Butcher's Block... worthless.

[Gamemako]

Cool, and I did too, and was playing with a Bard, a BLM and WHM and my experience was entirely the opposite. Agro was a struggle to maintain unless they intentionally throttled their DPS.

If your DPS couldn't pull agro, its because they are bad, or they pitied you and held back.

The bat swings both ways.

This is a pretty funny argument, because it's easy to do the math to show that you have more than enough enmity to hold aggro despite gear discrepancies. Forget Defiance and everything else, BB is 2150 enmity-potency per 7.5s, 2400 including autoattacks. A relic+1 DRG FT combo was an effective 1100 enmity-potency per 7.5s with HT and Disembowel up. Now tell me, do you really think the DRG is doing 120% more damage per potency? Because he isn't. Valk's heuristic predicts about 78% going from 38 WD and 300 strength to 46 WD and 500 strength. You have a 20% lead over your +1 DPS from the rawest of fresh-50 AF gear.

Yes, actual WAR enmity generation and actual DRG damage are both higher than that example, but the ratio is actually pretty similar. You would have to leverage that lead to generate AoE enmity at the same time, using Berserk to account for the damage buffs other players may use. If you just spammed Overpower, you would lose aggro. That isn't remotely true anymore. You can basically hold aggro against the strongest DPS in a bikini with a Weathered War Axe at this point.

Which is it?

There's nothing contradictory there. 2.0 enmity was not trivial, but you could always manage to account for gear discrepancy. Failing to pay attention, especially against combinations like SMN and MNK, would have you lose aggro unless you're highly geared. If you ever lost aggro, it was your fault, but the game didn't just hand it to you. In 2.1, the game hands it to you on a silver platter. Overpower three times, go have a picnic somewhere because it's a done deal. Enemies are dead before DPS can catch up to your enmity spike.

But we got the spam route buffed, so dungeons will continue to be 'mindlessly aoe all the things'

QFT.