Enmity Management, Do we want it back?

[Lyth]

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/

This is a misinformed comparison. This is not a new development, nor is it a debacle. Tanks in FFXIV have always been focused on dealing damage. This partially comes down to the fact that FFXIV is much less gear dependent than World of Warcraft, and being gear gated in newly released content hasn't really happened outside of Manipulator. There was no iteration of this game in which you were valued for stacking parry and turtling up. As such, there has always been pushback from the community against gameplay decisions that restrict tanks' damage output.

Even in Heavensward, which was over eight years ago now, groups were using effects like Shadewalker and Smoke Screen to negate the need for stance-based enmity. And Stormblood really drove this point home, with the addition of Shirk as a tank role action. The changes to tank stance and built in enmity in Shadowbringers were a natural extension of this, and the biggest reason why they were changed was because the stance system preferentially benefited one tank job over all others (guess which one). No, this is not a new concept, nor is it a borrowed one.

Tanks want to do more damage. We demanded it.

[Khalithar]

No. The new system and the change made to Provoke has made tank enmity feel great. I don't want it to change.

[Nestama]

Let's bring TP back while we're at it, too.

/s

[Tint]

The old enmity system was more an illusion of complexity than a real complex system.

Which I actually like.

But you basically did one aggro combo and that was it.

The burden of the enmity management was on the shoulders of the DDs and healers and tanks were exploiting the Shirk skill. Tanks stayed out of tank stance and were avoiding using aggro skills.

That's not the enmity management I would want to have back.

Enmity control is a part of tank gameplay and should not rely heavily on DDs and healers. So what really would change? That tanks have to use an aggro combo again, and more often during the fight and lose damage because of reasons? Shirk has to be removed of course. Why would we want to have enmity management back just so we can use an exploit to circumvent managing aggro?

No I don't think enmity management should come back. Not with the dps focused gameplay we have.

[Post]

The current state of Enmity is such that tanks don't even realize when they're not top or second on threat because it's such a non-factor.

But, the fact that so many tankbusters just automatically target the tank role regardless of their aggro is all but an admission that ShB change to Enmity didn't fix everything for the players they were trying to make the role more approachable for.

I don't know that they'd be any more aware if Enmity generation wasn't AS extreme, but at the very least what I miss most from StB were tools that allowed non tanks to manage their Enmity. Call it selfish, but being able to drop half my threat every 30 seconds as a DRG or give threat to an oblivious tank as a NIN was rewarding. Those things didn't have to go away.

Now, it's like you're completely at the mercy of some player that thinks fell cleave fell cleave fell cleave is too engrossing a rotation to put on their stance or remember to provoke after they're raised. At least with oblivious healers you have SOME survivability tools, but most jobs aren't surviving a tankbuster.

[Shurrikhan]

The current state of Enmity is such that tanks don't even realize when they're not top or second on threat because it's such a non-factor.

But, the fact that so many tankbusters just automatically target the tank role regardless of their aggro is all but an admission that ShB change to Enmity didn't fix everything for the players they were trying to make the role more approachable for.

I don't know that they'd be any more aware if Enmity generation wasn't AS extreme, but at the very least what I miss most from StB were tools that allowed non tanks to manage their Enmity. Call it selfish, but being able to drop half my threat every 30 seconds as a DRG or give threat to an oblivious tank as a NIN was rewarding. Those things didn't have to go away.

The only one among those I found at all worthwhile was Shadewalker, and even it felt like a waste of the name. They also didn't make us any less at the mercy of tanks needing to use Provoke after a rez, etc. They were little more than trifles useful only on the pull and for maintenance thereafter, for eeking out a tiny, tiny bit more tank rDPS.

[CidHeiral]

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.

Hi there, I was a very hardcore raid leader in one of those previous MMOs. Here is the extent of the communication around threat back in the day.

Raid Leader: "Don't attack for a minute while the tank gets aggro."
-everybody sits on their hands for a minute-
Raid Leader: "Ok you can attack now."

The end.

I am someone that loves complexity in my MMO and often harp about interesting gameplay being eroded away in the name of "accessibility", but threat management is not one of those things. There is nothing interesting or skillful about threat management, nor has there ever been. Anyone who tries to paint it as some super strategic three dimensional chess aspect to MMOs is lying to you.

[vetch]

Hi there, I was a very hardcore raid leader in one of those previous MMOs. Here is the extent of the communication around threat back in the day.

Raid Leader: "Don't attack for a minute while the tank gets aggro."
-everybody sits on their hands for a minute-
Raid Leader: "Ok you can attack now."

The end.

I am someone that loves complexity in my MMO and often harp about interesting gameplay being eroded away in the name of "accessibility", but threat management is not one of those things. There is nothing interesting or skillful about threat management, nor has there ever been. Anyone who tries to paint it as some super strategic three dimensional chess aspect to MMOs is lying to you.

"An older MMO did an aspect of design wrong in one fashion, so now we should embrace this current MMO doing it wrong in the diametrical opposite way and call it progress."

[Supersnow845]

If we are gonna talk about fights where you have to stop DPS’ing to make certain things work 14 has its own example of that type of fight (well technically 2) and it was a damn infamous fight in it’s time

Let’s not pretend like 14 is “better” than these problems

[Arohk]

Raid Leader: "Don't attack for a minute while the tank gets aggro."
-everybody sits on their hands for a minute-
Raid Leader: "Ok you can attack now."

The only hard thing in Classic WoW back then, aggro management and random loss or reset of aggro lists. That only worked because the rest of bossmechanics were a joke.