Quote Originally Posted by Maulclaw View Post
This actually got me thinking, was "fighting" for enmity that complicated back then? Would two tanks juggle between the same enemy non-stop? For example, there's a Paladin and a Gunbreaker, both with their stances on. The Gunbreaker gets the Monster's attention first and unless the Paladin uses Provoke, it seems like the Monster will never let go of the Gunbreaker. At least, that's how it is from personal experience.
Tanks weren’t fighting for enmity in expansions prior to shadowbringers. In fact, in an optimised party you were trying to minimise your enmity lead in favour of damage. Tanks tried to stay in dps stance as much as possible using their enmity combo as little as possible, this meant the party had to keep their enmity down and help keep the MT’s enmity up, there was a tank trick in stormblood when there was no tank swaps for a while where the OT would provoke (max enmity + a little extra), the MT would shirk them (place 25% of their enmity onto the OT), then the MT would provoke back (new much higher max enmity) and the OT would shirk them back (place 25% of their very high enmity on MT and drop a huge chunk of their own enmity securing the MT’s lead).

Other jobs had tools like diversion that lowered their enmity generation by 80%, some had tools that cut their current enmity in half like lucid dreaming and ninja in particular had extremely powerful enmity control tools called shadewalker (diverted 80% of their own enmity generation to the target party member which was the MT) and smokescreen which was essentially diversion for other party members (usually put on a high dps job with no personal enmity control like SAM or MNK). That along with trick attack made NIN a must have party member in any comp.

In most cases you’d have your more powerful dps nipping at the heels of the MT while the OT would sit comfortably in some of the last places on enmity until they needed to swap to MT at which point you’d just provoke/shirk.