Quote Originally Posted by MartaDemireux View Post
You'll see in "changes to LNC" that all direction based attacks no longer require the direction and instead increase enmity... Though I think I'll add some increased enmity to Heavy Thrust as well.
Heavy Thrust and Impulse Drive are your only two positional abilities. You just don't have nearly enough enmity through that to hold enmity. Even with 1.5x Defiance plus 1x/3x/5x combo on high-potency attacks, you're barely holding enmity against an ilvl90 MNK with a fresh 50 WAR. Seriously, spamming BB combo will put you at about a 10% lead. BB combo is 3600 enmity-potency with a 25% damage penalty. Either Heavy Thrust is giving you a 4x enmity modifier or you're dead in the water. You're also relying solely on cross-class Flash for AoE enmity and have no access at all to ranged enmity.

You need enmity on your pull. You will never be an acceptable tank without it. If you had a 4x enmity modifier on Piercing Talon and added a 3x on top of that, you'd have 12x enmity on it, or more enmity than BB puts out in a combo hit. Pick your poison, really. For AoE enmity, Ring of Thorns and Doom Spike come too late to be primary enmity generators -- you need it at 30, so you're stuck with Flash. I don't see a good way forward for a level 30 LNC tank except to make Full Thrust combo your standard enmity combo, Piercing Talon a standard pull, and give a unique AoE enmity move at 30. You can afford to put off a tanking stance until 35 or 40. PLD doesn't have one until 40 and has Rampart as its most potent cooldown until Convalesce trait at 32 and Sentinel at 38.

Note, though, that you cannot afford to make a tank which is weaker at tanking and offers higher damage. You're the tank, or you're dumped off the team. In the interest of balance, you pretty much have to make one of your abilities into a tanking stance. Your gear is going to add +200 strength, so even if you pushed base STR to comically-low levels, you'd still do too much damage to be balanced and just scale in the most busted way imaginable (missing out on STR would make your HORRIBLY gimped -- at fresh 50, you'd be hopeless, then you'd be a beast at ilvl90 anyway). Remember that even if you tried to take STR off gear, you'd still have Allagan with +STR on it. No real way to address it except with a tanking stance -- you'd want to do so anyway due to splitting tanking and non-tanking DPS the way current tanks do. It's a design decision the devs made that all future designs have no choice but to mimic.

In short, it's my opinion that you're stuck with

Piercing Talon +enmity
Full Thrust combo +enmity
Leg Sweep on-GCD
30: AoE enmity
35: Tank stance -- reduces damage by 25%, +enmity, +tank-relevant effects (parry strength, heal, magic resistance, debuff immunity, whatever)
40-50: tank abilities -- DPS boosts need not apply

plus need to account for eHP weakness somewhere. Debuff immunity somewhere seems a likely candidate in that you have to contend with a level 34 ability which is useless to a tank as an enmity spike unless you have a way to avoid the damage penalty.

As long as you don't put any extra points into STR from LNC, you should be fine for off-tanking balance. Basically no off-GCD abilities, so you're pretty much the same as WAR with more potency and a weaker damage buff (+10% instead of +20%), with WAR having higher spike (+41% or so from Berserk with +9% Inner Release) and a pacification afterward while off-tank TMP would be more consistent but would have additional vulnerability for the duration. This is also why TMP cannot have any more damage abilities (at least not which do not require the use of the tanking stance).