Quote Originally Posted by zipzo View Post
I don't reject the idea that enmity/threat, defensive cooldowns, and positioning work in sort of a triad, complimenting one another. I think when you take away any one of those 3 things you make the entirety of the role less interesting. I wouldn't want to give up any of the 3.

Just in my case, taking away the necessity of enmity/threat management would be (is) the most egregious cut, which WoW did.

There can be different things we like about a role, that's ok, but that doesn't mean I don't value the other remaining elements of the role, or think we could do without them.
And for me it's definitely the least painful amputation of what traditionally makes up a tank, mostly because it has only ever been one of three rotational or stance-based concerns, as a triad of damage, protection, and threat. Now, that protection can still come in a myriad form. The damage also can come in self-investment or target-investment, and as damage multipliers, DoTs / stat buffs, or, in the latter case, direct damage. But enmity can only ever be enmity. The more you focus action on enmity, especially purely upon enmity, relative to the number of other paths of action, the more you homogenize internal gameplay. Now, shades or pairings of enmity growth, as often the design concept behind WoW tanks (even the solo-pathetic Sunder Armor), can avoid that problem to an extent, but even if that were perfectly baked into the surrounding toolkit to allow for the most variance possible, you are still deferring or balancing concerns of damage, mitigation, self-healing, damage investment, mitigation investment, healing investment, utility, and so forth in order to ensure that you have a sufficient margin of an incredibly bland metric—enmity. It doesn't vary with different mob behaviors (except in threat wipes, if you can even call that variance), and provides no variance to said behaviors (unlike HP thresholds and so forth). You manipulate nothing but a consistent target via a flat threat table.

As long as enmity remains that dull, I'm not sad that other things have been given room to rise to the fore in WoW tanking. At most, I'm a bit sad that tanks have gotten so strong, both passively and by normal rotation, that there's rarely reason to strip mobs off my tank and kite them briefly, being able to provide damage shifts and support as a non-tank... not that I still can, given that streamlining has occurred not only from the tank side through enmity increases, but also the DPS side through ability pruning.