Can we please get aggro management back?

[MariaArvana]

I'll have to reply later when I have more time to write up more walls of text, but I wanted to reply to a quick point.

Also the context of WARs being less popular than DRK was in reference to SB time frame, Not HW. Secondly, the number of peopel who play a job, vs those who upload parses arent the same numbers. SE were the ones who released these numbers in direct response to people complaining about DRK. Saying WAR was the least played, and DRk was the most played.

That chart they released includes people who leveled DRK/PLD/WAR to 60 then never touched it again. Saying they're an accurate number of tank activity in actual level 60 content at that time is the equivalent of saying FF14 has 14mil players, or WoW has 100mil, when their actual active playerbase is usually 10% of that. Or releasing a statistic that included every single person who ever entered Eureka Anemos, regardless if they stayed for 1 second or all the way to Hydatos and then claiming it was indicative of Eureka's popularity. When you talk about active players, you use data that empirically provides whats being actively played at max level constantly, which FFlogs did. and WAR was untouched on its golden throne until 5.0 in terms of active play, where DRK was either taking the silver medal (HW) or bronze (SB).

And sure, not everyone uploaded. But stats are super great for analyzing, and a lovely thing called extrapolating that is used extremely often in the world of statistics because its a great tool. With WAR being played almost 3x as much in raids than DRK in SB, even if we could include all the missing players, there's a large enough sample of size of parses that we can make extrapolations that the ratio would stay the same or similarily. We aren't going to be finding 12k more DRKs that never uploaded without finding a lot more WARs/PLDs that never uploaded too. And there's no statistics of which tank was most actively played at max level across the entire playerbase, so that enters the realm of simple guessing or personal experience and not the realm of the empirical. But considering how much the meta drips down to lower-end groups and players (I.E: bad tank players trying to copy the dps tank meta and failing horrbly at it.) I wouldn't be surprised if the FFlogs ratios could be extrapolated even further.

They wanted to fix issues tehy saw, and came up with solutions that work in the short term with long term pitfalls. We can all agree on one thing though: The devs dont always get it right and some of the things they implement horribly suck.

Considering it takes all of 1 milisecond for someone to realize a 10x enmity multiplier on a tank stance would completely annihilate any output a dps can do gives a pretty big insight into what they desired in this system, and how its most likely a huge success for them. If it was at like 4x I'd be more inclined to think on your lines, but the 10x multiplier was extremely intentional. In their eyes, they extremely got it right, as the system is acting perfectly as intended, regardless of how each individual player views it.

Also, the identity thing is honestly an opinion. When I look at WAR, I still think 'berserker with immensely powerful skills', even in 5.0. I still see PLD as the holy shield knight that protects the weak, which several of its mitigation abilities (Intervention, Cover, Clemency) attribute well to its identity. When I play DRK, I know I'm playing a DRK thematically, just as I know when I'm playing a WAR. Job identity goes far beyond than just a few key skills being homogenized; the aesthetics of their skills, their AF, and their flavor CDs are all extremely unique to give each a powerful identity.

My understanding of Warrior Dominance stemmed from two primary factors - Damage was really good and having holmgang on a 3 Minute CD was ultra powerful for Tank busters.

WAR was dominant for many primary reasons beyond that:
-Unchained giving WAR the highest aggro gen bar none with the smallest damage loss, to the point it was a raid dps gain to bring a WAR over PLD/DRK combo due to the dps the other two would lose from having to secure aggro, ESPECIALLY PLD.
-(HW only): Storm's Path had a 10% all damage down debuff on it, which meant that not bringing a WAR to raid automatically meant your whole party took 10% more damage from EVERYTHING in the encounter. When there were extremely powerful raid busters floating around (J-kick, J-storm, Mortal Revolution, whatever the heck Allthink's electric raid buster was, Cascade, Whirlwind(?), Mega Holy, etc.) on top of giving a free 10% mitigation to your co-tank whenever they had aggro meant WAR was almost mandatory for low week prog, and gave healers extra offensive GCDs from less damage having to be healed across the entirety of the fight. WAR was increasing a lot of people's dps inadvertedly while also being the highest damage tank.
-WAR was the only tank to give slash resist, meaning you increased NIN dps due to them putting up slashing is a dps loss. And if you had some weird comp like PLD/DRK/no-nin or no-SAM? yeah, your whole raid suffered.
-(HW only): Equilibrium giving TP recovery every minute making WAR impossible to bottom out, where a PLD was basically out of luck after 2 minutes without BRD/MCH/NIN intervention and DRK would eventually lose the war of TP attrition even with blood weapon.

WAR was a case where it's one minor weakness (The fact defiance doesn't give you the effective 20% mitigation immediately due to needing to be healed first, where Grit/Shield Oath did) was effectively eliminated or a non-issue at all, leaving a job with no weaknesses competing against two jobs with much larger weaknesses. Which is reflected well in its active play statistics, but also in how Square homogenized certain abilities so that one tank wasn't completely annihilating the others due to some trick/synergy within its toolkit vs fight design.