Off tank mechanic Ideas

[Carighan]

Plus it's important to keep in mind that Emnity is also just DPS. It raises the DPS ceiling for your actual DPS in your party.

Hence it's usually an either-or: Either you focus on group interdependencies, and a tank's primary game is causing the maximum amount of Emnity possible as otherwise your DPS cannot deal more damage (old WoW did it a lot where tank swaps included a forced percentual aggro drop, which meant that there's over a long fight an absolute aggro ceiling). Or you focus on personal damage generation (and emnity is usually a secondary effect of this) and this is ultimately the same but with less explicit dependence.

Importantly, "maximum emnity" is also just an output number. As this directly increases how much damage the DPS can deal, there's factually very little difference to actual gameplay between focusing on emnity vs personal DPS. Both maximize output, the former just uses a number not explicitly shown.

What you could do is make Emnity an inherently short-term stat, that decays rapidly at all times. All emnity is lost after 20 seconds or so. Meaning that you need to burst a lot during burst phases or you'll lose aggro ,but between that can chill a bit, and this in turn allows more flexibility with the loadout. But also this means you're just once again syncing all burst timers in class design, no?

And don't get me wrong I'd do that rework:
* Massively curb tank DPS, they're now always the lowest.
* Massively curb emnity generation and make optional elements of the combat design that cause even less damage but even more emnity.
* Retool all 4 existing tanks around this "max your emnity output"-game instead of "max your DPS output"-game. As said above, this in turn creates the ability for the DPS to deal damage in the first place, so there's plenty damage-component to the gameplay already!
* I'd not necessarily do it via tankswitching, that'd be better if that's just one job that does that. Others could have branching combos to select between more-emnity vs emnity-is-fine-deal-more-damage (or reduce CDs or so). Or use their mitigation to also max emnity so it's a do-I-really-want-that-now tradeoff (say Warrior causes massive emnity from healing).
* Add tankswaps and emnity decay mechanics to all combat involving 2+ tanks. No exceptions. There is no offtank, all bosses either attack top 2 targets, have 2-player-cleaving autoattacks, or force tank swaps by deleting X% of current target emnity every so often.

But it's important to keep in mind that this mostly changes the number you optimize for, this could at no loss of complexity nearly all be done for just damage output, too (not 1-to-1, but equivalent).