Please make enmity values more transparent

[Rinari]

I know a few too many people that are already put off by the social implications of tanking and throwing a wall of numbers certainly wouldn't help, especially with the more... demanding the whole PUG environment is right now.

I was terrified when I started tanking. It was back in WoW and I was fortunate to have experienced tanks in my guild mentor me with their DPS alts, or I might never have gotten up the nerve to try. Up until then, I had only played DPS, where the redundancy of the role gives some extra room for error. I'm not sure if that's what you meant by social implications, but it was definitely the big barrier for me. Looking back it seems silly, but even now, I get a bit of anxiety going into new content, as the tank is expected to know their way around a dungeon!

As a new player, I can attest the UI is already an overwhelming pile of information. I'd say, any extra enmity information should be obscured by default to avoid screen clutter and throwing too much at new players. The enmity icons are enough until you start wanting to fine-tune enmity at the high end of things. Having the option to show more information would be great!

[Fluffernuff]

snip

by "social implications" i merely meant a more sugar coated version of saying the DF or random crowd picking apart every mistake relentlessly. As they do. Ice mages are annoying, but not called out. Healers actively not healing might get a word or 2. A tank not holding aggro? A tank not using cooldowns? A new tank only pulling 3 mobs? If you don't get an earful, chances are you've been kicked. THAT'S what I was poking fun at.

Interesting you bring it up as a toggle. I didn't think of it that way. I was thinking along the lines of just replacing the vague/unhelpful "Additional Effect: Increased Potency" with something more helpful like "Increased Emnity: XXX" and/or "Combo Enmity: XXX".
Something like that will throw more numbers at new players, but new players could also possibly see the bigger numbers and gravitate towards those. That's my thought process, anyway

[Rinari]

Interesting you bring it up as a toggle. I didn't think of it that way. I was thinking along the lines of just replacing the vague/unhelpful "Additional Effect: Increased Potency" with something more helpful like "Increased Emnity: XXX" and/or "Combo Enmity: XXX".

I'm probably being confusing. I was getting at optionally putting enmity values on the actual enmity list. As an example, that would help when out of tank stance so you could monitor how quickly DPS is catching up on enmity. Tooltips operate in a vacuum. Unless you're familiar with the enmity values of the DPS classes, knowing that one of your moves has XXX enmity modifier isn't as helpful as it could be. I like having more information though! I'm all for having enmity modifiers detailed in the tooltips and having relative enmity values shown in the enmity list. Of course, a verbose enmity option could be used to hide the extra information in tooltips even to avoid overwhelming newer players... but I don't think there is any harm in giving them the actual values there from the start. The enmity list though is a bit more confounding and clutters the UI all the time in combat, so it's more important to reduce clutter there at the start.

As for the social situation... I'm sure there are bad groups, but I haven't had any terrible ones yet. Since I'm starting out, I don't do huge pulls. I also give brief explanations of bosses before each boss pull, in case other players are unfamiliar. I once had someone get snippy and bark out 'we know', but usually people have been very kind and patient, or just silent. I'm not going slow or making mistakes left and right, and I tell people when I'm new to something at the start. I expect people to get a bit more toxic at the high end content (not there yet), but I've been very pleased with the FFXIV overall!