Is provoke broken or am I doing it wrong?

[Themis]

You have the right idea that you need to follow Provoke with an enmity generating action.

Rage of Halone is far better at this as it has a larger modifier than the others. It was also discovered that you could actually do Rage of Halone > Provoke whilst the animation is going off for RoH and it will still work. I have done this myself with success. Just have to make sure to be spamming that Provoke immediately after RoH so it can execute as soon as it possible can.

Of course, it is harder to get enmity back if the enemy has run off. This is why it is greatly encouraged than any non-tank player runs back to the tank with the enemy rather than keep running away. Shield Lob is ok to use, but if the other players are still attacking the enemy they may pull it back off. They really need to stop attacking it and let you get control back.

If it's trash, though, and it's almost dead (<20% HP in my books), then leave them to tank it and finish it off. It's not worth struggling with it at that point. Better to focus your attention on any other trash that still lives.

If you provoke a mob that isn't on the hate list of anyone in your alliance, it misses.

As already pointed out above, this isn't true.

Some enemies, however, are immune to the effects of Provoke. These include FATE enemies and Hunt targets. This wasn't originally the case, but players would use it to exploit the mechanics of getting Gold in FATEs (or would give full credit for hunts). Basically, FATE/Hunt reward is based on the amount of enmity generated during the encounter. Provoke could be used to game this by instantly generating a lot of enmity for you. So it was patched to make these types of enemies immune to Provoke. On these, it will come up as a miss. But every other target is not immune to Provoke or its effect.