Ditch the Tank Stances and fit enmity management into active gameplay

Since the "Increased enmity" Additional Effect got introduced to the AoE combos of every tank job, it could also be used as a way to ditch the Stance system, since they are a passive component and oftentimes a hindrance (such as having to toggle it on when level-synced or stealing aggro from the Main Tank when your damage output is far greater as an Off Tank).
My suggestion is to introduce a combo finisher for every tank job that has the Combo Bonus: Increased enmity. It should not deal less damage than other finishers and should leave the player with the option of using Provoke as an alternative.
Another suggestion to complement this addition would be to make an AoE version of Provoke, it could even use the same animation as the PvP action Rampage.
To my understanding, the "increased enmity" passive on the AoE combos was a response to the discrepancy in initial damage output from some DPS jobs, which would generate more enmity than a tank with Tank Stance on while pulling in dungeons. This demonstrates a fundamental flaw in Tank Stance's purpose. An AoE version of Provoke would likely avoid problems like this, depending on how much enmity is coded into the ability.

Some nuances of the proposed Increased enmity combo finisher:
This finisher has more potency than other finishers.
For Paladin, it grants Atonement Ready, but not Divine Might.
For Warrior, Storm's Path "Combo Bonus: Restores own HP" gets moved to the Increased enmity combo finisher. Storm's Path still increases Beast Gauge by 20, Increased enmity combo finisher increases it by 10, like Storm's Eye.
For Dark Knight, Souleater's "Combo Bonus: Restores own HP" gets moved to the Increased enmity combo finisher. Souleater still increases Blood Gauge by 20, Increased enmity combo finisher increases it by 10.
For Gunbreaker, Brutal Shell's "Combo Bonus: Restores own HP" and Barrier gets moved to the Increased enmity combo finisher. It doesn't add a Cartridge to the Powder Gauge.

Considerations:
Since I cannot iterate on these proposals in gameplay, it comes to question whether this proposed idea would be considered fun. Ideally, it would add nuance and differentiate playstyles between Main Tank and Off Tank in content that require multiple tanks and add active gameplay input in dungeons where pulling mobs and maintaining aggro is essential to not let damage fall upon allies. The proposed combo finisher depriving the Tank from potential damage output can also be called into question, as it would be the key difference between Main Tank and Off Tank gameplay.

Adding aggro to the aoe combo is fine but while i want tanks to have more combos I'm not a fan of enmity combos that slow down my gauge generation or healing. waiting till the thrid gcd in my combo to get that aggro gen sucks dude. if we do aggro combos then it should be its own full combo with huge aggro on each gcd and give full gauge+brutal shell type effects. Let me use the basic combo for off tanking.

The biggest issue is stances make tank swapping much more intuitive. without them you'd have to lower the cd of shirk to be closer to provoke.

Wanting to make aggro something to regularly manage again is fine but don't make the dps have to use shirk type abilities again. Stormblood dps could steal aggro really easy. Especially bard with foes requiem.

Also aoe provoke once existed and it was called ultimatum.

I don’t think anyone wants an agro system back where the person who controlled the agro was the NIN.

I think everyone would agree that if active agro management came back it should 100% be designed around only the tanks actually engaging with the system and its success being reliant on the tank, not whether the BRD pressed quelling strikes

This isn't to take shots at your post, because in essence I ultimately agree. Bring back enmity management, make it matter again. Perhaps make it more accessible with good visual UI too while we're at it.

- As pointed above, Ultimatum used to be a role action you could pick and acted as an AoE provoke.

- Current Provoke has been made braindead because it instantly adds +2k aggro potency after putting you at the top of the aggro table (+20k when used under tank stance due to the x10 multiplier). It used to have more synergy with stuff like Shirk for example for tank swaps, although Shirk didn't even exist before SB and tank swaps were already a thing, so Shirk was mostly QoL.

- The "increased enmity" on AoE combos is a remnant of the past when AoE combos for tanks didn't have a distinction between power potency combo and enmity combo like the single target variants: the ST variant enmity combos also used to have "increased enmity" to actually manage aggro outside of tank stance, but they got removed. The reason that "increased enmity" modifier existed was because tank stance wasn't an aggro stance primarily, even if it helped (x 1.7 aggro), but a defensive stance (+20% mitigation, now baked into Tank Mastery). They could remove it today and it wouldn't change anything, much like the ST filler combo is already affected by the modern tank stance anyway (x10 enmity). Same shit with the ranged attacks. Anything you hit as a tank will get a ludicrous aggro multiplier from the stance today so aggro management has essentially become a binary "did you hit something with tank stance on or not".

I too would love seeing a return to more organic aggro management, and I think the old system worked fine enough. Some things could always be made better, and I'm pretty neutral on whether or not the rest of the party should partake in it a little or not, the main issue was mostly that pressing an aggro button on cooldown was hardly enthralling, and giving to NIN such a meta tool like Shadewalker/Smokescreen and not to anybody else was also a recipe for meta disasters. I'd be actually fine with a lot of roles having access to it, if just rphys actually (because of its stated identity and because we're still looking for justification for the ranged tax).

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Originally Posted by Reginald_Cain

Wanting to make aggro something to regularly manage again is fine but don't make the dps have to use shirk type abilities again.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

I think everyone would agree that if active agro management came back it should 100% be designed around only the tanks actually engaging with the system and its success being reliant on the tank, not whether the BRD pressed quelling strikes

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Originally Posted by Valence

I too would love seeing a return to more organic aggro management, and I think the old system worked fine enough.

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I'm glad we are on the same page. I'm not an old player by a mile, started playing at the final patches of Shadowbringers (and haven't stopped ever since), so I'm not familiar with the old style of enmity management, my suggestions are based purely on the lack of friction I've felt ever since I started playing (I like playing tank in most if not all games that have this role).
The idea of DPS roles being involved in enmity management is alien to me and doesn't seem like a good time. In my opinion, Tanks should be about mitigation and enmity management, Healers about damage prevention and HP restoration, and DPS about rotation execution and careful positioning, even when the loop of damage dealing is an universal constant. Of course, it doesn't take into account the developers' intention, as it is what, in fact, dictates game design decisions.

Enmity from attacks never made sense to me. Logically enmity attacks are not different from other attacks yet they make enemies focus on you for some reason and in gameplay they're not much different in use from regular attacks, although they at least require some player thought in choosing which attack to use. If an enmity system came back I think it should revolve around tanks disrupting enemy offense instead of being a second set of tank attacks. Some examples would include a tank building enmity by using Reprisal and stunning enemies out of attack with abilities like Low Blow or by shielding allies. This creates a more sensible reason for enemies to aggo on to the tank and also centers tank gameplay around something that is more unique than DPSing with different buttons.

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Originally Posted by Kowaeru

The idea of DPS roles being involved in enmity management is alien to me and doesn't seem like a good time. In my opinion, Tanks should be about mitigation and enmity management, Healers about damage prevention and HP restoration, and DPS about rotation execution and careful positioning, even when the loop of damage dealing is an universal constant. Of course, it doesn't take into account the developers' intention, as it is what, in fact, dictates game design decisions.

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In reality it wasn't that much of a problem, it just made things more organic in a way. If you had DPS players not pressing their aggro mitigation button on CD, the tank would just have to perform more aggro combos than normal, since the whole game for tanks was to balance between aggro combos and power combos, out of tank stance if possible. And then came Ninja that offered aggro management tools to support the tank and you essentially ended in raiding/optimized setups with tanks not needing to do a single aggro combo except at the start, which played into the job being too meta already, and kinda negated the purpose

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Originally Posted by Valence

In reality it wasn't that much of a problem, it just made things more organic in a way. If you had DPS players not pressing their aggro mitigation button on CD, the tank would just have to perform more aggro combos than normal, since the whole game for tanks was to balance between aggro combos and power combos, out of tank stance if possible. And then came Ninja that offered aggro management tools to support the tank and you essentially ended in raiding/optimized setups with tanks not needing to do a single aggro combo except at the start, which played into the job being too meta already, and kinda negated the purpose

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This why despite wanting more combos I don't want them strictly tied to enmity. If an entire combo is only used once a fight there's no point.

For my end, mostly I'd want the tanks to have fundamentally different ways they generate their aggro.

That is, the x10 aggro modifier on the stances can stay, so long as it affects something different on each class. For example, Warrior should get a massive (x50 or so) boost to threat generated, but only on healing they cause, no matter on whom they do the healing. So all their self-healing is also how they do aggro, enraging the enemy with the fact that this unarmored 10 IQ doofus wearing just a loincloth won't die no matter how many planets they throw on their heads.

Meanwhile say Gunbreaker generates aggro every time they use Continuation, again no matter on what and maybe it's even a fixed amount that pulses in an AoE instead of based on the damage/effect of the specific continuation. Not sure what I'd do about Paladin and Dark Knight.

It's mostly flavor of course since over X minutes of fight it needs to be roughly the same threat total, but I'd love for the flavor and the profile of threat-generation to feel different between classes.

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Originally Posted by Kowaeru

Considerations:
Since I cannot iterate on these proposals in gameplay, it comes to question whether this proposed idea would be considered fun. Ideally, it would add nuance and differentiate playstyles between Main Tank and Off Tank in content that require multiple tanks and add active gameplay input in dungeons where pulling mobs and maintaining aggro is essential to not let damage fall upon allies. The proposed combo finisher depriving the Tank from potential damage output can also be called into question, as it would be the key difference between Main Tank and Off Tank gameplay.

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The main reason enmity combos were not liked and used as little a possible is because they done less damage, not only in the form of lower potency, but also in resource generation. This is why, the standard start to a fight was enmity combo in tank stance, then swap to DPS stance for the remainder of the fight (this is mainly coming from a SB point of view).

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Originally Posted by Kowaeru

Some nuances of the proposed Increased enmity combo finisher:
This finisher has more potency than other finishers.
For Paladin, it grants Atonement Ready, but not Divine Might.
For Warrior, Storm's Path "Combo Bonus: Restores own HP" gets moved to the Increased enmity combo finisher. Storm's Path still increases Beast Gauge by 20, Increased enmity combo finisher increases it by 10, like Storm's Eye.
For Dark Knight, Souleater's "Combo Bonus: Restores own HP" gets moved to the Increased enmity combo finisher. Souleater still increases Blood Gauge by 20, Increased enmity combo finisher increases it by 10.
For Gunbreaker, Brutal Shell's "Combo Bonus: Restores own HP" and Barrier gets moved to the Increased enmity combo finisher. It doesn't add a Cartridge to the Powder Gauge.

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First, 'more potency' on finishers doesn't help as I imagine you are trying to balance the damage loss from the resource with extra potency in the combo ender, which doesn't work due to a variety of reasons, but mainly the 2 minute meta (like it or not). However, for the individual jobs:
Paladin, losing the flexibility afforded by Divine Might for when you have to disconnect is a massive loss and whilst Holy Spirit can still be used, it isn't as flexible as you have to stand still and it is weaker.
Warrior, Reducing gauge generation for less Flee Cleave goes against the very fibre of Warriors and the healing isn't significant enough to warrant using it for that purpose either.
Dark Knight, same as Warrior, just for Bloodspiller, however it is even more egregious as they only have 1 combo as opposed to Warrior's 2.
Gunbreaker, First, Brutal Shell is the second combo hit and doesn't generate gauge, Solid Barrel is the one you are thinking off, but that doesn't produce a shield/heal. Also, having less cartridges to spend means less Burst Strikes, which, considering the recent changes to Gunbreaker made sure that the amount of cartridges you generated over a 2 minute window didn't change, is counterintuitive to that.

Noone wants less of the fun stuff.

Now, if we imagine this system works and you have to balance an enmity generator and a damage combo, we need a way to properly track this all so we can make proper judgement calls. Valance has said that there needs to be an improved UI, but how would this be done? What challenges ned to be considered?

First, we have to remember that enmity is a variable that gets larger and larger as a fight goes on. If we have a meter that tracks it, the whole meter is the top enmity and there is a bar that moves based on second in the enmity list, this is as basic as you can get. Now, to throw out some numbers. If this gauge is 100 units long, at the start of the fight, you have 100 enmity and the person behind you has 90. It is easy to see they are behind you, but the numbers are close enough that there is still a lot of volatility in the values. If we look later into the fight, max enmity is 1000, if everything has scaled up evenly, the second would have 900 enmity but the bar will be less volatile. But we are using this to get as many damage combos in as possible, so the second place will be closer, call it 950. Assuming the enmity bar is linear, this value will be closer to max than the initial example, so, do you have the room to do another damage combo?

How about if we use more realistic enmity values where they get closer to 100,000+ At 100,000 enmity, the second place could be at 99,000, which could be plenty of leeway for a damage combo, but, because of the resolution of the bar, 99,999 could also be 1 unit shy from filling, where you do not have that luxury and need to use the enmity combo. The point here is his gets less and less reliable so you are more likely to fall into a rhythm of x damage combos per enmity combo just to ensure you stay ahead, at which point, you aren't managing enmity, just following a rotation.

This is the first thing that has to be sorted out first if any sort of proper enmity management is to be implemented. There are other concerns I would have after that, but they do not matter unless a coherent Ui element can be put into place.

Yeah it also just means one finisher ends up being strictly superior.

You just end up with the Shield vs Sword stance thing again: You might need to use a +emnity finisher every X seconds, but it always feels bad, because you're just doing that to keep aggro, aggro that you'd also get in parts from just dealing more damage.

The reason why this doesn't work is that FFXIV has no mechanic like WoW's vanilla/TBC (mostly) Wing Buffets or other forced aggro drops, where +threat skills could raise the absolute threat ceiling, and hence increase how much damage your damage dealers in your group could deal until they had to stop and just stand there waiting for you to create more threat. Lacking those, and lacking the whole concept where a DPS could deal more damage if only the tank's threat were higher, there's no point to any of these mechanics at all. They only exist as a "You did well pat pat" vs "You blew it" binary check, like pressing your damage reduction in time. Useful to some degree, but none of these "Did you perform the thing?"-checks are any different in mental attention required or physical dexterity tested, and hence you might as well just have tankbusters you have to mitigate. Same level of "engagement".

Aggro/Threat is a cool system, but only if it's actively used, and for that it has to be a constant race for the tank(s) to create threat "space" for the DPS to deal damage in.

I agree with all points brought up, it's a very complex topic. I hope the developers can find ways to implement more nuance to the Tank role in the future.

I would much rather they invest more time into the jobs rotations and job identity than make enmity management more difficult. A poor enmity management creates a high failure system which would be detrimental in the early stages of the game. Tank is already the least played role and witht the changes they made in shadowbringers. I doubt they would change enmity management.

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Originally Posted by Derio

I would much rather they invest more time into the jobs rotations and job identity than make enmity management more difficult. A poor enmity management creates a high failure system which would be detrimental in the early stages of the game. Tank is already the least played role and witht the changes they made in shadowbringers. I doubt they would change enmity management.

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Making me think of StB tanks. Had ot use flash, ultimatim and enmity combos during boss whiel stance dancing to keep enmity. Why im glad they made enmity easier to manage in ShB. I mean yeah DT their aoes and certain abilities needed that enmity effect

It's only PLD that had to use Flash (because Total Eclipse had no enmity generation attached to it, and didn't even exist in ARR/HW).

Ultimatum's only use was to grab back aggro from all mobs after dying, like old provoke in dungeons.

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Originally Posted by Valence

It's only PLD that had to use Flash (because Total Eclipse had no enmity generation attached to it, and didn't even exist in ARR/HW).

Ultimatum's only use was to grab back aggro from all mobs after dying, like old provoke in dungeons.

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I forgot about old total eclipse not having enmity back hten. I like never used it but 2 times in StB

I would not want aggro management as a numbers mechanic back. It's just not actually interesting. I vastly prefer 'soft' forms of aggro management like boss positioning, crowd control like stuns, and interrupts, and reducing an enemies' damage dealt. and enemy mechanics that lean into the 'protect the party' fantasy like Mountain Fire, and engage both tanks.

Tanks are my most played class. They just feel too similar, because they are. Whatever they do that should be the first point of change, making them more unique again.
Paladin used to have a shield swipe that could pacify an enemy for a few seconds, making them unable to execute a weaponskill. It used to have silence via offglobal, not just an cast interrupt. Tanks used to have different combo with resistances down, or vulnerability up to a certain damage type. Tanks used to have dots. Tanks used to have individual unique mitigation skills. And generally more cc types.

This was all lost for the pure raw damage formula. Crowd control and versatility gone, replaced by same mitigation skills and same damage skills.

Remember when we had fights that included rooting enemies? Slowing them over longer duration? T7? This type of encounter design has completely died I guess. All trial mobs and bosses are mostly resistant to any form of cc. Unless they are from ARR, like ifrit normal.

If job design doesn't change meaningfully, the encounter design won't either. And aggro management alone doesn't make an encounter more interesting to me.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

Enmity from attacks never made sense to me. Logically enmity attacks are not different from other attacks yet they make enemies focus on you for some reason and in gameplay they're not much different in use from regular attacks, although they at least require some player thought in choosing which attack to use. If an enmity system came back I think it should revolve around tanks disrupting enemy offense instead of being a second set of tank attacks.

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So, partly agreed, but a few things here:

There could, especially if one realistically isn't perfectly able to access exactly how much damage has been dealt to them and by whom with each attack taken, be a difference in how you instinctively allocate your attention between someone basically unknown or at least out of sight stabbing you with a spear from behind and someone yelling in your face and taking up a large portion of your vision while stabbing you with a spear for an equally damaging attack.

That yelling in the enemy's face to hold their attention, thereby giving better access to back attacks and drawing counterattacks onto yourself... is, if indirectly, disrupting their offense, or at least their offensive potential, since the tank is more resistant to attack than non-tanks. From the party's perspective, relative to not having a tank, each skill used that directs the enemy's attacks onto the tank... is suppressive. The only reason it wouldn't really feel like that right now is because tanks have effectively infinite Enmity so long as they don't go afk (with increasingly long durations thereof required) or die.

Finally, if getting enemy's to attack you relied on how much suppression you do, then (A) if calculated in terms of final damage nullification, it'd be least on attacks already against you, and (B) unless we're still riding high passive Enmity modifiers, DPS would start off with higher enmity than you... which together mean you'd be required to run around peeling enemies off your individual high-Enmity (high output) allies, and in this case not even by being an ostensible threat to them, but merely by sapping the strength from their attacks against others.

That seems like it'd be an even less thematic experience, even before getting to the whole disordered and allies-dependent (with the party and especially tank being punished the more dps their DPS do) nature of it.

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Originally Posted by Carighan

For my end, mostly I'd want the tanks to have fundamentally different ways they generate their aggro.

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Okay, with you so far... maybe...

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That is, the x10 aggro modifier on the stances can stay, so long as it affects something different on each class. For example, Warrior should get a massive (x50 or so) boost to threat generated, but only on healing they cause, no matter on whom they do the healing. So all their self-healing is also how they do aggro, enraging the enemy with the fact that this unarmored 10 IQ doofus wearing just a loincloth won't die no matter how many planets they throw on their heads.

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Oh, please, gods, no. Why should the enemy freak out over just one person's healing in particular? And why make Warrior even more of a plate-armored healer?

At present, Nascent would be even more obligatory for its duplicated heals, no matter how wasteful, and even were Warrior adjusted to fit that change, that's still putting a huge damper on anything other gauge or CD-based output they could produce to the point that you'd need healing just to get the tankbuster aimed at you, at which point you might not have anything beyond long CDs to actually mitigate the damn thing, etc.

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Meanwhile say Gunbreaker generates aggro every time they use Continuation, again no matter on what and maybe it's even a fixed amount that pulses in an AoE instead of based on the damage/effect of the specific continuation.

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This would mean having to hold Continuation for add-spawns... Again, please, no.

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It's mostly flavor of course since over X minutes of fight it needs to be roughly the same threat total, but I'd love for the flavor and the profile of threat-generation to feel different between classes.

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The flavors and profiles of threat-generation differing between jobs can be as simple as GNB having Burst Strike available, sometimes as a sacrifice over Gnashing Fang uses per minute, for snap-aggro, Warrior again being able to choose between a purely-offensive Fell Cleave and a self-sustaining Inner Beast, Paladin being able to turtle and perhaps hold charges of Shield Oath for an oGCD or AoE Shield Bash (giving time to establish threat by other means, etc.)...

...all perhaps with (A) enmity being based on relative potency, not actual damage dealt, and (B) tank [or all, if we ever want to reinvite sub-tanking to the mix, such as if Tanks' eHP inflation were wholly reverted] GCD skills having, say, a 1%enmity bonus increase per point of potency (such that a 600p Fell Cleave or Burst Strike doing 960p of threat, while a Heavy Swing would only do 298 and a 380p Gnashing Fang would do only 524 [yes, some potency-shuffling here, as Burst Strike nerfs have left it with no use case except as filler once GF is learned]), befitting the whole 'drawing attention with obvious, hard hits'.

Sidenote: Something that might be interesting without too likely making Enmity easy for tanks to generate is just to double their Enmity modifiers (such as from the extra relative potency generated by Determination, Direct Hits, and Critical Hits) or, better yet for consistency's sake, to halve non-tanks' modifiers).

Further, similarly to accuracy modifiers before, we might suppress Enmity from unseen (rear) attackers by 30%, barely-seen (flanking) attackers by 15%, etc., with tanks being only half as reduced, and/or reducing Enmity slightly with range (again, halved for tanks), but that'd be more about future-proofing a melee's ability to peel for a squishier tank, as sometimes done back in 1.x and 2.x, rather than being so relevant to tanks).

In short, we don't have to throw logic to the winds to make jobs distinct in enmity generation. We just have to make Enmity itself meaningful and the kits themselves a bit more differentiated in their attack profiles. Too much has been sacrificed to streamlining and to pushing players towards the 'right' way to play endgame content with no regard for allowing for any sort of niche use cases (and therefore excusing the game's very deepening lack of variety in situations) or gameplay quality over the leveling experience, and just fixing that would already do tons of good for Enmity and the like just because Enmity is linked to our attacks and therefore our kit design.

So, given the stuff on the previous post, my $0.02. If Enmity were returned...

• There should be no buttons wasted on buffs/states that solely maintain normal action/wants vis a vis Enmity (i.e., for non-tanks to reduce Enmity or tanks to increase Enmity).

  It's fine for a skill like Divergence to temporarily massively increase a DPS's threat to allow them to cycle peels for healers or cycle 2nd-tank mechanics per their defensives/vuln stacks when running a normally two-tank fight with a single tank, but there is zero reason to have it decrease Enmity, since that's just the default intention / business as usual and should therefore be passive while leaving any such space to situationals (that should then be given more reason to see use, in turn meaning more gameplay variance across content).
  
  A returned Enmity-reducing Diversion would merely, like Lucid Dreaming now, be about the least interesting use one could have for a button.

• Enmity should not proportionately punish tanks for their non-tank party members' outputs.

  This could be by having Enmity scale with relative potency instead of raw damage (and therefore only with secondary stats, instead of primary as well, and therefore scale far, far less with gear), or by giving tanks the ability to steal away Enmity from others, be that preemptively (making enemies associate others' attacks with the tank drawing attention) or retroactively.
  
  For my part, ideally, I'd like to see tanks' eHP inflation wholly reverted ¹ and incoming damage mostly reduced accordingly, with melee actually having a reason to play an occasional part in tanking in odd scenarios (distant add spawns while the boss must be briefly held at a certain location unsafe to the party, wherein a healer may draw aggro to a central position and the melee grab them off the healer just before the healer gets melee'ed) or even ranged in kiting or LoSing in ranged mobs, etc. In such a case, it'd be best to set up a couple undermechanics, such as Enmity falling off by 15% each when not easily visible to the enemy (for most mobs, flanking it) or not in melee range and a further 15% each if not in view of the enemy (for most mobs, behind it) and not within 15 yalms, with those decreases halved for tanks. (I.e., up to a 51% (if multiplicative) or 60% (if additive) Enmity reduction total for someone out of sight and at max range.)
  
  ¹ Here meaning no Tank Mastery, including the removal of its listed 20% mitigation, its hidden %damage nerf AND its greater HP per point of Vitality and Attack Power per point of Strength --as each is a needless complication-- replacing the last two parts with (A) just ~25% more Vitality than Striking/Maiming gear and leaving the rest to Fending's greater Defense and (B) whatever potency changes are necessary for a simple, normal, 1:1 ratio of primary stat to effective attack power as on everyone else. Yes, I'd also remove Maim and Mend, Job Action Damage, and all other percentile modifiers, replacing them with visible potency shifts for simple, intuitive interchangeability of output per stat point across all jobs.

• None of this would necessarily require a whole separate ability set, such as the "Additional Effect: Increased Enmity" skills from before, but simply slightly more choicefulness within our existing skills, as would be use with or even without making Enmity a real thing again.

  While it would probably be still more beneficial to replace the rote button-cycling of Warrior's 1-2-3 1-2-4 1-2-3 5 or Paladin's 1-2-3 4-4-4-4 5-5-5 or GNB's 1-2-3 4-4-4 5-5-5 or DRK's 1-2-3 4-4-4-4, etc., with the likes of PLD being able to move smoothly between a combo each of <Fast Blade -> Savage Blade -> Rage of Halone> or <Riot Blade -> Goring Blade -> Royal Authority>, with either ending offering up a separately bankable <Atonement -> Supplication -> Sepulchre>, especially if there were frequently-situationally-varied reason for each job to swap back and forth between those buttons...
  
  ...we don't actually need to add any weaponskills, let alone rotational ones or ones specific to Enmity bonuses.
  
  Just accentuating² the GCD-to-GCD dynamics of tanks' attacks slightly and providing some reason to perhaps use them out of their max overall damage order (as sometimes done, before Enmity was basically removed as a gameplay-affecting mechanic, in opening with an uncomboed Butcher's Block for up-front Enmity, for instance) and/or giving ways to sometimes sacrifice mitigation for extra damage (that is, if we de-inflate tanks' absolutely bonkers eHP, nerfing only the strongest tankbusters proportionately, and offer reasons to stay above, say, 50% health [rather than a character a sliver of a breeze from death/unconsciousness still hitting with the same force as when at the peak of health]) would already serve the same purpose of offering choice, both via what to bank for timing Enmity and, especially if in failing perfect optimization/team-coordination, in what overall dps to sacrifice by using skills slightly out of order (especially if, say, those skills were a tad bit more bankable or raid buff cycles were de-emphasized).
  
  ² By "accentuating", I mean both (A) increasing GCD-to-GCD potency differences (which can then be important for add spawns and increasing moment-to-moment options such as by making things that are overall damage losses, like Burst Strike relative to Gnashing Fang with Continuation, a bit more situationally useful (such as by buffing Burst Strike with the same upgrade that adds Continuation or even just again allowing Burst Strike to hit for more than a mere combo opener itself [Gnashing Fang even without Continuation] and (B) maybe exaggerating instant big hits' contribution slightly, such as by giving tank hits (or maybe even all hits, if we want to involve melee more) 1% more Enmity per point of potency, such that a 600p Burst Strike [yes, some potency reshuffling here], for instance, would produce 960e (960 potency worth of Enmity) but a 380p Gnashing Fang and its 220p Juglar Rip (600p total) would produce only 524e and 268e (792p total), giving some (extra) use case for the prior.
  

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

So, partly agreed, but a few things here:

There could, especially if one realistically isn't perfectly able to access exactly how much damage has been dealt to them and by whom with each attack taken, be a difference in how you instinctively allocate your attention between someone basically unknown or at least out of sight stabbing you with a spear from behind and someone yelling in your face and taking up a large portion of your vision while stabbing you with a spear for an equally damaging attack.


That yelling in the enemy's face to hold their attention, thereby giving better access to back attacks and drawing counterattacks onto yourself... is, if indirectly, disrupting their offense, or at least their offensive potential, since the tank is more resistant to attack than non-tanks. From the party's perspective, relative to not having a tank, each skill used that directs the enemy's attacks onto the tank... is suppressive. The only reason it wouldn't really feel like that right now is because tanks have effectively infinite Enmity so long as they don't go afk (with increasingly long durations thereof required) or die.

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Yeah the mechanics might be an attempt to abstract that entire attention grabbing process but it goes too far in its abstraction to be believable. It's not just tanks radiating a flood of enmity in the same way that the Sun is bright enough to light an entirely solar system, it's that in game causality is backwards. Tanks don't have to get in anyone's face because they somehow force their targets to face them with only the tiniest amount of effort.

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Finally, if getting enemy's to attack you relied on how much suppression you do, then (A) if calculated in terms of final damage nullification, it'd be least on attacks already against you, and (B) unless we're still riding high passive Enmity modifiers, DPS would start off with higher enmity than you... which together mean you'd be required to run around peeling enemies off your individual high-Enmity (high output) allies, and in this case not even by being an ostensible threat to them, but merely by sapping the strength from their attacks against others.

That seems like it'd be an even less thematic experience, even before getting to the whole disordered and allies-dependent (with the party and especially tank being punished the more dps their DPS do) nature of it.

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Point A isn't a problem. It's just the reality that the tank isn't interesting to hit by nature of being a tank, outside of actions taken. If you're trying to get past an obstacle, why bash your head against the toughest wall instead of finding a crack to hammer away at?

On point B, the use of modifiers would be fine. Some raw enmity gain on actions may also make sense, especially CC. Holmgang for instance is a forced duel. You are chaining yourself to your adversary and making it impossible or at least very difficult to focus on anyone else. That could theoretically be infinite damage suppression. If enmity were generated this way tank openers would involve throwing out lots of CC and party defense initially. Binds, slows, party shields, etc to make attacking anyone but them futile. In addition they would be attacking the target of their CC, making them a threat directly through damage and through supporting the 3-7 other party members contributing damage.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

Yeah the mechanics might be an attempt to abstract that entire attention grabbing process but it goes too far in its abstraction to be believable. It's not just tanks radiating a flood of enmity in the same way that the Sun is bright enough to light an entirely solar system, it's that in game causality is backwards. Tanks don't have to get in anyone's face because they somehow force their targets to face them with only the tiniest amount of effort.

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None of those states you mention here would have anything to do with what's being proposed, though, or even to how those Enmity systems originally worked? Like, the whole idea here is to replace the passively supernova-esque Enmity tanks currently have.

The game launched with just a less than a third net Enmity increase in Shield Oath (less in ST for having missed the sizeable bonus 50 potency per auto-attack), for instance, and zero free passive increase. The largest Enmity gains were through, very visually distinctly, clobber the heck out of an enemy's face with Rage of Halone or Butcher's Block or by being that sunburst via Flash. Fast Blade was ~120 potency of Enmity, Savage ~320, Rage of Halone ~1100, scaled pretty sensibly with exactly that visual element/theme-ing.

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Point A isn't a problem. It's just the reality that the tank isn't interesting to hit by nature of being a tank, outside of actions taken. If you're trying to get past an obstacle, why bash your head against the toughest wall instead of finding a crack to hammer away at?

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Yes, an intelligent creature would ideally find a way to target the weakest link or the most crucial-yet-destructible element of its enemy, but that's not describing attention so much as strategy, and unless we'd both (A) have a way of hiding our most crucial parts' strengths until the pivotal moment to use them AND (B) such gameplay would actually be preferable, that's not really relevant to a system of mob-manipulation (something dependent on their not being especially intelligent, even if it can still allow for idiosyncratic or mob-type-specific calculations).

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On point B, the use of modifiers would be fine. Some raw enmity gain on actions may also make sense, especially CC. Holmgang for instance is a forced duel. You are chaining yourself to your adversary and making it impossible or at least very difficult to focus on anyone else. That could theoretically be infinite damage suppression. If enmity were generated this way tank openers would involve throwing out lots of CC and party defense initially. Binds, slows, party shields, etc to make attacking anyone but them futile. In addition they would be attacking the target of their CC, making them a threat directly through damage and through supporting the 3-7 other party members contributing damage.

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A couple things here, too:

CC goes most to waste precisely if it has significant (e.g., enough to force a target-swap) Enmity attached and is applied from melee range (as per most tank actions) because now, instead of getting the full mitigation of chasing someone out of reach, the enemy can just swap to the other (even if less efficiently attacked) target, still getting some 60+% of their value instead of none of it. Even basic 'intelligence' (scripting) can make it so that, barring any other opportunity, a bound enemy would swap targets to something that's at least in reach, certainly, but (1) it's not sensible for the focus to shift cumulative threat perception just because of one action that merely delayed their original plan (the 'target-swapping' would be more of a temporary trickling down) and (2) this would make tanking inherently more finicky to min-max party value from, since you'd want a large enough gap in Enmity not to actually force attacks against the tank while the enemy is CCed away from its current/original target.

So, yes, you can force attention onto the tank by binding or heavy-ing enemies, but literally any non-melee would do better with that purpose for the simple fact that then the enemy's attacks would go wholly to waste instead of just partly to waste. Meanwhile, temporarily occluding the enemy's best options still wouldn't actually sensibly contribute a lasting need to kill off the, as you said, least interesting-to-hit enemy. Unless every other party member holds fire or attacks something else, the same ratios of Enmity would still be accumulating over that time, baring the 'oh, crap, this humanoid can annoy me with Heavy / Bind effects' if tanks alone could apply such, just as before. So you'd have a tank chasing down enemies just to briefly allow the enemies to deal more damage than had the tank not existed.

Tl;dr: Heavy Enmity on CC is wasteful and if you want perfectly intelligent enemies, the only way to tank (offer meaningful help to the party's ratio of damage dealt to damage taken through manipulation of mobs or of their attacks/positions) wouldn't be through Enmity (cumulative reactive perception of who is worth prioritizing) anyways, but simply by... well, intercepting skill-shotted attacks (likely after baiting and resisting the mobs' own CC skills, if any), etc., since they'd know not to actually go for the kill on an enemy so resistant for attack, instead CCing and then bypassing them.


Tldrtl;dr: Having tank Enmity operate primarily off damage denial conflicts with having them operate off CC that would nonetheless let them reach someone extra (the tank) and is inherently finicky to get started (they have to already be trying to hit a non-tank for the tank to suppress meaningful damage and force threat onto them). The basic Enmity modifiers would almost certainly lead to better gameplay outcomes, especially so long as Enmity generation and the balance¹ of moment-to-moment GCD value are both decent.

¹ "Balance" here does not mean making everything flat, but rather having a good range of potencies (even when accounting for oGCDs) that can be skill-expressively played around, and perhaps making long-term losses occasionally situationally useful (Burst Strike situationally useful over Gnashing Fang even if the latter had no cooldown, for instance [but only enabled Continuation as its benefit over normal combo instead of also adding the same amount over normal combo in itself]).

But using attacks that deal +emnity instead of +damage or +whatever still holds no meaning.

I agree the current bonuses are simply too large, yes.

But ignoring the raw amount for a minute, moving emnity from being passive onto skills... has no value. Genuinely. What gameplay interaction arises from this? Having to alternate "The emnity combo" and "The damage combo"? That's not new gameplay. This just means you press 1-2-3-4-5-6 instead of 1-2-3-1-2-3, wow such gameplay, many decision, much skill, wow.

Without actual interaction with the tank's threat-production-per-second value, there is no reason to make it something you actively press buttons for. Period.

What interactions could those be? There are options:

* One way WoW had at least a few fights each expansion interact with this, particularly in older ones, was percentage-aggro-resets. Every X seconds, the boss would cast something that removes Y% of the tank's threat. No matter how you slice it, even multiple tanks taking turns will eventually asymptotically approach a final threat value. Being able to produce more total threat was hence an increase to the absolute cap of damage a DPS could do before they needed to reduce their threat value (death works). This is one way, if tankbusters always came with a "concussed" effect that bled a certain % of emnity over a few seconds or so. It'd be a bit lame if every fight had this, granted.
* Maybe being top threat and having a comfortable distance or being close to top threat and close-enough (offtank) has some mechanical benefit to your kit that is not damage, but also meaningful. Maybe certain mitigation CDs just do not work otherwise, or scale with the lead in threat you have. This has as big downside in that it is the same non-choice as damage-vs-threat-rotation: You will only want to enable as many mitigations as you minimally need to survive, then sink everything else into damage rotations, 0 exceptions. But if balanced well it could provide some interesting interplay between the MT and the OT, as the MT wouldn't want to pull too far ahead either, lest the OT loses access to their mitigation CDs.
* Maybe tankswaps are frequent (not just TBs that need a temp swap or an invuln, actual swaps), and don't transfer threat. In this case it's still a bit lame as you only run "threat combo" while actively having swapped for a little while, then both tanks just fall back to their damage skills. But hey, some gameplay out of it at least.
* And, and this is the interesting one, maybe tanks have loads of skills that consume and lower their threat. Hence using threat-gaining skills is a resource builder even on a personal basis, a resource you need enough lead with to later spend them in particular during burst without losing the boss mid-burst.

(edit: I'm not saying these should actually be implemented, they're examples of how game mechanisms can interact with active threat-producing gameplay)

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Originally Posted by Carighan

But using attacks that deal +emnity instead of +damage or +whatever still holds no meaning.

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I mean, it does at least as much as "higher total damage contribution but constrained" (Storm's Eye) and "situationally higher damage" (Storm's Path), etc., ever have. At least it has something nearer than the enemy's death that it could interact with.

Granted, yes, you could have particular HP thresholds on mobs that change their behavior, make them interruptible or end their attacks outright, knock them backwards, etc., too, so even damage could be leveraged far more/better than is done presently.

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But ignoring the raw amount for a minute, moving emnity from being passive onto skills... has no value. Genuinely. What gameplay interaction arises from this? Having to alternate "The emnity combo" and "The damage combo"? That's not new gameplay. This just means you press 1-2-3-4-5-6 instead of 1-2-3-1-2-3, wow such gameplay, many decision, much skill, wow.

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We currently do less. Would having choices between threatening and damage-maximizing (and, say, threatening, and self-healing or gauge-maximizing) actions necessarily be such a waste?

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Without actual interaction with the tank's threat-production-per-second value, there is no reason to make it something you actively press buttons for. Period.

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So first, we do actively press buttons for our alternate combos as is, and this would have the difference at least of being per target instead of just generating self-buffs (more akin to a DoT combo, if you prefer).

Meanwhile, any further "active" cause or "actual interaction" is just literally anything that novelly uses Enmity, which is... yeah, the necessary other half of all this, but I don't think almost anyone's implied that it wouldn't be required. We don't have to leave Enmity as just an inalterably cumulative table value.

But here, let's put the spitballs below to the same test:

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percentage-aggro-resets (on [A. current tank only?] [B. on all tanks]?). Every X seconds, the boss would cast something that removes Y% of the tank's threat.

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* Brackets my own additions to clarify what seems ambiguous.

This just means more combo A, less combo B, especially for whomever swaps in (in case B). Nothing beyond that would be within player control without punishing your best outputs for being high output.

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No matter how you slice it, even multiple tanks taking turns will eventually asymptotically approach a final threat value. Being able to produce more total threat was hence an increase to the absolute cap of damage a DPS could do before they needed to reduce their threat value (death works).

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If it's asymptotic per resets, the total threat done is not the most relevant factor. And, again, this would ultimately exist just to make your best DPS sandbag unless the fight would run more than n minutes or so longer than when that 'asymptote' is reached, since 25% of DPS for 90s + drift from death would be worse than selectively dropping certain combos to reduce DPS unless one could get in enough time uninhibited thereafter to make up for it.

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Maybe being top threat and having a comfortable distance or being close to top threat and close-enough (offtank) has some mechanical benefit to your kit that is not damage, but also meaningful.

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If the fight is ended by killing all enemies, all is ultimately worth damage. Damage from healing GCDs skipped in favor of extra healer attack GCDs. Damage from being able to greed an extra hit before dodging AOEs. Damage from baiting AoEs away from the BLM enough for it to get an extra cast off. "Utility", yes, but only of utility (literally, usefulness) because it ultimately amounts to damage.

And it'd take a lot of reworks across the board to allow for even that level of indirectness to be useful in this game, though I'd likewise love to see it.

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Maybe certain mitigation CDs just do not work otherwise, or scale with the lead in threat you have.

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Please no. That'd be nonsensical and, in party mitigation terms, redundant, as if the tank hasn't produced enough threat to aim the attacks onto themself instead, the mitigation potential is already wasted.

That in turn would just mean that there'd be no value in, say, gap-closing to an ally to intercept an attack (based in some way on Enmity instead of being pre-set to healer 1 or a random non-tank)... unless you already had enough threat to (very nearly) turn that attack onto you before it ever went on the ally anyways, in turn precluding many additions to tank gameplay otherwise possible.

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This has as big downside in that it is the same non-choice as damage-vs-threat-rotation: You will only want to enable as many mitigations as you minimally need to survive, then sink everything else into damage rotations, 0 exceptions.

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Unless, again, that utility has great enough rDPS value. If an Inner Beast just 300 effective potency less than a Fell Cleave were to, given incoming damage, allow for an extra 400 effective potency Glare over a Regen, for instance... that's a net gain, and so you absolutely would use it even if not strictly necessary for survival.

And, hell, that'd be a hugely more involved one than mere self-buff alt-combos since knowing the best option requires knowing your CDs, your healers CDs, incoming damage to be reducible by this GCD, and the upcoming damage for your next CD(s) / choiceful GCDs.

That said, you've already heard how I'd generally prefer a 0.01% health character not to somehow nonetheless retain 100% of their speed and power, and yeah, I'd be all for some sort of linearly scaled potency loss when under some health threshold (maybe 1% per HP missing below the "healthy" margin of 70+%, perhaps opposite a "critical" margin of below 30% if Executes were ever reintroduced).

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Maybe tankswaps are frequent (not just TBs that need a temp swap or an invuln, actual swaps), and don't transfer threat. In this case it's still a bit lame as you only run "threat combo" while actively having swapped for a little while, then both tanks just fall back to their damage skills. But hey, some gameplay out of it at least.

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Unless removing only Shirk without the far more significant Provoke, this would actually play more like 2 Warriors would without having leveled Gladiator, back in ARR: The other would maintain a close enough enmity to be ready to overtake on next combo without accidentally overtaking on the current combo via a critical hit, so there would be significant bar-watching, too, at least.

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And, and this is the interesting one, maybe tanks have loads of skills that consume and lower their threat. Hence using threat-gaining skills is a resource builder even on a personal basis, a resource you need enough lead with to later spend them in particular during burst without losing the boss mid-burst.

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Then that's just a gauge builder-spender system where you can get a higher portion of spenders the worse your DPS are. It makes tanks' rDPS (when including mitigation value in healing GCDs spared relative to healing a non-tank) more even --since the less damage the tank is distracting from, the more they personally deal-- but would probably just feel as bad as it did before.

Not losing the boss mid-burst meanwhile, would just be a more granular form of, say, ensuring cartridges enough for original (2-cart) Double Down and (1-charge) Gnashing Fang, both, on cooldown.

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Let me double back lest this end purely deconstructively:

Yes, there will need to be some manner of situational variation possible.

That said, just like adding a instance-long burn doesn't meaningfully change healing, neither would just adding some awkward (fight-specific) mechanical tax to Enmity, nor would (gamewide) redundantly doubling up on punishments for lack of threat, etc.

• We could have mobs different mob scripts, including with further conditionals, that would vary when Enmity is more required from tanks and when healing or heavy damage may want to be held off on slightly or would need true specific body-guarding (if that's something we want to see occasionally), etc.
• We could have more than just threat vs. damage if the addition of threat would otherwise seem too basic A-B.
• We even could involve times where we actually want to peel some attention off the tank and back towards split AoEs onto melee or baited attacks onto evasive ranged, etc., if we so want.

There's a lot else we could do with it even before looking at ways for tanks to specifically intercept or forcibly divert attacks not even aimed against them, just by varying calculations and putting the balance of available tank enmity to non-tank Enmity such that it can play a frequent and varied part AND perhaps even see more creative approaches to fight that aren't so rotely and universally "tanks grabs everything and just holds them conveniently for uptime".

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

No of those states you mention here would have anything to do with what's being proposed, though, or even to how those Enmity systems originally worked. The game launched with just a less than a third net Enmity increase in Shield Oath (less in ST for having missed the sizeable bonus 50 potency per auto-attack), for instance, and zero free passive increase. The largest Enmity gains were through, very visually distinctly, clobber the heck out of an enemy's face with Rage of Halone or Butcher's Block or by being that small supernova via Flash. Fast Blade was ~120 potency of Enmity, Savage ~320, Rage of Halone ~1100, scaled pretty sensibly with exactly that visual element/theme-ing.

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I thought we were close to agreeing so I'm not sure what the objection is. Holding attention by putting yourself front and center in the enemy's vision, as you presented, sounds like a valid explanation of the enmity system. I'm onboard with that. However there isn't any in game distinction between getting in someone's face versus attacking out of sight besides tanks simply generating more aggro. I find that level of abstraction sufficient to cross my threshold for suspension of disbelief. In terms of gameplay it also makes tanks essentially DPS.

As far as animations go, some of the tank attack animations look menacing but they have to complete with DPS animations that can involve tossing fireballs on foes or diving on them from the stratosphere.

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Yes, an intelligent creature would ideally find a way to target the weakest link or the most crucial-yet-destructible element of its enemy, but that's not describing attention so much as strategy, and unless we'd both (A) have a way of hiding our most crucial parts' strengths until the pivotal moment to use them AND (B) such gameplay would actually be preferable, that's not really relevant to a system of mob-manipulation (something dependent on their not being especially intelligent, even if it can still allow for idiosyncratic or mob-type-specific calculations).

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The intelligence barrier for that strategy isn't very high. Wild predators, which we could use as a stand in for random monsters, will naturally learn to attack weaker prey. Some enemies in game are clearly meant to be intelligent as well - and the concept of different aggro rules for intelligent/non-intelligent enemies sounds like a fun idea to explore, though its for another discussion.

Holding attacks back to hide or obfuscate the most threatening element of the party is one way of managing attention but it isn't required in a defensive aggro system. The tank would be the source of most aggro just as is the case now. The difference is what skills are used to generate aggro and the resulting strategies that emerge as a result.

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CC goes most to waste precisely if it has significant (e.g., enough to force a target-swap) Enmity attached and is applied from melee range (as per most tank actions) because now, instead of getting the full mitigation of chasing someone out of reach, the enemy can just swap to the other (even if less efficiently attacked) target, still getting some 60+% of their value instead of none of it. Even basic 'intelligence' (scripting) can make it so that, barring any other opportunity, a bound enemy would swap targets to something that's at least in reach, certainly, but (1) it's not sensible for the focus to shift cumulative threat perception just because of one action that merely delayed their original plan (the 'target-swapping' would be more of a temporary trickling down) and (2) this would make tanking inherently more finicky to min-max party value from, since you'd want a large enough gap in Enmity not to actually force attacks against the tank while the enemy is CCed away from its current/original target.

So, yes, you can force attention onto the tank by binding or heavy-ing enemies, but literally any non-melee would do better with that purpose for the simple fact that then the enemy's attacks would go wholly to waste instead of just partly to waste. Meanwhile, temporarily occluding the enemy's best options still wouldn't actually sensibly contribute a lasting need to kill off the, as you said, least interesting-to-hit enemy. Unless every other party member holds fire or attacks something else, the same ratios of Enmity would still be accumulating over that time, baring the 'oh, crap, this humanoid can annoy me with Heavy / Bind effects' if tanks alone could apply such, just as before. So you'd have a tank chasing down enemies just to briefly allow the enemies to deal more damage than had the tank not existed.

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The CC in this case is the player's actively controlled method of getting in the enemy's face and drawing attention that I feel is missing from the current tank aggro generation system. I see it as being more logically cohesive than what we have now even if it doesn't completely remove the abstraction around drawing attention.

If the ability of the enemy to turn to face someone else is a problem then tank CC could take that away. CC that not only lowers movement but the ability to turn. Personally though I don't see the need.

An in world explanation for why ranged aren't performing the CC is that they're too busy dealing damage as they should be better at this than the tank and that the tank being in melee range has more opportunity to impede the actions of the enemy. The tank can trip a foe or attempt to knock a weapon away. This is harder for ranged DPS.

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Tl;dr: Heavy Enmity on CC is wasteful and if you want perfectly intelligent enemies, the only way to tank (offer meaningful help to the party's ratio of damage dealt to damage taken through manipulation of mobs or of their attacks/positions) wouldn't be through Enmity (cumulative reactive perception of who is worth prioritizing) anyways, but simply by... well, intercepting skill-shotted attacks (likely after baiting and resisting the mobs' own CC skills, if any), etc., since they'd know not to actually go for the kill on an enemy so resistant for attack, instead CCing and then bypassing them.

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Perfectly intelligent enemies weren't a consideration. Varying forms of intelligence is an interesting idea, but not directly related to defensive or CC based tanking. I was assuming enemy behavior to remain close to what it is now.

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Tldrtl;dr: Having tank Enmity operate primarily off damage denial conflicts with having them operate off CC that would nonetheless let them reach someone extra (the tank) and is inherently finicky to get started (they have to already be trying to hit a non-tank for the tank to suppress meaningful damage and force threat onto them). The basic Enmity modifiers would almost certainly lead to better gameplay outcomes, especially so long as Enmity generation and the balance of moment-to-moment GCD value are both decent.

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I see CC and damage denial enmity as being complimentary. The tank's job is to protect the party. CCing the enemy to reduce their attack ability as well as directly negating their damage both accomplish this goal. Enmity generation wouldn't require targeting others besides the tank either. The idea is that the target of the CC feels its effects and this is enough to draw their attention to the CC user. Practically, CC enmity could scale off the remaining party combined HP (current or maximum), with multipliers for fine tuning, as a stand in for actual damage done. Some of the CC might be incidental as it's used purely for aggro purposes but I think this is fine as long as it doesn't all get used this way. As an example, using low blow to stun at random should have less value than using it to cancel an attack. This is innately true if said attack is inconvenient for the rest of the party (like a large AoE that forces melee to move out) and the value could be reinforced mathematically by adding an enmity bonus to stun if party members were in the AoE when the cast began, as an example.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

I thought we were close to agreeing so I'm not sure what the objection is.

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The objection across what you quoted was on your point, seemingly, that none of the skill-specific Enmity modifiers mattered because of the sheer massive passive modifiers tanks had. I pointed out that those were in two different eras, not simultaneous. We lost Enmity skills before we got any Enmity modifiers greater than a net doubling, with initial modifiers closer to a net third or less. And that such would be largely irrelevant anyways since we're free to remake all this as we see fit.

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Holding attention by putting yourself front and center in the enemy's vision, as you presented, sounds like a valid explanation of the enmity system. I'm onboard with that. However there isn't any in game distinction between getting in someone's face versus attacking out of sight besides tanks simply generating more aggro. I find that level of abstraction sufficient to cross my threshold for suspension of disbelief. In terms of gameplay it also makes tanks essentially DPS.

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Fair enough. See above:

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

such as Enmity falling off by 15% each when not easily visible to the enemy (for most mobs, flanking it) or not in melee range and a further 15% each if not in view of the enemy (for most mobs, behind it) and not within 15 yalms, with those decreases halved for tanks. (I.e., up to a 51% (if multiplicative) or 60% (if additive) Enmity reduction total for someone out of sight and at max range.)

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Would something like that suffice? Though shared by non-tanks, tanks would be the ones to most leverage it.

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Some enemies in game are clearly meant to be intelligent as well - and the concept of different aggro rules for intelligent/non-intelligent enemies sounds like a fun idea to explore, though its for another discussion.

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I mean, if we're going to make an Enmity system... why not explore that? Without it, we at best have a slightly more interesting extra combo. With it... we've potentially got a way to interestingly sandbox encounter designs, especially for, say... Hunts and certain dungeon bosses (anything less formalized than a strict raid) by manipulating what skills they'd use or strategies they'd pursue, etc.

Ideally... we would eventually get to there, even if it might be jumping the gun a little at present.

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The tank would be the source of most aggro just as is the case now. The difference is what skills are used to generate aggro and the resulting strategies that emerge as a result.

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I don't think you're quite understanding me, then.

If Enmity produced is based on the damage (in)directly to be nullified, then that means you have to let the mob attack a non-tank for the tank to then generate substantial Enmity... at which point it gradually gets pulled off the tank again because the CC is worth that much less if only obstructing attacks to the tank (bind/heavy not at all unless the tank walks out of range and stuns not at all if, say, the tank were already in Hallowed Ground).

To skip ahead briefly before returning...

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I see CC and damage denial enmity as being complimentary.

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In practice, though, they're more likely to be anti-synergetic, for the same reason Holy spam during an invuln is.

If a Ranged CCs a melee enemy chasing it, that's 100% mitigation over that duration. If a tank CCs a melee enemy chasing another player, that's 100% mitigation over that duration. If a tank CCs a melee enemy chasing another player and in doing so forces that enemy to attack said tank instead, that's only some 35% mitigation (over the non-tanks' passive mit). It's the worst choice the party could make in that situation.

(Moreover, XIV's unique in that the mob wouldn't just turn and slap whoever they still can. In WoW, for instance, if a tank gets hit with a debuff that stuns them until they're next struck, the mobs just swap and attack whoever else. In GW2, similar. A mob that wants to attack player A but gets bound and can only attack player B will then attack player B. So all that, too, is still something we could easily flip a switch on however we please.)

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The tank's job is to protect the party. CCing the enemy to reduce their attack ability as well as directly negating their damage both accomplish this goal.

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It does, but is there any part of that which is especially tank-ish? Tanks started off with the least CC of any role, and even now CC is far from tank-specific.

When I think of a tank, I don't think of an arrow pinning one's foot, a kick to the back of the knee, or a sleep spell, etc. I think of someone actively blocking the path or diverting my attention directly, not merely harassing/harrying the mob as it goes.

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Enmity generation wouldn't require targeting others besides the tank either. The idea is that the target of the CC feels its effects and this is enough to draw their attention to the CC user.

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So no longer based on damage to be nullified? Because otherwise, with tanks passively nullifying a majority of damage dealt to them even before defensives, CC applied when the target is already a tank with defensive up is going to be trivial by comparison, so... for all intents and purposes, CC would have to deny attacks against a non-tank or multiple players to be do much.

...Are we maybe trying to constrain this to raw, pre-mitigated damage? Because otherwise, yeah, scaling this way would neuter our only deliberate Enmity tool's ability to generate Enmity until the biggest possible 'oh shit' moments, or at least until it'd go make its mere slap fatal against a non-tank.

And if not based on damage to be nullified, instead just having the CC skill slap a bunch of extra Enmity onto the enemy baseline, then you basically just have standard Enmity skills again, but with all the more anti-synergy, since the same thing that holds them back from one player now forces them to turn and attack another, again granting the enemy the value you had just previous denied.

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Practically, CC enmity could scale off the remaining party combined HP (current or maximum), with multipliers for fine tuning, as a stand in for actual damage done.

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This doesn't quite make sense to me. Why would we get a combined-party-Vitality/HP Enmity-punch for using CC? And as a stand-in for whose actual damage done? The CC's, or what damage was denied? Sorry, I'm just not quite following here.

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As an example, using low blow to stun at random should have less value than using it to cancel an attack. This is innately true if said attack is inconvenient for the rest of the party (like a large AoE that forces melee to move out) and the value could be reinforced mathematically by adding an enmity bonus to stun if party members were in the AoE when the cast began, as an example.

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Okay, fair enough (probably not actually even that difficult to calculate by just having the cast continue ghosted and then checking whose still in it when it would have gone off otherwise).

And now back to the earlier point:

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The CC in this case is the player's actively controlled method of getting in the enemy's face and drawing attention that I feel is missing from the current tank aggro generation system.

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If it's just intended to force them to face the tank, then why not just use an Enmity tool like the old Butcher's Block, Rage of Halone, Power Slash, etc.? Again, just like it's least sensible to pop defensives when the enemy's being stunlocked anyways or vice versa, I don't see the intent here of instead having, say, {hamstringing the enemy as it's trying to reach someone else} as the main way for a tank to generate Enmity, since

1. it would neither have the visuals of something that'd lastingly get the enemy's attention nor feel tank-specific,
2. the Enmity generated would most often just remove most of the mitigation the skill would otherwise have provided unless the tank immediately runs away, and
3. in any other game, it'd already be redundant, as even a modicum of "smarter" mob scripting would have it swap targets when clearly unable to spend its upcoming action on its original target.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

I don’t think anyone wants an agro system back where the person who controlled the agro was the NIN.

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If you are talking about SB battle style, I greatly enjoyed that. It being a team activity made it much more engaging.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

The objection across what you quoted was on your point, seemingly, that none of the skill-specific Enmity modifiers mattered because of the sheer massive passive modifiers tanks had. I pointed out that those were in two different eras, not simultaneous. We lost Enmity skills before we got any Enmity modifiers greater than a net doubling, with initial modifiers closer to a net third or less. And that such would be largely irrelevant anyways since we're free to remake all this as we see fit.

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To condense my opening paragraph in post 22, it seems nonsensical that tanks can hold attention while doing nothing just because they've used a few attacks with the current enormous aggro generation and - nothing that they do, unless you look at the math used by the game, would make me think an enemy would prioritize a tank over someone else.

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Fair enough. See above:
Would something like that suffice? Though shared by non-tanks, tanks would be the ones to most leverage it.

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Mechanics similar to this would be very welcome. There actually is a related mechanic in FF already, but only when a player dies. All aggro is remove. A similar loss of interest should occur with inactivity or ineffective actions.

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I mean, if we're going to make an Enmity system... why not explore that? Without it, we at best have a slightly more interesting extra combo. With it... we've potentially got a way to interestingly sandbox encounter designs, especially for, say... Hunts and certain dungeon bosses (anything less formalized than a strict raid) by manipulating what skills they'd use or strategies they'd pursue, etc.

Ideally... we would eventually get to there, even if it might be jumping the gun a little at present.

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It's an excellent idea. The feeling that it is jumping the gun is what caused me to make my comment about it being out of scope but in hindsight maybe that wasn't the best way to look at it. The enmity system would need to change depending on whether or not this was in place.

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I don't think you're quite understanding me, then.

If Enmity produced is based on the damage (in)directly to be nullified, then that means you have to let the mob attack a non-tank for the tank to then generate substantial Enmity... at which point it gradually gets pulled off the tank again because the CC is worth that much less if only obstructing attacks to the tank (bind/heavy not at all unless the tank walks out of range and stuns not at all if, say, the tank were already in Hallowed Ground).

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Yes, these are potential issues with a defense based enmity system. However there is a lot of freedom in defining what negated damage means which creates some dials to turn to tweak the system. Say if shields count as negated damage when cast that would provide a method for tanks to generate enmity without any other party member needing to be targeted before them.

Though thinking about it, having the enemy's attention pulled to a non tank party member doesn't sound that bad - if the tank can intervene and generate enmity from doing so. Imagine the opening of a raid boss fight where the the boss goes for the DPS only to have the tank put a tether on the boss, or perhaps covering the target DPS, and that action having enmity tied to it. While initially the boss would be interested in a non tank, it wouldn't last long and correcting this situation would take some direct tank engagement.

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To skip ahead briefly before returning...

In practice, though, they're more likely to be anti-synergetic, for the same reason Holy spam during an invuln is.

If a Ranged CCs a melee enemy chasing it, that's 100% mitigation over that duration. If a tank CCs a melee enemy chasing another player, that's 100% mitigation over that duration. If a tank CCs a melee enemy chasing another player and in doing so forces that enemy to attack said tank instead, that's only some 35% mitigation (over the non-tanks' passive mit). It's the worst choice the party could make in that situation.

(Moreover, XIV's unique in that the mob wouldn't just turn and slap whoever they still can. In WoW, for instance, if a tank gets hit with a debuff that stuns them until they're next struck, the mobs just swap and attack whoever else. In GW2, similar. A mob that wants to attack player A but gets bound and can only attack player B will then attack player B. So all that, too, is still something we could easily flip a switch on however we please.)

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If a ranged party member could kite an enemy without getting hit that would lower that enemy's damage output more than a tank using defenses to reduce HP lost to hits. Whether or not this strategy works over an entire fight will depend on a number of factors. Can the ranged player do this indefinitely? Does CC take resources from the ranged party member? Does the enemy being kited have the ability to cast a ranged TB that a Ranged can't survive? Is it beneficial for the party if the enemy is held at a specific location?

Mechanically the tools that would allow the ranged player to kite successfully forever could be removed. Thematically I'd imagine that the ranged player would be more focused on damaging the enemy.

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It does, but is there any part of that which is especially tank-ish? Tanks started off with the least CC of any role, and even now CC is far from tank-specific.

When I think of a tank, I don't think of an arrow pinning one's foot, a kick to the back of the knee, or a sleep spell, etc. I think of someone actively blocking the path or diverting my attention directly, not merely harassing/harrying the mob as it goes.

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The image of actively blocking the path to allies is also what comes to my mind when I think of the tank role. DPSing, but with more aggro, doesn't conjure that image when I'm playing the game. Pinning an enemy down with an arrow (or sword) actually sounds closer to the tank ideal. I also expect that the party member in heavy armor would be the one to try this because it's risky. The tank would be the one to try to trip or shove a foe because if they made a mistake they'd have the least chance of suffering a fatal blow because of it.

At some point I think this amounts to more than passive harassment too. The tank won't step back after trying to trip you on stab you in the foot. The tank will follow up with a full blown attack. If this is to be reflected in the game then perhaps enmity bonuses on attacks could be kept, but tie them to the state of the enemy. If you as the tank have the enemy under CC, then your attacks get an enmity bonus.

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So no longer based on damage to be nullified? Because otherwise, with tanks passively nullifying a majority of damage dealt to them even before defensives, CC applied when the target is already a tank with defensive up is going to be trivial by comparison, so... for all intents and purposes, CC would have to deny attacks against a non-tank or multiple players to be do much.

...Are we maybe trying to constrain this to raw, pre-mitigated damage? Because otherwise, yeah, scaling this way would neuter our only deliberate Enmity tool's ability to generate Enmity until the biggest possible 'oh shit' moments, or at least until it'd go make its mere slap fatal against a non-tank.

And if not based on damage to be nullified, instead just having the CC skill slap a bunch of extra Enmity onto the enemy baseline, then you basically just have standard Enmity skills again, but with all the more anti-synergy, since the same thing that holds them back from one player now forces them to turn and attack another, again granting the enemy the value you had just previous denied.

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Originally I didn't specify damage reduction based enmity, but "disrupting enemy offense". Damage reduction/nullification would be a part of that, but not the sum total of tank enmity generation. Enmity on abilities that reduce attack potential fits, even if the enemy isn't attacking.

Your point about CC going to waste is an important consideration. It would likely be the case for CC used in the opener to establish aggro, but afterward the CC should have more value being used to negate damage. I tried to elaborate on this:

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

Some of the CC might be incidental as it's used purely for aggro purposes but I think this is fine as long as it doesn't all get used this way. As an example, using low blow to stun at random should have less value than using it to cancel an attack. This is innately true if said attack is inconvenient for the rest of the party (like a large AoE that forces melee to move out) and the value could be reinforced mathematically by adding an enmity bonus to stun if party members were in the AoE when the cast began, as an example.

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This doesn't quite make sense to me. Why would we get a combined-party-Vitality/HP Enmity-punch for using CC? And as a stand-in for whose actual damage done? The CC's, or what damage was denied? Sorry, I'm just not quite following here.

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This was just a proposition for a mathematical way to generate an enmity score. The idea is to assume that the CC has some amount of potential value just by being applied to the enemy and this is used as a stand in for damage that the enemy could do, but has not (yet). The use of party HP is arbitrary, but this number should scale with the level of the encounter, which would be convenient for calculation.

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Okay, fair enough (probably not actually even that difficult to calculate by just having the cast continue ghosted and then checking whose still in it when it would have gone off otherwise).

And now back to the earlier point:

If it's just intended to force them to face the tank, then why not just use an Enmity tool like the old Butcher's Block, Rage of Halone, Power Slash, etc.? Again, just like it's least sensible to pop defensives when the enemy's being stunlocked anyways or vice versa, I don't see the intent here of instead having, say, {hamstringing the enemy as it's trying to reach someone else} as the main way for a tank to generate Enmity, since

1. it would neither have the visuals of something that'd lastingly get the enemy's attention nor feel tank-specific,
2. the Enmity generated would most often just remove most of the mitigation the skill would otherwise have provided unless the tank immediately runs away, and
3. in any other game, it'd already be redundant, as even a modicum of "smarter" mob scripting would have it swap targets when clearly unable to spend its upcoming action on its original target.

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I can't tell the difference between Butcher's Block and Midare Setsugekka. Butcher's Block doesn't look like it should draw any more attention than Midare and if I read tool tips, Midare is much stronger. If the Midare comparison isn't convincing because Midare is a special skill and not just a filler combo, then replace with Gekko, Kasha, or Yukikaze. Visually I'd expect the SAM to draw as much attention as the WAR.

If the tank were trying to hold down the enemy to prevent it from attacking or moving at all, then I'd feel like the tank would certainly be the priority on that enemy's mind. This may be my own personal interpretation since you feel the opposite.

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Originally Posted by Canadane

If you are talking about SB battle style, I greatly enjoyed that. It being a team activity made it much more engaging.

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If you mean "team activity" you mean "have your dps click on diversion on cd" or "have a NIN" not really a better thing that todays where aggro is a no existent. Also it put tanks on a very strict ranking : WAR > DRK > PLD for aggro.

Also I think there is many "sense" to have about emnity, FFXIV is a video game rules which stand with video games rules, and the core gameplay expect mobs and bosses to focus on very resilient target in order to test them. And hopefully tanks are resilient because many hard content bosses need 2 attacks to kill a non tank player.

I also wonder : what could bring a more complex aggro system in the actual gameplay of FFXIV ?
I can understand active and very dynamic aggro system is fun. I've played some action MMO with such systems and it was cool, but it was on action style, and I think it work well here because it force tank players to not build aggro and be passive when the boss is a bit more active. So tanks need to be active and focused to not die to a no blocked hit and find opening to maintain the top aggro.
But does this could work in FFXIV ? I don't think so because FFXIV main rule is "ABC", and all gcd action to tanks are offensive one (but clemency, which is nearly never used for this reason), while defensives are only abilities. So to justify having a more dynamic system, to me it would need to create GCD meaningfull defensives actions, and manage to learn tank to use them (and it's not really easy in FFXIV because even heals have hard time casting healing gcd).

Also, FFXIV is a MMO where "everybody is a dps", and considering supports roles are supposed to deal something around 60% of a dps dommage, you cannot tell them to stop focusing on this (And this is a healer issues where they are supposed to DPS but don't feel they have the tools to do so). So tanks share a dps responsibility. They also have their survival responsibilities and group mitigation one. Do they really need to have a focus on aggro ? To my understanding, tanks in WoW have a heavy focus on aggro management because they deal no relevant dommage compared to DPS, so as heal.

In a nutshell, I don't think having a more dynamic aggro system on FXIV would impact the game as much as having better identities, better fight design and an overhaul of healing in the game. You have to choose your battle.

However I really enjoy theses kind of discussions.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

To condense my opening paragraph in post 22, it seems nonsensical that tanks can hold attention while doing nothing just because they've used a few attacks with the current enormous aggro generation and - nothing that they do, unless you look at the math used by the game, would make me think an enemy would prioritize a tank over someone else.

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Again, I just didn't, and still don't, see why what is the case now would constrain what could be or why the above would therefore be relevant to a discussion that's clearly aiming to change what is.

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Yes, these are potential issues with a defense based enmity system. However there is a lot of freedom in defining what negated damage means which creates some dials to turn to tweak the system. Say if shields count as negated damage when cast that would provide a method for tanks to generate enmity without any other party member needing to be targeted before them.

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Fair, but... at that point you're just looking at something that has already existed: Enmity from sustain (potential) manifested, Enmity from a debuff (as per Flash), and enmity from buffs (barriers, iirc, producing Enmity up-front equal to their barrier value in healing even if not all of that barrier is consumed, while all other buffs produce some small amount of Enmity on activation).

The only really new things then, seem to be that...

1. deliberate Enmity skills on tanks move from more visually aggressive "in[to] your face" skills to debuffs (wherein that Enmity may end up wasting the skills' mitigation potential), perhaps with CC being more commonly available on tanks as a complementary change, and
2. we close the loophole by which scaled non-healing sustain previously generated no Enmity, instead having %DRs, attack denial, etc., produce Enmity based on the sustain it was equivalent to.

Of those, I think the second is a good and perhaps even necessary change.

The first, I just... don't think is necessary once including the second, nor would I think of a on-CD Low Blow as more fitting of an Enmity generator than a Rage of Halone, etc.

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The idea is to assume that the CC has some amount of potential value just by being applied to the enemy and this is used as a stand in for damage that the enemy could do, but has not (yet).

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Which is essentially Flash without accounting for the sustain provided by the added misses it causes (be that only on miss or as a portion of each attack made more likely to miss).

Again, I just... don't see why that'd be preferable. And if attached to things that would previously deny action altogether, you then have the whiplash of getting instant Enmity based on the relative sustain of denying a mob access to its current squishier target altogether only to then, in the process of providing that Enmity and swapping it to the tank, make the actual sustain provided far less since it can then still reach somewhere where it otherwise wouldn't have.

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If a ranged party member could kite an enemy without getting hit that would lower that enemy's damage output more than a tank using defenses to reduce HP lost to hits. Whether or not this strategy works over an entire fight will depend on a number of factors. Can the ranged player do this indefinitely? Does CC take resources from the ranged party member?

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That's my point, though: The Ranged doesn't need to CC indefinitely to indefinitely kite, because CC doesn't only work on mobs targeting oneself; anyone could CC the mob chasing the ranged player. At that point, inflating any predictive sustain-based Enmity further just as a matter of action type makes it less likely to actually produce that sustain, essentially nerfing those niche cases. I'd rather have any such nerfs come from more general systems, like...

• the mob apportioning its decisions based on Enmity rather than having only one target it considers, such that it'd still accept spending its resources that would otherwise overcap on a less hated target it can reach than a maximally hated one it can't (even if it might still save tankbusters for them if the Enmity gap is large enough),
• Enmity fading with range, providing players a further way to manipulate mobs,
• etc.

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Your point about CC going to waste is an important consideration. It would likely be the case for CC used in the opener to establish aggro, but afterward the CC should have more value being used to negate damage. I tried to elaborate on this:

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To be clear, I both noted and, iirc, quoted that point (or, the relevant portion of that paragraph, though I assure you the whole context, too, was read). This part wasn't lost on me.

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Visually [given such big and flashy hits from the SAM] I'd expect the SAM to draw as much attention as the WAR.

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I'm actually cool with that, or very nearly. I do think the SAM should generate a bit more Enmity over an average minute than the likes of NIN or VPR because of those bigger flashier attacks. (You may remember my suggesting to Carighan that Enmity emphasize big, direct damage hits, or at least the more visually impressive ones, such that {Burst Strike} and {Gnashing Fang + Juglar Rip} might each have the same total potency but Burst Strike would have a fair bit more Enmity.)

Again, to me, a bit of passive mitigation bonus for tanks is fine. A tank could be excused for drawing a bit more attention just by being the more physically imposing even before accounting also for being better able to take advantage of certain positional opportunities for Enmity generation (e.g., intercepting a skill-shot that would otherwise have hit someone squishier to get at least the difference in damage done)... but in the range of 20-40% more Enmity, not 1000% more. That excess would allow the tank to frequently enough pull off some less visually imposing skills despite working alongside the likes of DRG and SAM while still leaving those Enmity skills frequently required.

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If the tank were trying to hold down the enemy to prevent it from attacking or moving at all, then I'd feel like the tank would certainly be the priority on that enemy's mind.

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Sure, but you've already made it a factor for everyone else, too, and anyone/everyone can CC, so why make it a "tank" thing, let alone to the exclusion of discrete Enmity skills by means less likely to be anti-synergetic (less likely to waste the CC and less requiring that the tank has already lost threat / that someone is especially at risk for the tank to generate that Enmity)?

For my part, you just...

1. Have twarted offenses "ghost-check". E.g., when a skillshot is intercepted or an AoE stunned, it looks at who it otherwise would have hit had it continued onward or completed.
2. Using the above, which gives you some actual numbers you can calculate, close the loophole on situational sustain to make it likewise an Enmity generator, allowing for a lot more interestingly contextual Enmity generators in general. (You could even perhaps do similar with other means, such as the more Enmity the mob has on someone, the more Enmity will be generated by sustain that specifically denies the mob's kill of that person.)
3. Give tanks, say, 25% more Enmity generation for all things, including the above, and some new/returned skills that are especially visually distracting for the mobs. Such multiplicatively affects the CC Enmity generated, yes, but doesn't unnecessarily tie deliberate Enmity generators to CC as a matter of course, allowing CC to be used more for when its specifically useful as CC.

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Originally Posted by Sparkthor

If you mean "team activity" you mean "have your dps click on diversion on cd" or "have a NIN" not really a better thing that todays where aggro is a no existent. Also it put tanks on a very strict ranking : WAR > DRK > PLD for aggro.

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Agreed here. I wish people wouldn't conflate "Stormblood combat" with the only narrow difference between the two relevant to this thread, which was just Diversion on CD, Shadewalker on CD, an only infrequently relevant Smokescreen, and Tactician and Refresh getting lobotomized before finally being removed.

Also I think there is many "sense" to have about emnity, FFXIV is a video game rules which stand with video games rules, and the core gameplay expect mobs and bosses to focus on very resilient target in order to test them. And hopefully tanks are resilient because many hard content bosses need 2 attacks to kill a non tank player.

That said...

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But does this could work in FFXIV ? I don't think so because FFXIV main rule is "ABC", and all gcd action to tanks are offensive one (but clemency, which is nearly never used for this reason), while defensives are only abilities. So to justify having a more dynamic system, to me it would need to create GCD meaningfull defensives actions, and manage to learn tank to use them (and it's not really easy in FFXIV because even heals have hard time casting healing gcd).

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So, a few things here:

First, the game launched with and retained some sustain-bearing uses of the GCD until Shadowbringers. We had about as long with that as without.

I'd agree though, that there'd be no point in a dynamic system without deliberate levers to pull on to interact with that. Those can be positional, timing-related (where oGCDs are flexible), and/or via new skills, etc., but there has to be enough agency in whatever form(s).

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Also, FFXIV is a MMO where "everybody is a dps"

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It used to be an MMO where most everyone was a bit of everything. In ARR, BLMs would AM in to share split-busters with tanks via Mana Wall (100% mitigation against the next Physical Attack only), or could be allowed to take threat in the opener while Covered against autos, full-miti the first tank buster, and then be Provoked off of as they finally Quelling Strikes. BLM parties might mass-DoT and then Sleep(ga), then focus down targets based on remaining DoT times so that the PLD could stay in Sword Oath the whole time. BRDs and SMNs would kite for speedruns and odd-comp leveling dungeons formed over shout chat. MNKs and DRGs didn't actually take that much more damage than a tank would outside of defensive CDs. The difference between a Monk's passive mitigation and a healer's was slightly larger than between a Dragoon and a tank, and so it wasn't uncommon for them to want to peel off the healer (especially since cast-interruption was a very real thing back then).

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Also, FFXIV is a MMO where "everybody is a dps",

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This part, though, isn't particularly relevant. That doesn't change because of a tanks having to actually deal with Enmity, for the simple fact that the relative value of those Enmity skills goes up the more damage the DPS can thereby produce without getting crushed.

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In a nutshell, I don't think having a more dynamic aggro system on FXIV would impact the game as much as having better identities, better fight design and an overhaul of healing in the game. You have to choose your battle.

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I'd agree, but... the deeper you dive, the more intertwined these things are. Enmity relies on an interesting, fruitful balance of long-term outputs (damage, in any fight ended by killing) and short-term outputs (sustain, again in the aforementioned situations that make up 100% of XIV encounters) across each role. Making it stick actually requires things like fixing healing. And that in turn allows for better identities. And, fully fleshed, Enmity easily could become a way to make many fights far more interestingly varied-but-manipulable.

CC "as a tank's job" is natural btw.

If you assume a game has no active threat/emnity system (compare early GW2) then the former role of crowd controller (back when CRPGs all built for 6 roles instead of 3) falls to the tank easily. Because that's how you "protect" your team.

Mind you that there are of course other ways of doing this, physically intercepting hits mostly. And I wish FFXIV did more with that. We have line stacks where the tanks go in front, and those tethers, but I cannot - in general I mean, for most attacks - just stand in front of a teammate to take hits for them.

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Originally Posted by Carighan

CC "as a tank's job" is natural btw.

If you assume a game has no active threat/emnity system (compare early GW2) then the former role of crowd controller (back when CRPGs all built for 6 roles instead of 3) falls to the tank easily. Because that's how you "protect" your team.

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That's like saying "if you remove A, that which was shared among A, B, and C (and used least, on average, by A) naturally belongs to A."

If there's no way to hold threat, there is no tank, only a sabotage-focused DPS. Crowd-controller is not a tank. It's just a dude with more than average CC casts available per fight.

Of all the things tanks do, never has sleeping/hamstringing/blinding/slowing/charming/rooting/snaring/etc ever been what's unique or iconic to the role.

Though, neither does any part of what they do even have to be uniquely possible for them outside of advantaged threat generation and breadth/depth of defensives, since even if everyone can intercept or thwart attacks, not everyone has the eHP to position themselves so aggressively or for guaranteeing a hit against themselves to be better for the party than the chance of someone else dodging something entirely, let alone having the burst threat to lock enemies occasionally into a certain position without needing a CD to pin them down directly.

Now, CC or mobility or barriers or whatever else might play some part in giving them an, in effect., outsized eHP capacity (since that's not necessarily passive), but the core of a tank is to be the disproportionately threatening, durable entity that helps take and manage space by nature of having the eHP to aggress where others could not and thereby shield directly or indirectly.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

If there's no way to hold threat, there is no tank, only a sabotage-focused DPS. Crowd-controller is not a tank. It's just a dude with more than average CC casts available per fight.

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That's an odd way to look at it, because existing implementations both digital and analog would disagree with you there. And it's hard to argue with, well, existence. Now of course, I'll readily agree that probably this role should consistently be called "crowd control" not "tank". This is one of those situations where the waters got very muddled because after WoW dropped the other 3 RPG-roletypes during its beta and reduced to what we now call "the holy trinity", this sadly became the norm for people even [b]thinking[b/] about these types of gameplay role. No longer even considering, as you exemplify, CC, Buffing or Debuffing to be roles. "It's just DPS with more CC". I'd say that's a CC who can do some DPS in their downtime? But it's of course a cultural shift, there's a reason we always say "everyone is a DPS" in Guild Wars 2. Which is wrong (if everyone is DPS, then nobody is, and you ought to state the differentiating parts not the common one), but it's how we think about RPG role types nowadays.
(edit: After all, what is an FFXIV tank but a DPS with more aggro production and eHP? Just DPS though.)

Ultimately just a language thing though, of course.

And yes, I am aware that in FFXIV, CC has never been a thing - and hence naturally discussing who is best at it is absolutely pointless. We have a single mezz-type ability, and even that is ~never used except for a cheese where enemies will not explode on death in deep dungeons. xD
This does not mean "tank" doesn't mean CC-centric. Hero shooters and MOBAs in particular showed this to be a very valid design choice, as did GW1/GW2 for more RPG-y games. I think it comes from the idea that if your tank isn't supposed to just be "I hold aggro" then another interpretation is "I protect my squishy team from danger". Which means that things such as CCing enemies, diverting enemies (physically intercepting attacks or if not possible, this is where holding aggro again finds its place) or putting protecting effects on party members then falls naturally to this archetype.

Could be cool. Better than just having +emnity on some skills instead of on a tank stance, at least.

The whole "I hold aggro"-thing is also a bit pointless insofar that if your blue-icon jobs are supposed to hold aggro, then there's no reason to even make that a scalable gameplay mechanism, as "aggro" (unlike threat) is a binary effect. You either have it or you don't. Which means it might as well be removed and the boss looks at whoever has tank stance on and uses provoke until switched elsewhere. It'd cause no loss of gameplay functionality to do that, in the end. There's a reason why GW2 can have raid fights where anybody can be the tank, you pick up a buff that marks you as "This person is who the boss runs after".
And I mean, SQEX seems to agree to a degree as most newer bosses aim their TBs at the two tank-role targets independent of aggro, and will only care about that if only 0 or 1 tank is alive. hence the OT leaving tank stance off in most fights nowadays.

Would it be better if as the OT I'd at least have to maximize my threat to be able to take aggro as needed? Not really, there's no gameplay difference from a mechanical POV between a combo that maximizes my threat and one that maximizes my damage, and the latter is something FFXIV always asks for, anyways. So it's a natural, shared, optimization direction. At least in the context of this particular game.
Of course, if DPS became less of a focal point, it'd be a very very different proposition. But honestly I - sadly - can't see that happen, as it's a problem that no MMORPG has managed to work on yet without having to rollback any work soon after. It's natural that we want to kill enemies as soon as possible, both for performance-awareness reasons and because the enemy being dead is factually the best way to ensure nobody dies.

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Originally Posted by Carighan

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

That's like saying "if you remove A, that which was shared among A, B, and C (and used least, on average, by A) naturally belongs to A."

If there's no way to hold threat, there is no tank, only a sabotage-focused DPS. Crowd-controller is not a tank. It's just a dude with more than average CC casts available per fight.

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That's an odd way to look at it, because existing implementations both digital and analog would disagree with you there. And it's hard to argue with, well, existence.

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Sorry, but... what the heck is this supposed to mean? What "existence" am I being construed as arguing with, digital, analog, quantum, or otherwise?

I'm not arguing with the fact that there were roles that were occasionally considered "crowd-controllers" (though a typical foundational 6-part division of roles would generally go to {Tank/Defender, Striker, Ranger, Caster, and Healer/Support} -- not {Tank, Healer, Damage, Crowd-Controller, +2} or whatever other arrangement that'd specifically push a theme-agnostic capacity like CC into its own "role").

I argued only that...
A. Where such a designation was used, it was about a shit designation about as useful as "DoT guy" in any fight lasting too long for the delayed pay-off time to make a difference, and that
B. No part of there (rarely) being a CCer "role" says that if you removed everything that makes a tank a tank... that then a "Crowd-controller" would be a tank.

Again, Sleep, Repose, Shadowbind, Lethargy, Cripple, Fluid Aura, Low Blow, etc., alone do not a tank make. They make nothing like a tank any more than having a basic damage rotation makes a tank.

CC is not "naturally the job of a tank". It's just one tool used by everyone that a tank will occasionally, by nature of what else it's used to tracking and where it tends to be positioned, make slightly more pivotal benefit of than most (though often still not quite so much as supports unless specifically having to make specific angular space for others).

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Now of course, I'll readily agree that probably this role should consistently be called "crowd control" not "tank".

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Then why treat it as a natural progression of a tank? They're two separate things.

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This is one of those situations where the waters got very muddled because after WoW dropped the other 3 RPG-roletypes during its beta and reduced to what we now call "the holy trinity", this sadly became the norm for people even [b]thinking[b/] about these types of gameplay role. No longer even considering, as you exemplify, CC, Buffing or Debuffing to be roles.

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Not really, no. Again, we had generally Tank (big eHP, high threat), Striker (some threat control, some direct manipulation, good damage), Ranger (could reach shit others couldn't, could kite if needed, could reduce party damage taken by nature of staying out of AoEs or baiting them away), Scout (traps guy, weakness-finder, sometime-initiator), Caster (specialty capacities via varied spells despite otherwise lower versatility), and Healer (heals, shields, sustaining-buffs, etc.), with buffs slightly more often found on the Healer (-> Support) but far from always.

Since WoW launched with considerable utility and distinction across those roles, it maintained it just fine, with some DPS being a hell of a lot more durable yet also at more risk than others, with some having more direct control and others less frequent but complex influences, etc.. What you're referring to here is simply dungeon-finder (duty-finder here); the differences between scouts, rangers, strikers, and casters were retained in WoW itself.

People did think about those roles; they just weren't bound to them beyond their actual difference in use (i.e., the points where a Cat being able to shapeshift into a Bear might offer more than a Rogue or the Rogue would offer a new route by way of Pickpocket, etc.).

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No longer even considering, as you exemplify, CC, Buffing or Debuffing to be roles. "It's just DPS with more CC".

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That has nothing to do with the alleged "reduction" of roles from 6 to 3. The original 6 didn't turn CC into its own role; instead, every role did CC (and/or created the same net effect as CC), each in different ways. Nor have buffing or debuffing ever made a cohesive role cluster. Support in a 3-part setup, yes. Striker in a 6-part, yes. Tank in either, yes. But not debuffer or buffer, because those don't actually take any unique approach to combat as a whole, only add a constraint to outputs otherwise perfectly average across and agnostic to an actual Caster/Ranger/Scout/Striker/Tank/Healer kit.

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And yes, I am aware that in FFXIV, CC has never been a thing

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It was a thing early on. You presumably joined after that time, is all.

The first level-cap dungeon's speed run cheese was originally 4 SMNs because of that, even if BRD/WHM/PLD/BLM was close despite being more intuitive.

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And yes, I am aware that in FFXIV, CC has never been a thing

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CC is not limited to mezzes. And atop them, we still even have binds, heavy, stun, and interrupt even after having lost pacify, silence, pull-ins, and knockbacks.

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Which means that things such as CCing enemies, diverting enemies (physically intercepting attacks or if not possible, this is where holding aggro again finds its place) or putting protecting effects on party members then falls naturally to this archetype.

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I'm literally the guy who was insisting on the ability to directly intercept or divert enemies? This isn't mutually exclusive to Enmity being a thing.

I merely pointed out that there's no reason to make CC tanks-only or to treat it as mutually exclusive with Enmity skills by more typical (less wasteful) means. You can have interception, suppression, CC, AND enmity-focused skills alike.

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The whole "I hold aggro"-thing is also a bit pointless insofar that if your blue-icon jobs are supposed to hold aggro, then there's no reason to even make that a scalable gameplay mechanism, as "aggro" (unlike threat) is a binary effect. You either have it or you don't. Which means it might as well be removed and the boss looks at whoever has tank stance on and uses provoke until switched elsewhere.

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This makes no more sense than "your kit has a DoT or it doesn't, so we should just have that tick automatically as long as you're a job with it and opened combat". It's still a rotational factor at minimum.

And no, Enmity doesn't have to be binary. That's how it's been used in XIV thus far, yes, but it could as easily apportion the decision weights of a mob's available attacks, making any such gradation of actions from that mob.

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And I mean, SQEX seems to agree to a degree as most newer bosses aim their TBs at the two tank-role targets independent of aggro, and will only care about that if only 0 or 1 tank is alive. hence the OT leaving tank stance off in most fights nowadays.

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Why should we care whether the SQEX agrees? We're in this thread (and most people are on the forums in general) because SQEX's decisions leave much to be desired.

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Would it be better if as the OT I'd at least have to maximize my threat to be able to take aggro as needed? Not really, there's no gameplay difference from a mechanical POV between a combo that maximizes my threat and one that maximizes my damage

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That's because there presently ARE NO ENMITY-MAXIMIZING ACTIONS. When there was, however, they provided at least as much gameplay as any other use of alternative combos (e.g., Storm's Eye, old Goring Blade, Gnashing Fang) until they were neutered by being treated multiplicatively under excessively strong stance modifiers. Which you can call negligible if you like (though by that warrant, the game is basically just a rote chain of buttons or, XIV-combo-condensed, 1 rotational ST button per job, and I don't understand why one would defend that), but it is literally something.

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Of course, if DPS became less of a focal point, it'd be a very very different proposition.

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DPS being the focal point makes zero difference. You cannot do DPS if you're dead. Your DPS cannot do DPS if they are dead. The more damage healers do, the more each GCD of healer damage saved via an at-cost tank sustain GCD is worth. The more damage DPS do, the more value each time the tank saves their ass is worth.

Flash dealt no damage in Stormblood. Did that stop it being used? Not remotely, because Total Ecclipse in turn had no Enmity modifier, while Flash reduced average damage from attacks not guaranteed to hit by ~20% and, more importantly, put out hugely more Enmity, which meant less healer GCDs wasted on healing non-tanks, less relative uptime lost to DPS dying, etc., the rDPS of which was far greater than the PLD's own DPS loss.

It's precisely because of DPS requirements that you use non-DPS skills -- because the rDPS gain is still higher and the only thing that could ever differentiate personal DPS from raid DPS is Enmity (and single-target buffs).

The effects pertinent here are solely the relative tuning of Enmity modifiers given whatever decay systems, etc., may exist, such that Enmity skills necessary use is enough to feel worth having as part of one's kit. When you only have to do a few combos at the start of an encounter and can forget about the Enmity combo thereafter, yeah, that feels wasteful. So just don't go out of your way to cripple those skills' use in that way, and you're good; they're at least as engaging as any other alt-combo.

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Summary

• Roles should include also some sense of how position, eHP, range, feature sets, etc., come together into a cohesive approach to combat (and often even a distinct silhouette, so to speak), not merely "has DoTs", "has CC", etc.
  
  
• CC, being agnostic to the above (part of how each role manages its capacities, each generally in different ways), is not sufficient to comprise a role just by having more CC than most other tanks/strikers/rangers/scouts/casters/healers.
  
  
• Enmity doesn't have to be binary. All that's fundamental to it is that it's a tabled value that other outputs carry some amount of and which can be modified (given an amplifier, suppressor, a match-up, match-down, doubling, halving, flat increase, flat decrease, constant decay, constant marginal decay, or whatever else). It can be made a granular weight for all decisions just as easily as it can be an absolute toggle for a certain set of decisions.
  
  
• Because CC already has its own purpose (the CC), it makes little sense to make that a core of tank Enmity generation. It would wastefully DR enemies early and either oversaturate threat via awkward optimizations or be dependent on such interactions just for tanking to function.
  
  
• Enmity skills when well-tuned and given some constraint on excess margining provide at least as much gameplay interest as any other alt-combo, but usually more. Just as debuffs have more skill-expression possible than a mere buff and a durationed buff combo more than a mere flat alternator, Enmity actions/combos (again, if not ludicrously poorly-tuned or lacking any margin-reduction) provide a higher ceiling than debuff combos in turn.