Why do we still have enmity?

[Dzian]

Enmity has been a non-factor for Tanks in MMO's for years now, since it's a terrible mechanic that is made "Relevant" by being unfun due to limiting DPS classes ability to deal damage because of them having to worry about not causing too much enmity.

Think that's partly down to MMOs being dumbed down so much over the years. Some of the old school MMOs enmity was actually pretty fun to utilise and work with.

Even the old school days of final fantasy XI. Where you could for example use trick attacks to do insane spikes of damage and pass massive amounts of enmity to a specific party member. And also had various other tools to manipulate it.

Also in things like FFXI enmity wasnt static it was a dynamically changing value. Would go up as well as down. So if you got smacked for 1000 damage you would pretty much lose 1000 enmity. and it also had a natural rate of decay over time.

By comparison in newer mmos it's just something that goes up and up and up and up to infinity basically and like many things in MMOs the only reason they get boring and unfun is because they get dumbed down so much and over simplified

In XIV you can seem the same with basic resource management and why they're getting rid of TP. Because it's been dumbed down so much over time its become pointless when since 4.0 you basically never run out...

or even stats. even the basic stats are boring because the system has been dumbed down amd simplified so much that the only stat that actually ever matters is I-Level.

the more you make things simple the more they become unfun..

[Argyle_Darkheart]

When did I state something contrary to that?

Right here.

Where enmity is a non-factor so long as DPS/Healers press Diversion/Lucid Dream on CD and Tanks Circle-Shirk during a fight...

Emphasis mine.

The fact of the matter is that enmity is currently managed. That it's to the point where tanks almost never use their enmity combo isn't really the point. Enmity isn't something you can ignore in its entirety, nor is it something you have to constantly monitor.

[JETAlone01]

> The_Distinguished_Anarchist

I saw you over in the healer forums too freaking out because Yoshi P said they wanted healers to heal more. Is this what you do? You just bounce between different boards complaining about things you don't understand?

[Dzian]

. With Enmity, it doesn't matter if you're 1 point above everyone else or 1,000,000 points above everyone else, the enemy will still be attacking you.

Thus once you generate enough enmity to maintain a lead over everyone else, more enmity generation is literally useless as it won't do a thing)

This is because enmity only ever goes up and up and up.

In older games it was a lot more dynamic so it did matter. If you only had a point nity lead then next time the boss hots you. Your going to lose that and then he'll turn to someone else where as a bigger lead would help but decays over time..

It's not to unlike life really. I could call someone at work an idiot and they might get really mad at me in that moment but few minutes later hes probably calmed down a bit.

Or hes turned around and given me what for and blew off some steam that way and then calmed down.. and all is forgotten

If it were like 14 I could call him an idiot and hed still be mega mad at me next year....

[Kalise]

This is because enmity only ever goes up and up and up.

In older games it was a lot more dynamic so it did matter. If you only had a point nity lead then next time the boss hots you. Your going to lose that and then he'll turn to someone else where as a bigger lead would help but decays over time..

Except...

Older games had the exact same mechanic of enmity only ever goes up.

It didn't "Decay". Only certain boss mechanics would force enmity resets (Which would just lead to you doing your pull rotation again. I.e. In games where it mattered, people would stop DPSing and you'd stack your Sunders. In games where it didn't matter, you just spammed your stuff like normal after maybe a taunt)

Even if it DID decay... It would have no effect other than arbitrarily increasing the amount generated to being "X + Y per second" where X is the amount of enmity per second the highest DPS on the list is and Y is the amount of decay.

This is due to the fact that the reason why Enmity is such a non-factor is because the only people that should be getting hit are Tanks. When there's only 1-2 Tanks in a party, then having complex enmity mechanics that can make other people potentially get targeted makes no sense.

For enmity to actually be an interesting mechanic, it would need to be created from the ground up as a unique mechanic as opposed to an independent modifier to justify Tanks doing less DPS/HPS than DPS/Healers (Since that's really the only reason why enmity mechanics actually exist. Otherwise you could simply make it based on DPS/HPS output since that'd have the same effect and then there would be no binary nonsense because as I mentioned, DPS scales infinitely until you one shot an enemy)

Though, it's hard to design something interesting when it still has to focus around the binary system of "Is attacking the Tank" or "Is not attacking the Tank" due to the way Holy Trinity games function.

Games without the Holy Trinity, tend to be able to have more interesting enmity mechanics because it's less important for enemies to be constantly focusing on a singular "Tank" character.

It's one of those things isn't it, everyone says enmity isn't an issue at all, often leaving out the so long as everyone does their bit to manage it factor.

Though... When "So long as everyone does their bit to manage it" happens to be "Press your MP recovery skill on CD to recover MP... Also dump your enmity" "Press Shirk after you Tank Swap" "Press Diversion alongside your other burst CD's" it does heavily mitigate how much it matters.

If it wasn't, then it wouldn't be so easy for SE to simply delete Diversion and give Tanks an enmity toggle while deleting enmity skills and modifiers (Such as on Onslaught)

Not necessarily. Depending on how Floors are calculated or how enmity tools work, you could switch between optimizing Enmity or DPS.
For example, let's imagine that the effect of Provoke is to put you at the beginning of the next floor.

• If you know you won't be able to generate enough enmity to reach that next floor by yourself by the time Provoke is available, you'd better do your DPS rotation, then use Provoke, and start buiding enmity from that next floor.
  
• On the other hand, if you have some skills that would allow you to reach that floor by yourself, you'd keep your enmity rotation, and only use Provoke once you reach the next floor, thus gaining two floors at the same time.

It's still a bit raw, but I'm pretty sure you could polish this kind of mechanics to make enmity more engaging.

So... If I'm understanding this right, you can visualize this as some sort of Limit Break gauge type system. Where each bar is a "Floor" of enmity.

So, Tanks generate enmity and fill up the bars which provide DPS boosts. While DPS fill up the bars and then lose the DPS boosts.

With the idea being that, enmity combos can fill up bars without using Provoke, while Provoke takes you just to the next bar.

So that the idea is that the reason why you wouldn't simply just spam enmity combo's 24/7 is because at some point, maybe, you might hit a point where the bar fills up so slowly that you won't be able to fill it until Provoke is back off CD anyway so you may as well just spam DPS until Provoke is back off CD...

But, somehow, swapping to that DPS combo over the enmity combo won't cause you to generate such a low amount of enmity that you start to lose some of your lead... Which of course wouldn't then mean you just spammed DPS combos 24/7 and Provoked on CD because reasons?

To say nothing about how this system works with Tank swaps? Who's going to get aggro? What happens if both tanks are simply spamming Provoke on CD to generate "Floors"? How will the actual basics of what enmity is supposed to do actually function? Or will this literally be just another completely unrelated mechanic while enmity continues to work as current and be a non-factor?

[Reynhart]

But, somehow, swapping to that DPS combo over the enmity combo won't cause you to generate such a low amount of enmity that you start to lose some of your lead... Which of course wouldn't then mean you just spammed DPS combos 24/7 and Provoked on CD because reasons?

The lead is mainly counted in Floors. If you don't have enough time to finish a floor before using Provoke, the enmity you'd have gained by your enmity combo is wasted. If, during that time, one of the DPS gain one Floor, you just can't do anything about it, since he would have gained that Floor anyway.
As for spamming Provoke on CD, is also depend on the rest of the toolkit. Of course, if enmity becomes a proper mechanic, we can expect tanks to have several skills to manage it. Also, if Provoke became available when you're on the verge of gaining a Floor, you'd obviously delay it after you've gained that floor to gain another one right away. Exactly like DRG wouldn't use Life Surge if the next weapon skill is True Thrust.

To say nothing about how this system works with Tank swaps? Who's going to get aggro? What happens if both tanks are simply spamming Provoke on CD to generate "Floors"?

It's not always strategic for the OT to gain too much floors, since it would only prevent him from gaining the full buff. As for tank swaps, Shirk would already help a lot and would basically transfer floors to someone else. You could also have skills that spend floors for other uses, to purposefully reduce your enmity, and let someone go above you. But you'd probably would have to do some stuff to facilitate the swap instead of simply letting the other Provoke. On a sidenote, I personally think that if so much fight require a tank swap, it's also because that's one of the only mechanics related to enmity.

Or will this literally be just another completely unrelated mechanic while enmity continues to work as current and be a non-factor?

Considering that the basic effect of enmity is "who's attacked", and that the target would still be the one with the highest floor, this would still be counted as "enmity".

[Jandor]

It's one of those things isn't it, everyone says enmity isn't an issue at all, often leaving out the so long as everyone does their bit to manage it factor.

Well, yeah, so long as everyone is managing everything correctly HP isn't an issue either, neither are enrage timers, or any other mechanic for that matter.

The difficulty in this game comes from harder encounters requiring you to play closer and closer to perfect, enmity is admittedly a rather low hurdle to clear on your way to perfect play, but games do benefit from having some easy hurdles to clear at the start.

[Subrias]

Enmity was never an issue, threat is easy to hold, just stay in tank stance and gg. The problem comes in the form of having to also push dps for raid encounters and the stances were just clunky at best. The reason it still exists is because you still have to have tank swaps. I can't think of any currently in ffxiv, but there are some bosses in wow who are immune to taunt and the tanks actually have to find another way to deal with the tank swaps.

[Subrias]

So as I'm going over the various changes to the tank role it's starting to feel like there's really no point in enmity even existing any more. If a tank can just sit there in the tanking stance with no penalty and there's no longer enmity-building combos or enmity-mitigation abilities-- Diversion, Smoke Screen, and so on-- why even have the mechanic at all?

Whether or not it was intentional, it seems like enmity has been set up to more or less handle itself in this expansion. If, hypothetically, Paladins had a trait that caused Shield Lob or Total Eclipse to make their current target automatically attack them, or Provoke was changed to something like, "Forces the target to attack you", would that be functionally any different than how things are shaping up to be at current?

I've always been of the opinion that threat management was a key component of the tanking experience and these changes essentially remove that by automating the process and making it effortless.

I'm concerned that it's not only will this not feel like tanking any more and be like playing another DPS class except you have to use damage mitigation cooldowns sometimes, but also that this will have the added effect of homogenizing the tank jobs to the point where the things that made those classes unique and valuable in different circumstances will be gone.

Paladin used to have the edge in off-tanking because of Divine Veil, Cover, Passage of Arms and Intervention. Now every tank will have a single-target and AoE mitigation ability and Cover has been nerfed back to it's pre-20% days. Warrior used to have the early-fight enmity gain potential, the best HP, and the top damage. Now there's no damage penalty on tank stances, Defiance is gone and all tanks have, allegedly, been tuned to the same damage potential.

If you are going to streamline a mechanic to the point of automation what's the point in that mechanic still existing?

Maybe paladins don't want to offtank? But were forced infinite because of their kit, now anyone can be mt or ot. Before the arguemen t of so play warrior if you want to be mt gets thrown in... I dislike warrior play style. Drk is ok, but I've always been a tank naturalist in games.. sword and board just feels aesthetically right.

[Kaedan]

Because you still need the tank to keep the mobs from killing your dps and healers....