors"?

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It's not always strategic for the OT to gain too much floors, since it would only prevent him from gaining the full buff. As for tank swaps, Shirk would already help a lot and would basically transfer floors to someone else. You could also have skills that spend floors for other uses, to purposefully reduce your enmity, and let someone go above you. But you'd probably would have to do some stuff to facilitate the swap instead of simply letting the other Provoke. On a sidenote, I personally think that if so much fight require a tank swap, it's also because that's one of the only mechanics related to enmity.

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Originally Posted by Kalise

Or will this literally be just another completely unrelated mechanic while enmity continues to work as current and be a non-factor?

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Considering that the basic effect of enmity is "who's attacked", and that the target would still be the one with the highest floor, this would still be counted as "enmity".

Because you still need the tank to keep the mobs from killing your dps and healers....

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Originally Posted by Kaedan

Because you still need the tank to keep the mobs from killing your dps and healers....

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That doesn't require enmity.

Enemies could just automatically attack the party member with the blue icon.

In two tank situations they could automatically attack the blue icon with the attack me button pressed.

I mean, that is essentially what we've got now, but enmity does still appear to technically exist as a "thing".

Enmity is still a thing because it determines who's being attacked, and there still may be some off tank mechanics here or there that target 2nd on enmity etc.

As for it dumbing down tanking, technically sure, but the goal from a min/max or high performance perspective was always to use tank stance and enmity combos as little as possible, usually only at the very start of a boss fight wasn't it? So I don't tend to see it as a huge loss. For tanking we still have positioning, management of defensive cooldowns and bilities, and now every tank will have something to help protect the party as well. The whole 'blue dps' thing, while I can see where people are coming from, I don't feel is quite true even with the enmity changes. Even before these chagnes you generally spent far more time doing your dps rotation than doing enmity combos anyway, unless you're a pre HW paladin and your only combo IS your enmity combo.

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Originally Posted by Bright-Flower

For tanking we still have positioning, management of defensive cooldowns and bilities, and now every tank will have something to help protect the party as well.

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And likely a greater focus on interrupting/stunning attacks considering how they are making interruptable attacks more noticeable and Tank have both interrupts and stuns.

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Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

And likely a greater focus on interrupting/stunning attacks considering how they are making interruptable attacks more noticeable and Tank have both interrupts and stuns.

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True, though I think they're also giving that to ranged dps too? Though I imagine tanks will probably be in charge of it more often, unless these abilities happen often enough you need to rotate interupts like some WoW bosses. Is head graze on the gcd for ranged physical? If so then they'll definitely want the tanks to handle it I think. And depending on the content you may not always have a ranged physical in duty finder.

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Originally Posted by Bright-Flower

True, though I think they're also giving that to ranged dps too? Though I imagine tanks will probably be in charge of it more often, unless these abilities happen often enough you need to rotate interupts like some WoW bosses. Is head graze on the gcd for ranged physical? If so then they'll definitely want the tanks to handle it I think. And depending on the content you may not always have a ranged physical in duty finder.

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Head Graze is ogcd, but we may see the return of T1 ADS style "interrupt an attack every 15s" in some high end fights.

Well if what you have to worry about now is not an enmity combo, and instead a proficient damage rotation... If you can't keep enmity even with tank stance on, that means you're doing something wrong right?