Enmity Management, Do we want it back?

[Chajii]

Honestly? No. Less to with skill and more to do with people forget the situation we were in SB.
Have ninja with shadewalker was mandatory, voke shirk on cool down, dps and healers lucid/diversion on cool down. Even tanks hated tank stance and the eminity combo. Tank generally gave us all access to worse skills vs. dps stance, generated less gauge significantly, and just felt bad being in. Eminity im fine with getting just a nerf to require said MT to be good at their rotations to hold the boss. They can focus more on job individuality and removing some of the overlap instead.

Totally agree, tanks had never had a major role in enmity management when we started to optimise damage, it was always the other party members' fault of not using all their enemity reduction skills, healers' fault of overhealing even just so slightly, or ninja's fault that they don't take care of everything enmity related smooth enough, but somehow when people talk about enmity management, they only seem to ask for opinions from tank players, interesting isn't it.

(Sorry if my English were difficult to understand, I don't play the game in EN)

[Post]

Enmity being a group responsibility is precisely why I disliked its removal. It's similar to healing and mitigation being mostly a healer responsibility until healers began to be stripped of these tools in StB in favor of giving them to the rest of the party, but in reverse.

It's like how healer personal DPS performance suffers for group members' mistakes. Why shouldn't tank's? They're both support jobs. Why is tank allowed to have immunity from a party or encounter mechanic affecting their performance to the degree that they remove any say in it from all other roles?

Isn't Ex1's tankbuster more fun? It's a mechanic the whole team has to consider. Enmity didn't always fully measure up to that, but it caused e.g. tank mechanics to matter more to the party than they tended to from ShB onwards.

The overall effect on Enmity changes in my eyes is that tanks don't even pay attention to it. The 2nd and 3rd tank will not provoke if the main one dies until several DPS die, and those same DPS used to be able to drop their own threat to protect themselves at least now have less agency in their survival.

And for some reason, I can't generate aggro with Aurora on dungeon pulls anymore because ShB tank stances and super Provoke weren't enough for some players? I don't even know that anyone was asking for HoTs to generate 0 enmity, but here we are.

[Chajii]

Enmity being a group responsibility is precisely why I disliked its removal. It's similar to healing and mitigation being mostly a healer responsibility until healers began to be stripped of these tools in StB in favor of giving them to the rest of the party, but in reverse.

It's like how healer personal DPS performance suffers for group members' mistakes. Why shouldn't tank's? They're both support jobs. Why is tank allowed to have immunity from a party or encounter mechanic affecting their performance to the degree that they remove any say in it from all other roles?

Isn't Ex1's tankbuster more fun? It's a mechanic the whole team has to consider. Enmity didn't always fully measure up to that, but it caused e.g. tank mechanics to matter more to the party than they tended to from ShB onwards.

The overall effect on Enmity changes in my eyes is that tanks don't even pay attention to it. The 2nd and 3rd tank will not provoke if the main one dies until several DPS die, and those same DPS used to be able to drop their own threat to protect themselves at least now have less agency in their survival.

And for some reason, I can't generate aggro with Aurora on dungeon pulls anymore because ShB tank stances and super Provoke weren't enough for some players? I don't even know that anyone was asking for HoTs to generate 0 enmity, but here we are.

If it were only the tank personal damage suffers from the group performance, it isn't too bad; the problem is that the group could easily suffer from the tank being bad and refuse to switch between stances "because of damage stance deals bigger numbers".
Tanks' damage stances being removed is similar to how they attempted to fix Cleric Stance on healers and gave up, if you want tank mechanics, please consider asking for smaller target circles, more freedom for tanks to position bosses and leave enmity alone.

[Mikey_R]

It's like how healer personal DPS performance suffers for group members' mistakes. Why shouldn't tank's? They're both support jobs. Why is tank allowed to have immunity from a party or encounter mechanic affecting their performance to the degree that they remove any say in it from all other roles?

There is a difference, yes, if other players are bad, both roles will suffer, however, if the DPS are good, healers will use less GCDs on healing, which brings more damage. If DPS is too high, the tank has to use more enmity combos. So, whilst the overall damage of the party is higher, the tank has to reduce their damage to account for it. This also means there is a point where, if the DPS is just right, there is the potential your party DPS overall is reduced, so it is actually detrimental.

So, DPS being better, makes tanks worse. Good gameplay there. Also, since this is the best place to put it, the longer a fight goes on, the harder it is to more finely tune enmity and know when you want to use your DPS combo or whether you want to enmity combo, which again, can reduce damage unnecessarily.

[Valence]

Those days I do wonder what do tank players want out of this game besides dpsing with a pseudo damage/mechanical immunity to be honest..

[Shurrikhan]

Those days I do wonder what do tank players want out of this game besides dpsing with a pseudo damage/mechanical immunity to be honest..

Want: Actively thwarting and manipulating enemy offenses as a shared task against which we have uniquely expansive toolkit, incidental (as from higher eHP from stats) and direct (unique passives and actives), to leverage, and (thereby, indirectly) opening up more efficient avenues of attacks for our team.


Don't Want: Hit-on-CD "role" bloat.

And if there are to be additional actions for Enmity, it makes more sense to start tanks off at naturally high enmity with a stance to then remove it, and for DPS and healers to have CDs from which to briefly gain tank enmity modifiers as to act as a decoy for kiting purposes, etc.

Needing 4 separate attacks, 1-2 stances (be they GCD or oGCD), and 4 abilities just to "manage" Enmity (read: guess correctly how long you'll need to be in "tank" stance before dropping its penalty such that you never again have to touch a stance button) was peak bloat that never actually made tanks more like tanks, only like a The Price is Right contestant somehow saddled with random children capable of yelling wrong answers in their place.

[CKNovel]

Enmity being a group responsibility is precisely why I disliked its removal. It's similar to healing and mitigation being mostly a healer responsibility until healers began to be stripped of these tools in StB in favor of giving them to the rest of the party, but in reverse.

Enmity used to be a group responsibility but that was different.
DPS wouldn't use quelling strike and just cry at the tank to put on tank stance. DPS don't get punished and can get away.
Meanwhile on healer side, DPS take damages, they're the one taking the punishment, even more with a damage down. Healers can just throw an oGCD without losing damage, unless it's a death which massively punishes the DPS.

This was basically what was going on during Stormblood, in an organized group, it was good. In a random party, it sucked.

Aurora doesn't generate aggro on pull because SQEX reduced the enmity generated by regen effect such as Regen from WHM.

Those days I do wonder what do tank players want out of this game besides dpsing with a pseudo damage/mechanical immunity to be honest..

• More spread out high damage on tanks, less kitchen sink for a single hit.
• Auto attacks that actually hurts and requires mitigation.
• Stop making the boss jump to the middle when I can think for a super cool spot my melee DPS will enjoy. Let me pull that teddy bear to the side of the arena!
• No more "everyone's mechanic" or "only tank mechanic". Raidwide? Mix it with double tank buster.
• Double boss fight that requires each tank to take one of the bosses.
• Tank buster on DPS that requires shielding from tanks/healers.

Tank kit is good (except DRK), now we just need to exploit it.

[Shurrikhan]

• Stop making the boss jump to the middle when I can think for a super cool spot my melee DPS will enjoy. Let me pull that teddy bear to the side of the arena!

Tangent, but...

I actually wouldn't mind some degree of "snapping" and "stretching" and/or "doubling" in this regard:

Snapping: bosses wouldn't want to move past certain points unless they're being guided at least some 2 yalms past those points (in which case there's no pause) or turn past certain angles (e.g., a cardinal) unless turned at least some 5 degrees beyond that point.

Stretching: Right when a positional snap or any other forced movement happens, the hitbox is briefly duplicated and temporarily continues as it was as it hadn't been snapped or forcibly moved.

Doubling: When a facing/angular snap or any other forced turn happens, the hitbox rings are temporarily duplicated and striking the target gets the "better of" positional (e.g., if the were to suddenly between when you queue an attack and when it actuates such that your rear attack would have failed to hit the rear despite appearing to have done so, that former angle is retained for another half-second or so, allowing the positional to succeed / follow from what you see on screen).

And pair that with, of course, better handling of angular change over small forced movements where such may remain.

Such, especially the snapping, would keep some of the ease for positioning bosses to be just barely accessible from as many safe points as possible where that can be an occasional benefit of taking positioning out of tanks' hands... without actually having to take it out of the tank's hands.

[BigCheez]

If it were only the tank personal damage suffers from the group performance, it isn't too bad; the problem is that the group could easily suffer from the tank being bad and refuse to switch between stances "because of damage stance deals bigger numbers".
Tanks' damage stances being removed is similar to how they attempted to fix Cleric Stance on healers and gave up, if you want tank mechanics, please consider asking for smaller target circles, more freedom for tanks to position bosses and leave enmity alone.

How is this any different from players wiping the party by greeding a GCD in the modern game?

God forbid our party based game actually play like a party based game.

[Valence]

Want: Actively thwarting and manipulating enemy offenses as a shared task against which we have uniquely expansive toolkit, incidental (as from higher eHP from stats) and direct (unique passives and actives), to leverage, and (thereby, indirectly) opening up more efficient avenues of attacks for our team.

Would you have examples of it?

• More spread out high damage on tanks, less kitchen sink for a single hit.
• Auto attacks that actually hurts and requires mitigation.
• Stop making the boss jump to the middle when I can think for a super cool spot my melee DPS will enjoy. Let me pull that teddy bear to the side of the arena!
• No more "everyone's mechanic" or "only tank mechanic". Raidwide? Mix it with double tank buster.
• Double boss fight that requires each tank to take one of the bosses.
• Tank buster on DPS that requires shielding from tanks/healers.

Tank kit is good (except DRK), now we just need to exploit it.

Sounds good on the encounter design side. I'd like other things to do on the battle system side as well, but I think the devs have given up on the battle system long ago.

However even if I'm not a tank main, I do despise all 3 tanks but DRK actually. I'm not gonna say its rotation is more engaging than its brethren, quite the contrary it's more of the same homogeneous soup supports are afflicted with, but on the defensive side it's the only tank that actually pleases me with TBN properly combined with mitigators, and even its invuln in spite of its flaws is malms ahead of the basic ones other tanks have to contend with. DRK's defensive toolkit is the only one that still requires some skill to execute and promotes skill expression, while the 3 others are completely overtuned and brainless to use. I'd love them to go back to that kind of model for the other tanks rather than make DRK the same bland broken crap. It directly ties in with why I am absolutely not attracted to supports, which includes tanks those days, except DRK: they're just boring as roles, and barely challenging one bit.

How is this any different from players wiping the party by greeding a GCD in the modern game?

God forbid our party based game actually play like a party based game.

Healing is next on the chopping block. Wouldn't want to die from a healer not fulfilling their role after all.