Enmity Management, Do we want it back?

[Absurdity]

I think I said this in another thread before but I would return stances back to tanks, just with a different approach.

Make the DPS stances provide a stacking benefit the longer you can stay in the stance (obviously with a cap) and the tank stance provide mitigation benefits.
Then cut down on tanks' mitigation cooldowns so you can't simply 30%+30% or 20%+10%+30% every buster, make tank stances a necessity to survive mechanics at some point.

Then it becomes about deciding when to use your defensive stance to survive and when to use your defensive cooldowns so you can stay in DPS stance.
Enmity doesn't even factor in here, because the most interesting part of old stances were the job mechanics attached to them.

[Casualty]

I think I said this in another thread before but I would return stances back to tanks, just with a different approach.

Make the DPS stances provide a stacking benefit the longer you can stay in the stance (obviously with a cap) and the tank stance provide mitigation benefits.
Then cut down on tanks' mitigation cooldowns so you can't simply 30%+30% or 20%+10%+30% every buster, make tank stances a necessity to survive mechanics at some point.

Then it becomes about deciding when to use your defensive stance to survive and when to use your defensive cooldowns so you can stay in DPS stance.
Enmity doesn't even factor in here, because the most interesting part of old stances were the job mechanics attached to them.

What this will look like in practice is the tank stance will only be used when busters are completely unsurvivable without the mitigation provided by the tank stance and ignored the remainder of the fight. The stacking damage cap will be the baseline damage and the tank stance will be in effect a toggle-able mitigation cooldown with a damage down debuff baked into it. It will be worse than the old tank stances that reduced damage dealt, because it will take time to ramp back up again.
There were no significant mechanics with the old stances, as virtually no one used them outside of the first few GCDs of the fight, and that was only to secure initial enmity.



Speaking in general regarding the thread - I don't want enmity management back, no. It was never a significant part of content, even with aggro resets like in Neo Ex-Death. It only served as a checklist of skills for the MT to use at the beginning of the fight that sat there unused, cluttering hotbars after that. I would rather be more responsible for shielding/covering allies, picking up adds/controlling the layout of the arena through positioning, while still contributing meaningfully to actually defeating the boss/fight. I think that the boss teleporting to the middle for the party to do dance mechanics is overdone. However, if they are going to change it, they also need to address bosses pausing during each auto-attack. It makes movement janky and unfun.

[Absurdity]

What this will look like in practice is the tank stance will only be used when busters are completely unsurvivable without the mitigation provided by the tank stance and ignored the remainder of the fight. The stacking damage cap will be the baseline damage and the tank stance will be in effect a toggle-able mitigation cooldown with a damage down debuff baked into it. It will be worse than the old tank stances that reduced damage dealt, because it will take time to ramp back up again.
There were no significant mechanics with the old stances, as virtually no one used them outside of the first few GCDs of the fight, and that was only to secure initial enmity.

Yes you will only need the tank stance if you don't have cooldowns to survive but this still involves decision making on when to use said stance specific to the fight you're doing.

And if you think trying to maximize the %crit increase from Deliverance through proper gauge management or dealing with the MP drain from Darkside weren't mechanics then idk what to tell you.

[Casualty]

And if you think trying to maximize the %crit increase from Deliverance through proper gauge management or dealing with the MP drain from Darkside weren't mechanics then idk what to tell you.

Neither of those were the tank stance, and no, there was not a giant interplay. You were not holding max stacks of deliverance and overcapping to benefit from the crit rate. Darkside, although requiring management, was not like Deliverance. It was not the opposite stance of grit, it was a self buff.

If we are talking about the tank stances, Grit and Defiance, again, I am going to say there was no management. You turned them on before the pull, used a combo (WAR wasn't even penalized for this because they had unchained) and then turned it off for the remainder of the fight. They had mitigation attached to them, and no one used them for that.

The part you are doubling down on (the reduced damage) was one of the biggest complaints from this entire forum from DRK/PLD players. You could achieve a higher level of decision-making by keeping current skills and giving more things outside of ultimate to mitigate, whether that be more busters, or overall higher damage.
Tying X% damage to not using an ability, an ability that you really probably won't have to use outside of savage/ult, would likely make it a dead skill for people who don't do that content as they adjust to having just one less tank cooldown. To me, it makes more sense with a powerful cooldown to not make people actively avoid using it until they can't get away with it, but rather give multiple reasons to use it and you have to pick and choose which is the best situation to do so.

[Absurdity]

...Man do I love when the forums are bugging out and won't actually let me edit a post properly.

Neither of those were the tank stance, and no, there was not a giant interplay. You were not holding max stacks of deliverance and overcapping to benefit from the crit rate. Darkside, although requiring management, was not like Deliverance. It was not the opposite stance of grit, it was a self buff.

I probably should've mentioned that I was specifically talking about 4.2 Deliverance because despite the rework making warrior significantly easier it was pretty much the only time where it had some resource management, due to several limiting factors.

-Every 10 points of gauge gave you 1% crit so you wanted to keep it as high as possible without overcapping.

-You want to Upheaval on cooldown which will cost you 20 gauge every 30 seconds.

-Onslaught allows you to spend 20 gauge at minimal dps cost because it wasn't far behind Fell Cleave on PPG, allowing you to not only manipulate your gauge but also manipulate how many Fell Cleaves you do in X amount of time and therefore manipulate Infuriate and your GCDs

-Storm's Eye only lasted 30 seconds, you rarely ever wanted to drop the buff but you also wanted to use it as few times as possible. At the same time you needed at least 17 seconds left on Eye when you went into Inner Release.

-Every Fell Cleave reduces the cooldown of Infuriate by 5 seconds, you have only a single stack of the ability which meant you wanted to use it on cooldown. Inner Release shaved 25 seconds off of Infuriate which meant it could come up during your IR burst but you also couldn't spend any gauge during those 10 seconds.


All of these were restrictions that needed to be kept track of and managed to maximize dps by not wasting resources. Granted only the %crit increase actually had anything to do with stances and most of it was managing your Eye buff, Infuriate cooldown, Inner Release and your gauge, but they certainly made for more nuanced gameplay than spam 1-2-3, dump gauge whenever and IR every 60 seconds.

If we are talking about the tank stances, Grit and Defiance, again, I am going to say there was no management. You turned them on before the pull, used a combo (WAR wasn't even penalized for this because they had unchained) and then turned it off for the remainder of the fight. They had mitigation attached to them, and no one used them for that.

Correct, tank stances in 4.X were simply a case of "Use them during the opener to establish snap aggro and then forget about them for the rest of the fight" because you didn't actually need the mitigation they provided. Which is why I want to make them a necessity to survive certain mechanics, you just decide when it happens.

It then becomes about learning the fight and figuring out when you should drop your DPS stance buff to mitigate a mechanic in exchange for being able to keep the damage buff for longer later down the line.
Let's say in an 8:30 fight you would be forced to use your tank stance 3-4 times because other mechanics have forced you to use your active mitigation, but you get to decide when to use your tank stance and save your mitigation cooldowns for points in the fight where there are long stretches of full uptime to maximize the damage bonus from your DPS stance.

It doesn't even need to be a direct dps buff, it could be something like increased MP regeneration while in Darkside. The stacking dps buff was simply the first thing that came to mind to make maximizing your time in DPS stance relevant while not outright slapping a damage down on the tank stance.

The part you are doubling down on (the reduced damage) was one of the biggest complaints from this entire forum from DRK/PLD players. You could achieve a higher level of decision-making by keeping current skills and giving more things outside of ultimate to mitigate, whether that be more busters, or overall higher damage.

Would it technically be a damage nerf? I would call it being rewarded for using your tank stance at the optimal time to maximize your dps bonus but yes, technically you would lose damage from dropping your DPS stance.

I guess I just don't see having to sacrifice damage at certain points in a fight as this unspeakable horror.
I certainly wouldn't make the dps buff the ridiculous 20% that you lost by staying in tank stance previously.

Tying X% damage to not using an ability, an ability that you really probably won't have to use outside of savage/ult, would likely make it a dead skill for people who don't do that content as they adjust to having just one less tank cooldown. To me, it makes more sense with a powerful cooldown to not make people actively avoid using it until they can't get away with it, but rather give multiple reasons to use it and you have to pick and choose which is the best situation to do so.

True, it probably wouldn't see too much use in casual content but that's because the content is brain dead easy already. I don't need half of my defensive kit on current tanks in most content.

Our current mitigation is completely stale, the big decision boils down to "do I use my 120s+short mit here or my 90s+short mit, and then proceed to spam 1-2-3?" Adding another mitigation cooldown would do nothing to change that, especially not in content that already doesn't require our full 6.0 mitigation kits.

Alternatively you could also make it a necessity in casual content, but we all know how the current playerbase feels about being able to actually fail at something.