Quote Originally Posted by baklava151 View Post
Bumping an old thread since it seems like an appropriate spot for it

I joined during ShB so I didn't get to experience old tank stance and enmity management, but the general idea sounds like it could be interesting and give tanks more to think about during a fight. Just from what I'm reading it sounds like good tanks would use tank stance once during their opener to get aggro and then ignore it the rest of the fight, I guess between doing high damage and DPS using their enmity tools. I wonder if they could have tweaked some numbers, possibly remove DPS enmity tools, to make it mainly the tank's responsibility to maintain aggro and they had to swap between stances throughout the fight to hold aggro. I also see reading old guides that DRK and PLD would get increased defense when they had tank stance on, and WAR increased health and healing received with Defiance, maybe they also could have also played with mechanics where you had to be in tank stance to survive or just generally give bosses harder hitting autoattacks (if that wasn't the case already).
If you read post number 16 it goes into detail on how it was before, what the issues were with it and how potential fixes just lead us to where we are now. It also addresses the concern of, where do they balance things. Granted, I didn't re-read what I posted however IIRC the bulk of the issues the old system had were there.

As a very short summary, there were too many negatives and not enough positives with the system. From what I remember of this thread, you don't make tanking more engaging or more interesting by enforcing an enmity system, you do it by giving the tanks more control over the boss in various ways.