Enmity Management, Do we want it back?

[Renathras]

Hey everyone! I appreciate all the discussion and feedback, It’s been interesting to hear everyone’s perspective on the matter. My observation so far is that most don’t want it back, some would be open to it as long as it’s not the same as StB, but majority would much rather focus on defending allies, boss positioning and the like. Anyway just wanted to chime with that observation and a little appreciation, please feel free to continue

I think this is a pretty good summary.

Many don't want enmity back at all, some want it back the way it was before, others want it back but not as it was before (they don't think the way it was before was really the best way the mechanic could be implemented);

...but pretty much everyone wants there to be more to do for Tanks. Most who don't want enmity want positioning and defending allies to be more important. But most who want enmity ALSO want this. So there's an overlap of the Venn Diagram circles there.

It's like 45/20/35 on no enmity/exact as before enmity/new version of enmity, but also 90/10 (so lots of overlap) want more to do defending, positioning, etc.

EDIT:

Again, I don't think discrete Enmity skills are a good idea.

The way I would think is most likely/functional if we WERE going to implement it would be to have either a side ability (e.g. Shield Lob already does this) or a branching combo, like Fast Blade -> Riot Blade -> Royal Authority (damage) OR Rage of Halone (agro). This way, it makes enmity relatively straightforward and doesn't require a huge change to the rotation. The smart Tank will look at their enmity list in the party to see if someone's at risk of overtaking them, and if so, they swap out the next Royal for a Halone. In effect, agro becomes an "upkeep buff". We already have this same system in the game for WAR with Storm's Path/Storm's Eye where they use the latter in an upkeep capacity. They could also do something like have Halone generate a small potency heal to be a rotational sustain tool (right now, PLD doesn't have one until level 84 when Holy Spirit starts healing them) if they wanted, but it's really not too complicated with a system like this.

Whether it would be engaging or not is an exercise for the reader, but there's no reason such a system HAS to be as clunky as SB's stance swap and separate rotation where the -2 and -3 steps were both different. All of the Tanks had branching combos at the -2 step (like SAM) and that ended with ShB. Even when PLD had Goring as a rotational DoT, they removed the -2 step to get there (I think there was a third one...maybe it was just for Halone?) to where it's also unified to Riot, just like WAR's "branching" combo is.

If only the third step branches, then it doesn't require a massive disruption to the rotation, you just swap the finisher if you need to pull ahead in the agro race. Or, again, spam Shield Lob, but that's less interesting. Still a backup, considering I think it generates more agro than Halone did while doing still less damage.