Help, Why do I lose aggro when healer cast regen?

[Duelle]

True story. I can't tell you how many times I've had a healer cast regen on me AS I'm running in to pull a group of mobs.

Regen and all HoTs applied on the tank prior to pull are there to mitigate incoming damage at the beginning of combat (specially with packs of mobs that will eat through stoneskin in a fraction of a second). HoTs are both Proactive and Reactive; the only real issue is that the healer should never regen everyone in the group prior to pull. That's where you see the most aggro issues with Regen.

FFXIV lacks a support role that can funnel enmity back into the tank or away from DPS/Healers effectively - this was the function of a Thief in FFXI.

Hate tranfer, like buffing and debuffing, is a tertiary class aspect and a perk that can be given to a select few DPS that make sense. WoW's Rogue and Hunter classes had nifty abilities to transfer hate (Tricks of the Trade AKA "DPS buff to the tank while transferring a percentage of generated threat to the tank" and Misdirect AKA "a much better, ranged version of trick attack") while still being good DPS. I don't see why Thief and Ranger/Gunner/<insert ranged job> wouldn't have that be part of their arsenal.

[Kitru]

Regen and all HoTs applied on the tank prior to pull are there to mitigate incoming damage at the beginning of combat (specially with packs of mobs that will eat through stoneskin in a fraction of a second). HoTs are both Proactive and Reactive; the only real issue is that the healer should never regen everyone in the group prior to pull. That's where you see the most aggro issues with Regen.

It doesn't matter whether Regen is on one target or all targets in a pull: having a HoT on anyone is going to immediately draw everything away from the tank and towards the healer as soon as combat begins. Rather than running to the tank so that they can be nicely grouped up and easily picked up, the group will splinter and spread out, making it way harder and much less efficient for the tank to do so. Any healer that thinks that it's even remotely close to okay to start off a fight with *anyone* HoTed up is actively trying to make life harder on the tank for no particularly good reason: there aren't any fight/pulls that burst hard enough in the beginning that you need the extra couple of ticks that said HoT would provide.

The only things that a healer should put on people are absorb shields, since those *don't* draw aggro while still doing *exactly* what said healer wants out of them: eating the first few hits while they set up and gauge the fight. HoTs do the job *worse* while also being *way* riskier and annoying to boot.

[Duelle]

It doesn't matter whether Regen is on one target or all targets in a pull: having a HoT on anyone is going to immediately draw everything away from the tank and towards the healer as soon as combat begins.

Which is testimony to there being something wrong with the way HoT enmity is being calculated. I totally agree on healers that spam Medica over and over as well as overzealous DPS. Knowing how to proactively heal is the sign of a good healer, and what you're arguing for is removing a part of that aspect simply because threat values on Regen are wonky, clinging to the wrong part of the skill argument instead of perhaps asking for an adjustment to how HoTs generate aggro.

[Kitru]

Which is testimony to there being something wrong with the way HoT enmity is being calculated.

Except that knowing when and if to use a HoT is just as much part of being a good healer as pre-healing. HoTs and DoTs have applied threat at the time that the damage and healing occur, rather than entirely up front, in every game that I know of. In some games, like WoW, where tanks are expected to drop a single AoE and get threat on everything permanently, ARR was designed with a tighter/more challenging threat metagame. You don't just hit something once and have all of the aggro on it you need. You can't even effectively frontload threat generation because more than half of it is backloaded onto the third attack in your high enmity combo. Personally, I like that; it adds a level of complexity to tanking that most games lack. Healers have to deal with the tighter enmity model just as much as tanks do; they have to wait until the tank has tagged everything before throwing out any heals, which includes HoTs. It's why Stoneskin and Adloquium are so useful.

You're operating under the assumption that it is a *problem* that healers can't HoT up all the time, which I honestly don't believe it is because the game isn't designed to make enmity a joke *anyone*. Enmity is a factor in how *everyone* plays and the proper time to use HoTs is one of the biggest things healers have to learn about that part of the game, along with how to AoE heal effectively and avoid overhealing to minimize enmity generation.