Opinions: Should tanks work for aggro?

[ReiMakoto]

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.

[Jirah]

Yes tanking as of right now is boring as you can get 100% agro with 1 aoe then you just feel like a DPS with a underwhelming aoe kit until they die thanks to dungeons with uninteresting trash which is 98% of them.

If they were gonna make tanking easier they should of compensated somehow with more tenacious trash or hazards examples:
Trashes with Cleaves
Floor Traps/Hazrds
Trashes with deadly Aoes
Trash that spawns randomly
Trashes that self destruct
Trashes that cannot be aggroed and stick to other players like bombs
Trash that takes priorty, for multiple reasons like Damage down debuffs or raid wide damage idk im not a game developer but you dont need to be one to know this crap is boring either give us back agro control or compensate with smarter instances. Sometimes it feels the game is getting easier and more simple for no reason WoW was never this "family friendly"

[Videra]

Tanks haven't had to work for aggro since The Burning Crusade.

[Juzjuzz]

Yes ? But i really didnt like doing it in stormblood, it was really frustrating sometimes. You didnt get anything from keeping aggro. Only ppl who like risk and the frustration of loosing aggro will enjoy it.
" uuh dude you saved the day when you keep isnt that enough? " For you yes, but not everyone. Some ppl hate loosing dps because of other players.
If building aggro was linked to your dps rotation, and gives you something in return then it wouldnt be frustrating for players who don't enjoy loosing dps. Even a simple dmg buff would do the trick: if a healer generates too much aggro because of healing, the tank would get a reward for keeping aggro.
Ofc you don't just reward a tank for spamming aggro combos: if he does too much he looses the dmg buff as well.
I'm not an expert in gameplay mecanics etc but i just got this idea and wanted to share it.

[EmilyClarke]

I have read through entire post and some good opinions but also see a lot of Tanks have it too easy and should work for aggro.

1) If a tank had to work for aggro we would see alot more DPS saying things like why didn't tank pickup aggro. Honestly this is an winnable conversation.

2) If tanks didn't have a button to on emity then we would have to fight with DPS / Healers for aggro and whole group wipes.

3) Tanks have it too easy! I see this in every single MMO out there. This is as old as MMOs themselves. I will say learn to live with it. It will never change and needs to be there.

Honestly, I only seen people type that play healers or DPS in this thread. Coming WoW to here it is a lot same old arguments from there to here.


I would say to you is this ... With game allowing you level up all classes/jobs go make yourself a tank and/or healer try it out.

[ty_taurus]

What about instead of having to work for aggro, tanks needed to work for essential mitigation? Make the emphasis less on pulling the enemies, and more about surviving the enemies you're facing. As it stands, virtually all the mitigation tools are just press and done buffs, but what your defensive buffs came more from a more fluid combo system, or some kind of OGCD tools that needed to interact with one another separately? What about putting more emphasis on physical vs magical damage? Make enemy cast bards change colors depending on if the damage will be physical or magical, and now you need to focus on adapting your rotation to effectively mitigating certain kinds of damage, or just going for raw DPS?

Samurai has Third Eye and that Eyes Open effect that allows you to counter damage received with healing. Why does a DPS have a more interesting mitigation tool than any of the tanks?

[aodhan_ofinnegain]

From my experience so far in XIV, I genuinely do not get why, Enmity is such a factor to get hung up over, should tanks manage it solely by themselves, make it a team effort, or make it a non factor? But the thing is none of those things are remotely interesting in tanking. Enmity is a by product of carrying out tank roles, like positioning, mitigating damage, intercepting adds, crowd control, leading the pace of a dungeon or raid, and making sure you're doing your rotation as best you can to deal as much damage as you can, enmity should be an after thought. Making a tank work for enmity would undermine the tanks ability to carry out more important functions.

I will concede tanking has become neutered in the aim of accessibility, which has given little in the way of a raised ceiling that has been seen in the past iterations of tanks. But firstly, in terms of dungeons, they're design with casual players in mind, those that think freestyle is the way to go and play for fun, to expect any degree of difficulty outside of mega pulls, and you've set a bar way too high for yourself, dungeons are a means to gain exp, and tomes. (or glamour, minions, songs)

Whereas end game in Extreme trials and Savage, need to be designed with more in mind of tanks, and less of a fancy orchestrated and heavily scripted fight. More hp checkpoints that created carnage if you pushed dps too hard, more add spawns that require tanks to be kept on their toes, more fights similar in vein to M and F in o12s, that had both tanks actively tanking, make better use of the interrupt feature that was often highlighted at the start of the expansion, that can happen randomly, to keep tanks and physical ranged on their toes. Better to make use of the tools we currently have in game than throw random, poorly thought out ideas and not consider the balancing required nor the practicality of it.

Probably in the minority, Going to bury myself into an even further minority opinion and say that outside of Provoke, which could have had a equivalent version with a different name and animation for each tank, and PLD's block not working on magic attacks - that I liked everything way better about how each tank played in Heavensward versus now....cross class skills, enmity combo, stances and all.

To address the first point, do we NEED extra provokes with different names and animations? Not really. That, like some other skills mentioned in past threads are only complained about out of a persons personal tastes in aesthetics, but doesn't affect the practicality of skills currently in place.

The second point I have heavy disagreements with, gimping a job so heavily as to cripple it's main method of defense in the pursuit of an ideal flavor as opposed to practicality, and was one of many factors that benched PLD for all of HW, that is plain stupid.

Thirdly, cross-role and cross-class, there isn't a lot of difference, one required you to level classes as far lvl34 at the highest, but left people incapable of accessing provoke or awareness as a WAR or DRK, because people couldn't be bothered to level PLD, which meant tanks didn't have important tanking skills, which thanks to cross-role became a non-issue.

Fourthly, Enmity combos were the second worst design aspect of tanking pre ShB, which was use it once (if DRK or PLD) and not touch it again for the rest of the fight, while WAR could circumvent that with, Unchained, Equilibrium, Storm's Eye combo, Fell Cleave spam in Inner release. Enmity combos never presented any meaningful thought, they were spammed by your everyday casual who never bothered to look up a rotation.

Finally, Tank Stance, the epitome of terrible design in the development of tanks that only benefited one job, WAR, no penalties, that it couldn't circumvent, and only suffered a 10 second cooldown, while PLD and DRK needed to spend resource and GCDs to use. Where one stance was far superior, only for the fact alone it did not slap you with a damage penalty for some arbitrary reason of trading damage for defense, but in practice, the defense was never needed, and only sought to punish tanks for carrying out a mundane task of generating enough enmity as to not have to use tank stance or enmity combos for the rest of the fight. Especially, when there was superior options available like Shadewalker /Smokescreen from Ninja, and enmity dumps or suppression skills. Tank Stances, like enmity combos were a one use at the start of the fight and forgotten about, but this is only in more optimal settings or in high end content.

In normal run of stuff, this wasn't always the case, and the dumbing down of tanks is due in large part to the pandering to the casual crowd of the game and newer players. Many people had ideals like only tanks should manage aggro, or tanks should use tank stance 100% of the time, but not actually give any thought to "think oh maybe this person knows what they're doing, or may have more experience", and these ideals led some people to refuse to use aggro mitigation tools that were free oGCD (except Merciful Eyes on SAM and Purification on MNK).

It's not that SE didn't scrap things for no reason, and I don't mind that they have scrapped useless aspects from the tanking kit with the move to ShB, but I would like more fight design in end game to make more use of the tools we do have, as that's the only true way to take advantage and get the most out of what tanks can bring to the table, more fights need to be designed with tanks in mind instead of re-working Enmity which was never a problem except in casual content where people were new to the game or failed to put any effort into the game and learn the basics.

[Juzjuzz]

What about instead of having to work for aggro, tanks needed to work for essential mitigation? Make the emphasis less on pulling the enemies, and more about surviving the enemies you're facing. As it stands, virtually all the mitigation tools are just press and done buffs, but what your defensive buffs came more from a more fluid combo system, or some kind of OGCD tools that needed to interact with one another separately? What about putting more emphasis on physical vs magical damage? Make enemy cast bards change colors depending on if the damage will be physical or magical, and now you need to focus on adapting your rotation to effectively mitigating certain kinds of damage, or just going for raw DPS?

Samurai has Third Eye and that Eyes Open effect that allows you to counter damage received with healing. Why does a DPS have a more interesting mitigation tool than any of the tanks?

Yeah aggro is not the only thing about tanking but not every tank should focus on the same thing.
Aggro and defense needs to work with offense. Dots and buffs already work with offense, but it should be something more than "i push this button i get this buff/dot and it's over".

[Shurrikhan]

Probably in the minority, but from my view, yes, tanks should have to concern themselves with enmity beyond just turning on tank stance. Going to bury myself into an even further minority opinion and say that outside of Provoke, which could have had a equivalent version with a different name and animation for each tank, and PLD's block not working on magic attacks - that I liked everything way better about how each tank played in Heavensward versus now. Also liked that DPS had enmity reduction skills and Ninja's could redirect extra enmity to help the tank, giving everybody a little extra purpose. It was a group effort to be able to have your tank turn off the defensive stance and DPS a bit more and that appealed to me for some reason. Bascially, HW Dark Knight and tanking was more fun to me: cross class skills, enmity combo, stances and all.

Ehh... I could see it. I, too, definitely would have preferred if we left Heavensward headed towards even further diversity rather than less (largely via Role Skills). That said, without larger leveling reworks, I'd prefer not to have cross-class skills either. Just put everything in the job itself.

To briefly touch on Provoke, sure, we don't need 3 shades of Provoke, but it's the only actually required functionality of the lot and 2 extra animations in order to retain a discrete aesthetic set for each job isn't a whole lot to ask for. Heck, if we had more interesting encounter designs, I could easily see a place for Provoke+Ally_Peel via Guardian (PLD), Provoke+Self_Centered_AoE_Temp_Enmity via Challenge (WAR), and Provoke+Brief_Percentile_Enmity_Steal via Nemesis (DRK).

As for DPS's place in enmity management, I've mixed feelings. I didn't care for Diversion at all, for instance, nor for the enmity attached to Purification or Merciful Eyes. I'd have much preferred that undermechanics be our means of limiting/controlling threat and Diversion, if it must be a button, did the opposite (thereby allowing a DPS to quickly rip threat off healers and bring them to tanks, on the off-chance we actually had a fight with interesting add mechanics). But I do like the idea of some integral play having to do with specifically commanding or evading enemy attention. It just has to be fun, integral, and decently deep, rather than amounting merely to bloat or, at best, potency-compromise.

[Jandor]

I'd like enmity management back I think, but as a tank responsibility rather than a party responsibility. As others have said, it was annoying when DPS refused to reduce their enmity.

Tools to shift enmity around the party would add a little something extra to tanks beyond relatively simple DPS rotations and hitting CD's at the right time. Even better if enmity could be spent on abilities as a reward for good play.

I've no issue with enmity being rather simple to handle on its own, juggling three rather straightforward responsibilities (DPS, CD's, Enmity) should end up being engaging enough when it's all mixed together. Especially if the three interacted with each other.

Edit: Also, slightly related, tank stance should be DPS stance. Tanks should be in tank mode by default.