Can we please get aggro management back?

[MariaArvana]

snip

1) Not everyone wants to 'pick a different tank.' believe it or not, people like certain jobs thematically or rotation wise, and throughout this game's history, there's been plenty of threads/rants/vents about people's job they love getting shafted hard. (PLD in HW, DRK in SB, MNK and to lesser extent RDM essentially 4ever, etc.) Arbitrarily making the tank they love to play harder to play than the others enmity wise is just going to annoy many people who love the job while tickinling the itch of a potential minority. The current tank setup allows all 4 tanks to effectively do their job on all fronts, with minor variances that only come in to play in the highest of end content, compared to your theoretical setup where they'd have major variations present in all content, casual or hardcore.

2) The purpose of your setup was to make certain tanks stronger in certain aspects while weakening them in others. I was simply pointing out a quick flaw that makes the 'enmity weak tank' basically have zero weakness compared to the other 3, which is a balancing issue. A tank that has a harder rotation can't fix his damage by hitting a single button, neither can a tank that generates resources needed for mitigation slower can speed it up by hitting one button, whereas provoke would knock out the enmity weak tank's issue, leaving it with only its strengths. WAR from 2.1-5.0 has historically shown that when your job has all the strengths with basically none of the weaknesses or almost non-issue weaknesses, it becomes the desired tank and inevitably forces another tank onto the bench. (PLD in HW, DRK to a lesser extent in SB). With how close in balance the tanks currently are, I'd rather not they invest in a system that could easily re-create such days.

3) The Inner Release debate in SB is proof enough that people aren't very fond of one job having to execute tons of weaving/optimizations in order to achieve its max dps threshold (SB DRK), vs a job that can unga bunga spam and deal just as much, if not more damage for basically zero effort (WAR). Rotation complexity should be pretty standardized across all tanks which honestly, is something they still need to work on a bit.


Aggro management by itself is intrinsically boring, it's just a simple binary yes/no system, and for any skilled tank during SB, it basically didn't exist due to how absurdly broken WAR was at generating it, combined with shirk use. Focus should shift away from aggro and more towards fun aggro-based mechanics for the tanks to deal with, like:

-the aggro drops in Neo-Exdeath
-more boss mechanics that target #2 hate instead of #1, making control of the fight who's MT/OT at certain times more important than it is currently.
-a phase where aggro gets dropped and then inverted, so the tanks want to drop tank stance to stay at #7 & #8 to keep aggro
-boss randomly swaps #1 & #2 hate through the fight right before certain mechanics/tank busters, placing more emphasis on pre-emptive planning mitigation & positioning.

The thing about your OGCD stance idea is that it inherently limits fight design by its nature, or becomes irrelevant. What if they wanted to design a boss that constant auto'd #1 -2 in hate throughout the fight forcing both tanks to pop their ogcd at the beginning, but quickly into a fight, they wanted to spawn an add around the time after the OGCD wears off? And if you can refresh it by using stuff, then how would it be designed to be refreshed without making it completely irrelevant and permanently up (DRK' darkside as an example), without it also being a dps loss? If you make the refresh too forgiving, then it might as well have never existed, and if you make it too harsh, you just run into the same situation as SB where bad tanks were constantly losing aggro, and is just an extra thing they had to keep up and failure to do so gets the healer/dps eaten alive and having the tank get yelled at, potentially scaring them off the role and completely defeating the purpose Square intended with making tanking easier? It's a much more complex solution with tons of variables that would require much more dev time to balance than the eloquently simple solution they have now.

Also, a tank stance OGCD would be a logistical nightmare for dungeon groups. "Okay, lemme pop my tank stance and - oh, everything's dead in 25s, my stance fell off and can't refresh it, and now I can't gain aggro on the next pack due to the OGCD being on cd for another 1:30." At that point, the group either pulls and lets the dps/healers tank, or waits 1:30 for the tank to get his stance back. (oops)