Opinions: Should tanks work for aggro?

[Payadopa]

I think everyone should work for enmity.

It was really fun, teamwork oriented, and meant something.

I agree. Synergy should actually mean something. Centainly more than just filling red, green and blue spaces in DF. I want to depend on my teammates, especially in an MMO.

[Shurrikhan]

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

Even then, it was less something to be "worked for" than just a limitation you worked around as DPS. Outside of Prot Warrior, it didn't add any tank-specific gameplay (and even then, only barely, and only in the same way as enmity combos did here, trading direct damage for excess high-threat Sunder casts); it just made gear that much more necessary for tanks.

At most, the tank was just more responsible for target selection since everyone else had to follow their selections more precisely.

[LeonKeyh]

I'll preface this with saying that this is coming from a typical DPS player.

I get the desire to make enmity management a thing again. I've played tank a bit and it really is just like playing a DPS. The only issues that I see with bringing back enmity management is:

1. The "speed limit" of the party is essentially set by the tank. If the tank is not good at holding enmity, the DPS will need to slow down to match the speed limit set by the tank. This would put more responsibility on the tank and would ultimately lead to more frustration for parties.

2. As a DPS, it feels like a penalty for playing well. I realize that it isn't really that, but sometimes it feels like I need to force myself to play worse because I'm playing "too well." With the first point, this means that I'm only "allowed" to play as well as the tank lets me basically.

3. The overall goal it seems with recent changes to tanks and healers seem to be pulling those roles to be DPS with a little bit extra responsibility. It's no surprise that DPS is the most played role in most MMOs, and people seem to find it the most fun. It seems like changes were made to Tank and Healer to make them simpler to get more people to play them. I feel like any increase in complexity from here or increase in responsibility would result in people leaving the role and moving to DPS, making tanks even harder to find and DPS queues even longer.

I understand why tanks would want to have some sort of differentiation between them and DPS. Something that I had been thinking about to give tanks at least some more responsibility was to drastically decrease enmity generation on AE abilities. To the point where if you have "good" DPS, you won't be able to hold aggro on a group of enemies by just spamming your AE attack. This would require tanks to dance between targets in a group of enemies and hit them with ST abilities before they lose aggro on them. It also creates a good distinction between "Good tanks" and "Bad tanks" with wall to wall pulls. It will result in wall to wall pulls actually being a skillful thing to pull off as a tank since it would be tough to keep aggro on everything. Most importantly, it doesn't affect (too much) the "not good" tanks that single group pull. They can just single pull and manage 2-3 enemies at a time. It increases the skill ceiling for tanks without increasing the floor too much.

That's if we're just giving the responsibility back to tanks. Most people believe that aggro should be a party wide thing to manage. I've just found it tough to balance well between giving people too many vs not enough tools. Either you give someone an OGCD that they just spam during their rotation, or you give them a single big aggro dump with a long cd. The problem comes when DPS are getting frustrated because they only have so many things that they can do before they're being asked to "play worse" essentially. It's a tough design to get right.

[Kabooa]

Enmity is not the problem with tanking. Do you know what is? That tanking just doesn't matter anymore.

It's not the problem. It's a problem.

It's part of the "tanking just doesn't matter anymore" problem. It's part of the "lack of consequences" problem.

Tanks certainly don't have a power problem. Would love to see any no-Tank UCOB clears. The issue is that their power is largely relegated to passive status, and Threat being made into a basically automated process contributes to that.

[Atreides]

Let's be honest, the enmity change was not to make tanks easier but to take away the dependency of DPS knowing how to use their enmity reduction abilties, in a way it made DPS easier. No shadewalker, diversion etc...
Back then it was just annoying to have DPS players force you into tank stance because they didn't even have enmity reduction skills in their hotbars let alone know about it.
I do miss stance dancing as WAR though, it was fun.

[aodhan_ofinnegain]

I understand why tanks would want to have some sort of differentiation between them and DPS. Something that I had been thinking about to give tanks at least some more responsibility was to drastically decrease enmity generation on AE abilities. To the point where if you have "good" DPS, you won't be able to hold aggro on a group of enemies by just spamming your AE attack. This would require tanks to dance between targets in a group of enemies and hit them with ST abilities before they lose aggro on them. It also creates a good distinction between "Good tanks" and "Bad tanks" with wall to wall pulls. It will result in wall to wall pulls actually being a skillful thing to pull off as a tank since it would be tough to keep aggro on everything. Most importantly, it doesn't affect (too much) the "not good" tanks that single group pull. They can just single pull and manage 2-3 enemies at a time. It increases the skill ceiling for tanks without increasing the floor too much.

So A Realm Reborn and Heavensward PLD says hello, and to say this is hands down the worst idea possible, because they had 4 years of it and it was not fun nor creative gameplay.

[Lyth]

Tanks certainly don't have a power problem. Would love to see any no-Tank UCOB clears.

I would love to see a tier in which tanking and healing are so critical to progression that tanks and healers invariably get first dibs on raid gear. That’s essentially how oldschool MMOs worked. Tanks and healers were the outliers, but you knew you had your most reliable, consistent, and dedicated players in these roles, you valued them, and you geared them up before anyone else. Nobody chooses to focus on tank or healer to fly under the radar. We do it because we want to be the ones you rely on. We do it because we want to be challenged. We do it because we want to be the best.

It’s not about enmity. It’s about consequences.

What do you think actually happens if tanks struggle to hold aggro? Well, what happens in most content? Your dps run ahead, they tank the boss, and do their own thing. In order for enmity generation to actually matter, mobs have to oneshot non-tanks in pretty much all relevant content. And the risk of tank death resulting in chain oneshots actually has to be a real, persistent threat.

This kind of gameplay doesn’t require you to have clever ‘enmity rotations’, or require you to really work hard to keep enmity. Back in ARR, if you weren’t at the spawn points of the T13 adds when they showed up, they made a beeline for your healers, one shot them with tail swipes, and you wiped. Pick-up is the only part of enmity management that matters. This has always been true in games, even when you had to wait for three sunders before attacking. And it still works the same way now. You just need to make the consequences matter.

Here’s the dumbest part of all.

You show up as a new tank. Three other players look at you. If you’re the sort of person who waits for instructions or guidance on how to proceed, they tank the dungeon for you and you feel worthless and never tank again. You’re never going to convince that person to tank, even if it's stripped down and simplified to oblivion, like this expansion has tried to do. They’re just not suited for it.

But if you’re the sort of decisive person who just dives in and figures things out as you go along, and has the guts and thick skin to risk failure and wipes, you become a tank. Nobody becomes a career tank or healer to be mediocre. Tanking and healing are personality types.

But when you do max level content, it gets reversed – the game is scared of giving you too much responsibility, lest you feel afraid to tank. Don’t worry, there’s a really, really bored backup tank in case you die (hint: they’re probably praying for you to die just for the chance to do something more interesting). Damage received is trivial. Damage output is trivial. Tankbusters can all be met with invulns. Bosses tank themselves and position themselves, lest you accidentally wipe the group. Your failures have no consequences, so your victories have no value. It's backwards.

And let’s face it, if you were the sort of person who wanted to fly under the radar for the carry win, you would have rolled dps at the start. But you reluctantly switch, once you realize where the carry potential and raid value actually sits. The dev team have completely, and utterly failed to recognize the simple thing that drives certain personality types to pick these roles.

To be valued for being able to do something that others lack the drive or skill to do.

Hey, where’d all the tanks go?

What an intelligent dev team. But hey, if catering to dps self-importance sells you Mogstation pretty pretty princess glamours, by all means. But you can kind of see why the other two roles are frustrated with this. You want a trinity? Put value where it belongs. Challenge the players who want to be challenged. Surviving the fight is not a privilege. Make bosses and mobs a genuine threat, rather than being Stone, Sea, Sky meters. Or failing that, let us at least have the damage output to properly and rightfully embarrass underperforming dps. Let us bring value for effort.

Make tanking and healing actually matter.

[Shurrikhan]

What do you think actually happens if tanks struggle to hold aggro? Well, what happens in most content? Your dps run ahead, they tank the boss, and do their own thing. In order for enmity generation to actually matter, mobs have to oneshot non-tanks in pretty much all relevant content. And the risk of tank death resulting in chain oneshots actually has to be a real, persistent threat.

I'm not a fan of traditional threat management, but there is a huge distance between threat being an actual mechanic and mobs needing to one-shot non-tanks.

If anything, healers being so powerful as sustain DPS through would-be two- or three-shots would be the only necessary issue there. The sheer burst heal potential in this game makes eHP beyond what is necessary to survive one-shots too little a factor. That shouldn't be the case.

That said, neither am I a fan of "trinity" gameplay as it's so often imagined -- where a tank role exists not just to have synergy and greater control over a set of tasks (carrying unique depth over to otherwise generalizable tasks or shared concerns), but to effectively remove most of DPS concerns and likely nearly all Support concerns from an otherwise general kit (the Tanks'), and in turn remove tanking avenues of gameplay from the other two kits so everyone gets at best half the gameplay otherwise allowed them.

I don't give two shits about extreme consequences of my being there if that "being there" still amounts to subpar gameplay. The raid dying the instant I mess up doesn't actually make the process of those gameplay considerations any more interesting for me. It's the same mechanic. It just now discourages many a would-be tank from learning them, which in turn reduces the available depth it can actually take on. Its consequences must be enough to feel impactful, but that's far from needing to be necessary for every moment of tank-like functionality (in turn ensuring that teamwork is limited wholly "by role") or, especially, to have extreme passive value.

There's a sweet spot, sure, but it isn't "mobs have to one-shot non-tanks", even if we were to bring back enmity systems. Remember, mobs' target-selection (the whole thing that makes a threat system at all meaningful) doesn't have to function identically to what we've seen thus far. A mob needn't only ever target the top of its enmity list for every attack.

[Kabooa]

I would love to see a tier in which tanking and healing are so critical to progression that tanks and healers invariably get first dibs on raid gear. That’s essentially how oldschool MMOs worked. Tanks and healers were the outliers, but you knew you had your most reliable, consistent, and dedicated players in these roles, you valued them, and you geared them up before anyone else. Nobody chooses to focus on tank or healer to fly under the radar. We do it because we want to be the ones you rely on. We do it because we want to be challenged. We do it because we want to be the best.

Anyone who was actually part of those old raiding communities knows loot was never that simple. You had archaic 'fair' systems that just sort of worked and could still be exploited given the right circumstances.

The only constant was somebody else got your best in slot and quit 2 weeks later, or it dropped the week you couldn't make it.

I'll take FF14's coffers any day, and if you don't like how your team divides it, take it up with them. The only time distribution matters is week 1 killing, and the moment you can kill the boss, it stops mattering.

You probably don't want to advocate for basic enemies one-shotting non-tanks because you might actually have damage that makes the 1000% threat modifier look reasonable.

[SamRF]

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.

Could perhaps be fixed with giving all tanks positionals, so they do on par damage as the MT in your example since they can do their positionals while the MT can't.