Ditch the Tank Stances and fit enmity management into active gameplay

[Shurrikhan]

Yeah the mechanics might be an attempt to abstract that entire attention grabbing process but it goes too far in its abstraction to be believable. It's not just tanks radiating a flood of enmity in the same way that the Sun is bright enough to light an entirely solar system, it's that in game causality is backwards. Tanks don't have to get in anyone's face because they somehow force their targets to face them with only the tiniest amount of effort.

None of those states you mention here would have anything to do with what's being proposed, though, or even to how those Enmity systems originally worked? Like, the whole idea here is to replace the passively supernova-esque Enmity tanks currently have.

The game launched with just a less than a third net Enmity increase in Shield Oath (less in ST for having missed the sizeable bonus 50 potency per auto-attack), for instance, and zero free passive increase. The largest Enmity gains were through, very visually distinctly, clobber the heck out of an enemy's face with Rage of Halone or Butcher's Block or by being that sunburst via Flash. Fast Blade was ~120 potency of Enmity, Savage ~320, Rage of Halone ~1100, scaled pretty sensibly with exactly that visual element/theme-ing.

Point A isn't a problem. It's just the reality that the tank isn't interesting to hit by nature of being a tank, outside of actions taken. If you're trying to get past an obstacle, why bash your head against the toughest wall instead of finding a crack to hammer away at?

Yes, an intelligent creature would ideally find a way to target the weakest link or the most crucial-yet-destructible element of its enemy, but that's not describing attention so much as strategy, and unless we'd both (A) have a way of hiding our most crucial parts' strengths until the pivotal moment to use them AND (B) such gameplay would actually be preferable, that's not really relevant to a system of mob-manipulation (something dependent on their not being especially intelligent, even if it can still allow for idiosyncratic or mob-type-specific calculations).

On point B, the use of modifiers would be fine. Some raw enmity gain on actions may also make sense, especially CC. Holmgang for instance is a forced duel. You are chaining yourself to your adversary and making it impossible or at least very difficult to focus on anyone else. That could theoretically be infinite damage suppression. If enmity were generated this way tank openers would involve throwing out lots of CC and party defense initially. Binds, slows, party shields, etc to make attacking anyone but them futile. In addition they would be attacking the target of their CC, making them a threat directly through damage and through supporting the 3-7 other party members contributing damage.

A couple things here, too:

CC goes most to waste precisely if it has significant (e.g., enough to force a target-swap) Enmity attached and is applied from melee range (as per most tank actions) because now, instead of getting the full mitigation of chasing someone out of reach, the enemy can just swap to the other (even if less efficiently attacked) target, still getting some 60+% of their value instead of none of it. Even basic 'intelligence' (scripting) can make it so that, barring any other opportunity, a bound enemy would swap targets to something that's at least in reach, certainly, but (1) it's not sensible for the focus to shift cumulative threat perception just because of one action that merely delayed their original plan (the 'target-swapping' would be more of a temporary trickling down) and (2) this would make tanking inherently more finicky to min-max party value from, since you'd want a large enough gap in Enmity not to actually force attacks against the tank while the enemy is CCed away from its current/original target.

So, yes, you can force attention onto the tank by binding or heavy-ing enemies, but literally any non-melee would do better with that purpose for the simple fact that then the enemy's attacks would go wholly to waste instead of just partly to waste. Meanwhile, temporarily occluding the enemy's best options still wouldn't actually sensibly contribute a lasting need to kill off the, as you said, least interesting-to-hit enemy. Unless every other party member holds fire or attacks something else, the same ratios of Enmity would still be accumulating over that time, baring the 'oh, crap, this humanoid can annoy me with Heavy / Bind effects' if tanks alone could apply such, just as before. So you'd have a tank chasing down enemies just to briefly allow the enemies to deal more damage than had the tank not existed.

Tl;dr: Heavy Enmity on CC is wasteful and if you want perfectly intelligent enemies, the only way to tank (offer meaningful help to the party's ratio of damage dealt to damage taken through manipulation of mobs or of their attacks/positions) wouldn't be through Enmity (cumulative reactive perception of who is worth prioritizing) anyways, but simply by... well, intercepting skill-shotted attacks (likely after baiting and resisting the mobs' own CC skills, if any), etc., since they'd know not to actually go for the kill on an enemy so resistant for attack, instead CCing and then bypassing them.


Tldrtl;dr: Having tank Enmity operate primarily off damage denial conflicts with having them operate off CC that would nonetheless let them reach someone extra (the tank) and is inherently finicky to get started (they have to already be trying to hit a non-tank for the tank to suppress meaningful damage and force threat onto them). The basic Enmity modifiers would almost certainly lead to better gameplay outcomes, especially so long as Enmity generation and the balance¹ of moment-to-moment GCD value are both decent.

¹ "Balance" here does not mean making everything flat, but rather having a good range of potencies (even when accounting for oGCDs) that can be skill-expressively played around, and perhaps making long-term losses occasionally situationally useful (Burst Strike situationally useful over Gnashing Fang even if the latter had no cooldown, for instance [but only enabled Continuation as its benefit over normal combo instead of also adding the same amount over normal combo in itself]).