Enmity Management, Do we want it back?

[Mikey_R]

Honestly? It depends a lot on how you look at what "aggro" even is / what function it can hold. (By one view, you need to extend its functionality to the point it includes other things as well, while by another, it's just allowing it to influence the targeting of more of a mob's actions.)

Aggro, at minimum, tends to be a value table that assigns a target for auto-attacks. Everything else is potentially already independent of that. Heck, sometimes even the "second auto" on some bosses is independent of the aggro-table, and instead just looks for tanks.

But let's say you make two seemingly tiny tweaks: (A) You replace certain "random-target" attacks/abilities with aggro-influenced attacks (be they of the main or a separate "aggro" table), and (B) you allow the relevant "aggro" this works off of to be reset at particular times, only to count contribution over particular spans of time (e.g., right before the ability) or weight them far higher, etc.

Now, suddenly, a tank may have use for timely intervention to bait mechanics, rather than simply having a maintenance task that uses a fight-long cumulative value. At which point it can at least have potential to become something interesting.

I wouldn't call this a rework, infact, your point A has been done before, one that immediately comes to mind is Lakshmi's cleave which is done on second in enmity (I'm sure there are more recent examples) and your second point is just an enmity check. As it stands now, we generate so much it is going to be meaningless.

If enmity is going to come back in a meaningful way, it would need to be built from the ground up, which is what I assume the poster I quoted was insinuating. I was curious as to what they potentially had in mind.

I don't miss it at all. I was a warrior main until late Stormblood. I always found it more confusing and annoying than anything. I don't think aggro is a super interesting mechanic in really any game. That said, it was one more thing to keep in mind and they didn't add anything to occupy tanks when they removed it. I would like something to make tanks feel more like tanks than invincible melee DPS. Maybe more interactivity with defensive kits or something.

There have been many suggestions on these forums as to how tanking can be made more enjoyable/meaningful, I just hope they get listened to, though lets be honest, it isn't likely.

[Shurrikhan]

As it stands now, we generate so much it is going to be meaningless.

There'd be zero difference in the timing of the enmity opportunity if that enmity wasn't generated actively/deliberately/at cost, with sufficient difference between using those active tools or not to satisfy those shorter and separate enmity checks. Unless there's some suggestion to "bring enmity back" by... leaving it just as it is now, I would think that need for more than just the current passive and absurdly excessive enmity generation would be already clear?

My point was that a "rebuild from the ground up" differs only semantically from adjusting the means, opportunities for, and allowance of thresholds/sectioning in Enmity generation; whether you call it all still just Enmity or split the name among different sub-systems (e.g., Focus, Threat Perception, and Enmity) under that larger umbrella, the effect on gameplay is identical, reliant on just means, opportunities, and use cases.

[aodhan_ofinnegain]

That's not why people do it.

On hunts, you want to kill the mark RELATIVELY slowly so that all participants can get full credit. Especially in prime-time trains where you can have 150-300 (yes, I've seen that many; you can tell when doing instanced zones how many are in the zones as you go between instances), the marks can vaporize quickly. Like, within 15-20 seconds quickly.

But party contribution (and thus reward for all party members on the boss agro table; having tagged the boss with at least one attack or I think having used a heal on someone who has) is based on reaching some agro threshold.

The result is trying to figure out how to generate lots of boss threat while intentionally NOT maximizing damage. This goes double for doing some of the older hunt trains, like ShB or especially SB A Ranks. The result is that Tanks put on agro stance and spam their ranged attack, and Healers tag the boss then start spamming AOE heals. Especially for prime-time trains, people will swap away from DPS Jobs so that the boss doesn't instantly vaporize. When you have 300 people hitting a mark, it doesn't last long.

.

So the Tanks there aren't fighting "to be the Main Tank". They're using a low damage high agro generating button (along with party member Healers spamming AOE heals) to generate maximum payout for their party while keeping the boss alive as long as possible so more people can get credit.

This also goes for S ranks, which will sometimes get even MORE people to them since people try to beat the rush to world travel over to get another S rank on their achievement progress for those rare mounts.

Hunts are not that deep, you generate more than enough with tanks just doing their opener, especially now since all tanks burst in their open, if you can not generate enough threat on a hunt, then you are playing bad, or your whole party is. I've done hunts since HW onwards and never once have ranged attacks been a requirement. Even with the snoozefest that hunts have become with trains.

[Absimiliard]

You do realize it still happens right? The only difference is instead of actually doing a rotation since enmity was heavily tied to damage output, you just spam your ranged and you have instant aggro. S ranks are the worst for this.

It's why threads like these pop up, because when you can effectively maintain aggro by just spamming one button, what is the point of enmity?

I've stated before, I wouldn't be surprised if enmity is just baked into the tank mastery trait so they can avoid the whole "tanks stance on" That would officially be the day that tanking truly died in this game and you are just a dps with higher defense.

Enmity was heavily tied specifically to your tank stance modifier and abilities with enmity modifiers, not necessarily to your raw damage output in and of itself. The maneuver was to go full tilt on your enmity generators while your tank stance was up for a bit, then turn that garbage off and stick to an optimal DPS rotation for the rest of the fight/until a mechanic or adds forced you to use tank stance again. Provoke could come in pretty handy for continuously escalating enmity too.

Spamming the projectile now is basically just a more gimped version of being one of those morons back in the day that didn't ever shut their tank stance off. Is it annoying? Yeah, but it's also not as common as tank stance Karens were way back when. Except for in hunts, apparently, where very little seems to have changed. But outside of that? Enmity pissing contests are much less common.

[Mikey_R]

My point was that a "rebuild from the ground up" differs only semantically from adjusting the means, opportunities for, and allowance of thresholds/sectioning in Enmity generation; whether you call it all still just Enmity or split the name among different sub-systems (e.g., Focus, Threat Perception, and Enmity) under that larger umbrella, the effect on gameplay is identical, reliant on just means, opportunities, and use cases.

This is the exact reason why I asked the question in the first place. Get someone else to say how they would want an enmity re-work, which, hopefully, gets them to think about what it actually means to have an enmity system. Even if they did post a reply (which at this point I am not expecting one), I would have pointed out that the system they made was essentially the same as it used to be, just with added fluff for no reason.

[dspguy]

We won't go back to the "old way" when players had aggro reducing tools and tanks had to tank stance dance as well as choose between STR and VIT accessories. In my opinion, it was a better system but sadly this game is designed for the lowest common denominator. Push one button and you have hate. Have you ever tried to see how long you can keep hate on a group of enemies with just having tank stance on for one combo? You keep it a long time. The modifier they have in place is ridiculous.

Part of the reason I don't see it happening is that previous MMOs used to be designed with the idea that some jobs had huge burst damage with very long cooldowns. So, the DPS would time those abilities that would inevitably grab hate (unless some other action was taken) to be used to nearly finish off the enemy. Otherwise, you had to have a strategy to let your tank build up enough hate before these abilities went off. There was actually collaboration and communication amongst the group.

That's all gone now. Look at the groups we commonly get into:
- Dungeon starts: "Hey"
- Dungeon ends: "gg"

That's the limit of communication in most dungeons and with that in mind, we shouldn't expect to have to work together given how the game is designed.

[Shurrikhan]

This is the exact reason why I asked the question in the first place. Get someone else to say how they would want an enmity re-work, which, hopefully, gets them to think about what it actually means to have an enmity system. Even if they did post a reply (which at this point I am not expecting one), I would have pointed out that the system they made was essentially the same as it used to be, just with added fluff for no reason.

I understand that you intended your question to almost purely rhetorical, but you're drawing conclusion that have very little to do with the responses thus far given. So unless this was intended only as a rhetorical trap for a specific person, rather than any interest in the idea...

>> What "rehaul" would be necessary to have potentially interesting Enmity?

<< Arguably nothing that would need to be called a "rehaul". Even small changes would allow for an Enmity system that feels entirely different and capable of far more gameplay interest.

>> Ahh, then it must be irredeemable. Any of those additions or adjustments can only ever be mere "added fluff for no reason".

??? Again, would being able to use at-cost active Enmity tools to redirect mechanics and manipulate mob behaviors just be "fluff", let alone 'more of the same'?



The problems with the Enmity system as it was previously implemented was that it...

• took up many more buttons that would otherwise be necessary on discrete actions (ones useless for anything but increased Enmity, outside of Flash and Overpower),
• arbitrarily sabotaged its ability to enter or exit its active use on all but Warrior (since the rest had GCD and MP costs to enter and possible even also to exit active threat),
• that the tank stance was typically an rDPS loss, making it effectively just an Enmity stance,
• was singular and unaffectable except by Enmity purges (Tactician, Refresh, Lucid Dreaming), such that one could simply tank stance at the start of the fight until reaching an estimate Enmity requirement to have stayed just barely above the highest-Enmity DPS's Enmity lead over your normal actions accumulated by the time the boss dies, and never touch said tank/Enmity stance again,
• stacked its multipliers multiplicatively (making Enmity actions largely useless outside of Tank stance), and
• was fundamentally based on damage (giving no punishment for using it during raid buffs unless you'd hold onto Tank stance for a GCD too long because you haven't yet learned that Tank stance and Enmity was really just a The Price is Right minigame at the openers of fights).

But, those issues were the result of tangential and arbitrary decisions.

Those weren't problems of/with Enmity; they were the opportunity costs of Tank Stance, the poor tuning of tank stance relative to healers' available offensive output and free party ST healing per minute relative to tank damage intake, the lack of other uses for tools that carried increased Enmity, the multiplicity of Enmity multipliers, etc., etc., all narrowing its interactions down to about as bloated, stale, and somewhat unintuitive a form as was possible.



Again, I don't want Enmity back anything like it was. (Nor do I particularly care whether it comes back at all, so long as it doesn't return in its old bloated form.) But its past state has more to do with the design decisions that surrounded it, not the mere the fact that there existed a table that influenced Enmity targeting (of auto-attacks, most secondary auto-attacks, some special attacks, some casts, some afflictions, etc. -- essentially, whatever one decides it should affect for that particular mob).

Similarly, I don't necessarily want Enemy TP back from 1.x, but for issues pertaining to how it was affected by certain debuffs and largely lacked available influence apart from that (leaving it stale and unintuitive while simply decreasing the reward of burning a mob down quickly), not the mere fact that it existed as a way to vary mob attacks, attack pacing, and thereby behavior by a (mob-specific) formula for how its actions' granular resource (TP) was generated over time, from damage dealt, damage taken, and specific attacks/afflictions made or made against it. The basic idea is fine; it's just also largely unnoticeable until you attach to it its available interactions. It's those interactions that form the gameplay, which the game could then do quite interesting things with that enhance the game... or even incidentally make the game more dull for even having them.

[Zarkovitch]

Hell yeah brother, they should add it (for nostagia sake) but they wont have it back due conflicts of bad players,teamwork too hard and the hassle with current construction of this game.They should just make the OT doing something outside of using cds on tank buster or hitting like a blue dps. They need to bring adds to tank back on encounters, there no more lost on dps with the tank stance anymore and the risk of dying on heavy hitting add with tank buster coming from the boss seem more fun.

[Mikey_R]

I understand that you intended your question to almost purely rhetorical, but you're drawing conclusion that have very little to do with the responses thus far given. So unless this was intended only as a rhetorical trap for a specific person, rather than any interest in the idea...

More of a challenge, of which I will provide commentary on. I might have some inherent bias towards thinking there is no system that would make enmity interesting, but that doesn't mean someone couldn't prove me wrong.

>> What "rehaul" would be necessary to have potentially interesting Enmity?

<< Arguably nothing that would need to be called a "rehaul". Even small changes would allow for an Enmity system that feels entirely different and capable of far more gameplay interest.

>> Ahh, then it must be irredeemable. Any of those additions or adjustments can only ever be mere "added fluff for no reason".

The term used was rework which, in my eyes, means a completely different system built from the ground up. There will be some base underlying similarities, but it should be different in how it is handled. One idea would be to completely decouple enmity from damage and have it be it's own separate thing by making it so that actions produce their own, fixed enmity. This alone means differences in levels and gear do not matter. That one tank that has just hit level 90 can tank just as well as the other tank how has all the gear. Even with this simplification of enmity, there are going to be issues, but standardising it would make it much easier to balance.

??? Again, would being able to use at-cost active Enmity tools to redirect mechanics and manipulate mob behaviors just be "fluff", let alone 'more of the same'?

Yes, it would have to be a separate target, of which you provoke just before the cast goes off. Done. Otherwise, you are taking damage away from the boss for this arbitrary mechanic and if that happens, you have to start going along the lines of, can the damage be mitigated enough for the DPS/healer to survive so that more damage is put onto the boss? You can't even really reset the bosses enmity as you just do the same as before, just with an extra enmity combo in there to get enmity and from what I understand, O4S had a similar thing where the bosses enmity reset and the consensus was that it was more annoying than fun.

Again, I don't want Enmity back anything like it was. (Nor do I particularly care whether it comes back at all, so long as it doesn't return in its old bloated form.) But its past state has more to do with the design decisions that surrounded it, not the mere the fact that there existed a table that influenced Enmity targeting (of auto-attacks, most secondary auto-attacks, some special attacks, some casts, some afflictions, etc. -- essentially, whatever one decides it should affect for that particular mob).

And that is why you cannot just tweak what we had and it needs to be a different system built from the ground up to properly support the design decision they want to achieve.

[Leonerdo]

I recently learned that WoW went through the same debacle 8 years earlier. Ghostcrawler (a very vocal dev on the WoW team at the time) explained some of their reasoning in a blog post that's now gone. But I found it copied in a reddit comment here: https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comment...usses_massive/

In short: There are benefits and downsides to difficult threat management. Sure threat management is a good source of engagement, is thematically appropriate, and is rewarding for good tanks to master. But on the other hand it frequently required other party members to "waste" time on aggro dumps or stop attacking to avoid getting aggro. And in the worst case, it meant that poorly-geared (or bad) tanks simply could not keep up with top-tier DPS, causing a lot of frustration in normal dungeons.

At the end of the day they decided it was better to burden tanks with more fun things, like dealing with enemy mechanics and mitigation.

I would add that in FFXIV, the most engaging part of stance-dancing was the different effects/rotations you got from each stance. I only played DRK at the time so I can't speak on the other tanks, but DRK's Blood Price and Blood Weapon (among other things) gave each stance unique gameplay. Using both in a dungeon was crucial. But that had nothing to do with enmity, and therefore could be achieved without the messy enmity management.

I do still miss the enmity management a little. But it wasn't a great system overall, and probably would never be worth the dev time to "fix" it, if it's even possible to do so without watering it down. I moved on from caring about it pretty soon after ShB released.