Why do we still have enmity?

[Kalise]

That's simply not true; you yourself even say as much earlier in your post.

Now, I'm not saying that enmity management is currently all that interesting, but it doesn't fit into either of the two extremes you've outlined.

When did I state something contrary to that?

Enmity is not utilized by Tanks outside of a 2-3 GCD's at the start of a pull. After which it is completely ignored because oGCD skills are spammed on CD to "Manage" it (With stuff like Lucid Dream/Refresh being used primarily for MP and just happen to also completely negate Enmity needs)

Think that's partly down to MMOs being dumbed down so much over the years.

Nah, even old school MMO's had enmity being terrible.

Stuff like Everquest/vanilla WoW simply had Tanks spam out Enmity skills 24/7 and its only interaction was DPS would have to slow down/stop DPS when their enmity got too high (Which is a decidedly not fun mechanic for DPS and something that doesn't really bother the tank at all because they're just spamming as much as they can)

This was to the point where back in the day in WoW, people had to wait for Tanks to build up stacks of Sunder to have enough enmity before people could start attacking. With also times where if people got some lucky crits in a row, they'd then have to stop attacking and wait for the Tank to catch up in enmity.

Meanwhile other classic MMO's such as Anarchy Online, simply had Tanking classes generate a bunch of hate by doing their thing (Or would have makeshift Tanks by having someone who would generate aggro easily through things like Healing while having some decent defence "Tank" stuff)

Enmity has simply never been an interesting or engaging mechanic. Even "Fun" tools to manipulate it (Such as Tricks of the Trade/Trick Attack) were simply just damage buffs that diverted enmity but where often redundant for their enmity generation outside of maybe making pulls easier.

There is simply nothing interesting that can be done with such a binary mechanic. Where it's a case of "You have highest enmity and the thing is attacking you" or "You don't have highest enmity and the thing is not attacking you". With maybe some occasional mechanics that cause special attacks to someone who's second on the enmity list or bottom of the enmity list, but that's just further binary actions.

Which is why TESO literally does just make it a binary mechanic. Either the enemy is taunted and thus forced to attack you or it isn't and it will attack whomever tf it feels like.

(Also, in response to a prior poster claiming that damage is also binary, that is not the case. While the result is "Enemy is alive" or "Enemy is dead" and thus binary, dealing damage is not. The more damage you deal, the more damage you deal and the faster the enemy dies.

This scales infinitely, up until you have enough damage to kill the enemy in a single attack. With Enmity, it doesn't matter if you're 1 point above everyone else or 1,000,000 points above everyone else, the enemy will still be attacking you.

Thus once you generate enough enmity to maintain a lead over everyone else, more enmity generation is literally useless as it won't do a thing)