Quote Originally Posted by Lyth View Post
MMO players tend to fixate too much on how "complex" their rotation is. So you can type out the lyrics to "Mary has a little lamb" while doing the usual memorised raid DDR. I'm so proud of you. But how is the game challenging your ability to adapt and react?

Tanking is about controlling space. You deny your opponents good positioning, and give your team the positional advantage. In PvP games, this is usually because the space around the tank is dangerous. Perhaps they can drag you over and stunlock you into oblivion. Perhaps walking past the tank to the squishies gives them attacks of opportunity. Or perhaps it's simpler, in that they actually present a genuine, credible, physical melee range threat. One does not simply walk into range of Reinhardt's hammer.

So why does enmity exist in MMOs? It exists because of melee dps. If your tank does damage on par with dps players, then you just replace them with tanks. Enmity is just a fictional multiplier that justifies why tanks keep the boss' attention while doing less damage than 'real' dps players.

The problem isn't enmity, though. It's the lack of consequences. If your tank dies or dps pull ahead of you, it doesn't really matter too much. The mobs do not mash your team into paste these days, as they would have back in the days of ARR and T13. Your dps can tank. You're actually not all that important.

This was done to make tanking friendly to new players. But the people who do choose to be career tanks specifically do so because they want to differentiate themselves from everyone else. So if you decrease the risk of tanking poorly, you drive away the select few that could be bothered to take it up in the first place.

Enmity is not the problem with tanking. Do you know what is? That tanking just doesn't matter anymore.
I'm of the camp that thinks tanks should be on par with melee damage... however they should only be able to achieve that BY tanking so you can't just stack tanks. Cover/Counter and other tanking mechanics have been some of the highest damage options traditionally in final fantasy games, and many other games have hit this balance of dishing damage while recieving damage perfectly (xenoblade series hits this very well, with the tank characters being often your strongest damage dealers, but needed to retain aggro or forward positionals to achieve that damage). The issue with FFXIV is the presence of an Off tank in all 8 man duties, if tanks had to work as a tank for their damage, the off tank would be stuck with nothing to do for most fights.