Ditch the Tank Stances and fit enmity management into active gameplay

[Mikey_R]

Considerations:
Since I cannot iterate on these proposals in gameplay, it comes to question whether this proposed idea would be considered fun. Ideally, it would add nuance and differentiate playstyles between Main Tank and Off Tank in content that require multiple tanks and add active gameplay input in dungeons where pulling mobs and maintaining aggro is essential to not let damage fall upon allies. The proposed combo finisher depriving the Tank from potential damage output can also be called into question, as it would be the key difference between Main Tank and Off Tank gameplay.

The main reason enmity combos were not liked and used as little a possible is because they done less damage, not only in the form of lower potency, but also in resource generation. This is why, the standard start to a fight was enmity combo in tank stance, then swap to DPS stance for the remainder of the fight (this is mainly coming from a SB point of view).

Some nuances of the proposed Increased enmity combo finisher:
This finisher has more potency than other finishers.
For Paladin, it grants Atonement Ready, but not Divine Might.
For Warrior, Storm's Path "Combo Bonus: Restores own HP" gets moved to the Increased enmity combo finisher. Storm's Path still increases Beast Gauge by 20, Increased enmity combo finisher increases it by 10, like Storm's Eye.
For Dark Knight, Souleater's "Combo Bonus: Restores own HP" gets moved to the Increased enmity combo finisher. Souleater still increases Blood Gauge by 20, Increased enmity combo finisher increases it by 10.
For Gunbreaker, Brutal Shell's "Combo Bonus: Restores own HP" and Barrier gets moved to the Increased enmity combo finisher. It doesn't add a Cartridge to the Powder Gauge.

First, 'more potency' on finishers doesn't help as I imagine you are trying to balance the damage loss from the resource with extra potency in the combo ender, which doesn't work due to a variety of reasons, but mainly the 2 minute meta (like it or not). However, for the individual jobs:
Paladin, losing the flexibility afforded by Divine Might for when you have to disconnect is a massive loss and whilst Holy Spirit can still be used, it isn't as flexible as you have to stand still and it is weaker.
Warrior, Reducing gauge generation for less Flee Cleave goes against the very fibre of Warriors and the healing isn't significant enough to warrant using it for that purpose either.
Dark Knight, same as Warrior, just for Bloodspiller, however it is even more egregious as they only have 1 combo as opposed to Warrior's 2.
Gunbreaker, First, Brutal Shell is the second combo hit and doesn't generate gauge, Solid Barrel is the one you are thinking off, but that doesn't produce a shield/heal. Also, having less cartridges to spend means less Burst Strikes, which, considering the recent changes to Gunbreaker made sure that the amount of cartridges you generated over a 2 minute window didn't change, is counterintuitive to that.

Noone wants less of the fun stuff.

Now, if we imagine this system works and you have to balance an enmity generator and a damage combo, we need a way to properly track this all so we can make proper judgement calls. Valance has said that there needs to be an improved UI, but how would this be done? What challenges ned to be considered?

First, we have to remember that enmity is a variable that gets larger and larger as a fight goes on. If we have a meter that tracks it, the whole meter is the top enmity and there is a bar that moves based on second in the enmity list, this is as basic as you can get. Now, to throw out some numbers. If this gauge is 100 units long, at the start of the fight, you have 100 enmity and the person behind you has 90. It is easy to see they are behind you, but the numbers are close enough that there is still a lot of volatility in the values. If we look later into the fight, max enmity is 1000, if everything has scaled up evenly, the second would have 900 enmity but the bar will be less volatile. But we are using this to get as many damage combos in as possible, so the second place will be closer, call it 950. Assuming the enmity bar is linear, this value will be closer to max than the initial example, so, do you have the room to do another damage combo?

How about if we use more realistic enmity values where they get closer to 100,000+ At 100,000 enmity, the second place could be at 99,000, which could be plenty of leeway for a damage combo, but, because of the resolution of the bar, 99,999 could also be 1 unit shy from filling, where you do not have that luxury and need to use the enmity combo. The point here is his gets less and less reliable so you are more likely to fall into a rhythm of x damage combos per enmity combo just to ensure you stay ahead, at which point, you aren't managing enmity, just following a rotation.

This is the first thing that has to be sorted out first if any sort of proper enmity management is to be implemented. There are other concerns I would have after that, but they do not matter unless a coherent Ui element can be put into place.

[Carighan]

Yeah it also just means one finisher ends up being strictly superior.

You just end up with the Shield vs Sword stance thing again: You might need to use a +emnity finisher every X seconds, but it always feels bad, because you're just doing that to keep aggro, aggro that you'd also get in parts from just dealing more damage.

The reason why this doesn't work is that FFXIV has no mechanic like WoW's vanilla/TBC (mostly) Wing Buffets or other forced aggro drops, where +threat skills could raise the absolute threat ceiling, and hence increase how much damage your damage dealers in your group could deal until they had to stop and just stand there waiting for you to create more threat. Lacking those, and lacking the whole concept where a DPS could deal more damage if only the tank's threat were higher, there's no point to any of these mechanics at all. They only exist as a "You did well pat pat" vs "You blew it" binary check, like pressing your damage reduction in time. Useful to some degree, but none of these "Did you perform the thing?"-checks are any different in mental attention required or physical dexterity tested, and hence you might as well just have tankbusters you have to mitigate. Same level of "engagement".

Aggro/Threat is a cool system, but only if it's actively used, and for that it has to be a constant race for the tank(s) to create threat "space" for the DPS to deal damage in.

[Kowaeru]

I agree with all points brought up, it's a very complex topic. I hope the developers can find ways to implement more nuance to the Tank role in the future.

[Derio]

I would much rather they invest more time into the jobs rotations and job identity than make enmity management more difficult. A poor enmity management creates a high failure system which would be detrimental in the early stages of the game. Tank is already the least played role and witht the changes they made in shadowbringers. I doubt they would change enmity management.

[Mercury_Grey]

I would much rather they invest more time into the jobs rotations and job identity than make enmity management more difficult. A poor enmity management creates a high failure system which would be detrimental in the early stages of the game. Tank is already the least played role and witht the changes they made in shadowbringers. I doubt they would change enmity management.

Making me think of StB tanks. Had ot use flash, ultimatim and enmity combos during boss whiel stance dancing to keep enmity. Why im glad they made enmity easier to manage in ShB. I mean yeah DT their aoes and certain abilities needed that enmity effect

[Valence]

It's only PLD that had to use Flash (because Total Eclipse had no enmity generation attached to it, and didn't even exist in ARR/HW).

Ultimatum's only use was to grab back aggro from all mobs after dying, like old provoke in dungeons.

[Mercury_Grey]

It's only PLD that had to use Flash (because Total Eclipse had no enmity generation attached to it, and didn't even exist in ARR/HW).

Ultimatum's only use was to grab back aggro from all mobs after dying, like old provoke in dungeons.

I forgot about old total eclipse not having enmity back hten. I like never used it but 2 times in StB

[mallleable]

I would not want aggro management as a numbers mechanic back. It's just not actually interesting. I vastly prefer 'soft' forms of aggro management like boss positioning, crowd control like stuns, and interrupts, and reducing an enemies' damage dealt. and enemy mechanics that lean into the 'protect the party' fantasy like Mountain Fire, and engage both tanks.

[Commander_Justitia]

Tanks are my most played class. They just feel too similar, because they are. Whatever they do that should be the first point of change, making them more unique again.
Paladin used to have a shield swipe that could pacify an enemy for a few seconds, making them unable to execute a weaponskill. It used to have silence via offglobal, not just an cast interrupt. Tanks used to have different combo with resistances down, or vulnerability up to a certain damage type. Tanks used to have dots. Tanks used to have individual unique mitigation skills. And generally more cc types.

This was all lost for the pure raw damage formula. Crowd control and versatility gone, replaced by same mitigation skills and same damage skills.

Remember when we had fights that included rooting enemies? Slowing them over longer duration? T7? This type of encounter design has completely died I guess. All trial mobs and bosses are mostly resistant to any form of cc. Unless they are from ARR, like ifrit normal.

If job design doesn't change meaningfully, the encounter design won't either. And aggro management alone doesn't make an encounter more interesting to me.

[Shurrikhan]

Enmity from attacks never made sense to me. Logically enmity attacks are not different from other attacks yet they make enemies focus on you for some reason and in gameplay they're not much different in use from regular attacks, although they at least require some player thought in choosing which attack to use. If an enmity system came back I think it should revolve around tanks disrupting enemy offense instead of being a second set of tank attacks.

So, partly agreed, but a few things here:

There could, especially if one realistically isn't perfectly able to access exactly how much damage has been dealt to them and by whom with each attack taken, be a difference in how you instinctively allocate your attention between someone basically unknown or at least out of sight stabbing you with a spear from behind and someone yelling in your face and taking up a large portion of your vision while stabbing you with a spear for an equally damaging attack.

That yelling in the enemy's face to hold their attention, thereby giving better access to back attacks and drawing counterattacks onto yourself... is, if indirectly, disrupting their offense, or at least their offensive potential, since the tank is more resistant to attack than non-tanks. From the party's perspective, relative to not having a tank, each skill used that directs the enemy's attacks onto the tank... is suppressive. The only reason it wouldn't really feel like that right now is because tanks have effectively infinite Enmity so long as they don't go afk (with increasingly long durations thereof required) or die.

Finally, if getting enemy's to attack you relied on how much suppression you do, then (A) if calculated in terms of final damage nullification, it'd be least on attacks already against you, and (B) unless we're still riding high passive Enmity modifiers, DPS would start off with higher enmity than you... which together mean you'd be required to run around peeling enemies off your individual high-Enmity (high output) allies, and in this case not even by being an ostensible threat to them, but merely by sapping the strength from their attacks against others.

That seems like it'd be an even less thematic experience, even before getting to the whole disordered and allies-dependent (with the party and especially tank being punished the more dps their DPS do) nature of it.

For my end, mostly I'd want the tanks to have fundamentally different ways they generate their aggro.

Okay, with you so far... maybe...

That is, the x10 aggro modifier on the stances can stay, so long as it affects something different on each class. For example, Warrior should get a massive (x50 or so) boost to threat generated, but only on healing they cause, no matter on whom they do the healing. So all their self-healing is also how they do aggro, enraging the enemy with the fact that this unarmored 10 IQ doofus wearing just a loincloth won't die no matter how many planets they throw on their heads.

Oh, please, gods, no. Why should the enemy freak out over just one person's healing in particular? And why make Warrior even more of a plate-armored healer?

At present, Nascent would be even more obligatory for its duplicated heals, no matter how wasteful, and even were Warrior adjusted to fit that change, that's still putting a huge damper on anything other gauge or CD-based output they could produce to the point that you'd need healing just to get the tankbuster aimed at you, at which point you might not have anything beyond long CDs to actually mitigate the damn thing, etc.

Meanwhile say Gunbreaker generates aggro every time they use Continuation, again no matter on what and maybe it's even a fixed amount that pulses in an AoE instead of based on the damage/effect of the specific continuation.

This would mean having to hold Continuation for add-spawns... Again, please, no.

It's mostly flavor of course since over X minutes of fight it needs to be roughly the same threat total, but I'd love for the flavor and the profile of threat-generation to feel different between classes.

The flavors and profiles of threat-generation differing between jobs can be as simple as GNB having Burst Strike available, sometimes as a sacrifice over Gnashing Fang uses per minute, for snap-aggro, Warrior again being able to choose between a purely-offensive Fell Cleave and a self-sustaining Inner Beast, Paladin being able to turtle and perhaps hold charges of Shield Oath for an oGCD or AoE Shield Bash (giving time to establish threat by other means, etc.)...

...all perhaps with (A) enmity being based on relative potency, not actual damage dealt, and (B) tank [or all, if we ever want to reinvite sub-tanking to the mix, such as if Tanks' eHP inflation were wholly reverted] GCD skills having, say, a 1%enmity bonus increase per point of potency (such that a 600p Fell Cleave or Burst Strike doing 960p of threat, while a Heavy Swing would only do 298 and a 380p Gnashing Fang would do only 524 [yes, some potency-shuffling here, as Burst Strike nerfs have left it with no use case except as filler once GF is learned]), befitting the whole 'drawing attention with obvious, hard hits'.

Sidenote: Something that might be interesting without too likely making Enmity easy for tanks to generate is just to double their Enmity modifiers (such as from the extra relative potency generated by Determination, Direct Hits, and Critical Hits) or, better yet for consistency's sake, to halve non-tanks' modifiers).

Further, similarly to accuracy modifiers before, we might suppress Enmity from unseen (rear) attackers by 30%, barely-seen (flanking) attackers by 15%, etc., with tanks being only half as reduced, and/or reducing Enmity slightly with range (again, halved for tanks), but that'd be more about future-proofing a melee's ability to peel for a squishier tank, as sometimes done back in 1.x and 2.x, rather than being so relevant to tanks).

In short, we don't have to throw logic to the winds to make jobs distinct in enmity generation. We just have to make Enmity itself meaningful and the kits themselves a bit more differentiated in their attack profiles. Too much has been sacrificed to streamlining and to pushing players towards the 'right' way to play endgame content with no regard for allowing for any sort of niche use cases (and therefore excusing the game's very deepening lack of variety in situations) or gameplay quality over the leveling experience, and just fixing that would already do tons of good for Enmity and the like just because Enmity is linked to our attacks and therefore our kit design.