Can we please get aggro management back?

[Melichoir]

Thats the issue people have with the old system though. Its the job of the tank to hold and maintain threat, the old system just passed the job off to someone else. The current system problem is that it gives too much Enmity it needs to be reduced to a point that tank have to intergrate Enmity abilities in to their dps rotations. Rather then one and done with threat abilites like the old days and now, you would have to work to maintain enmity throughout a fight. While still mitigating damage and dps'ing.

Exactly. There should be nothing wrong with tanks having two damage combos - one that produces threat and one that produces raw damage. What mightve been a solution is to REMOVE tank stance all together and Jack up threat generation on things like Rage, Butchers, and HardSlash to the point that if you did nothing but those combos, you wouldnt lose threat, ever, and the balance then becomes how often you can use the Damage combo before you have to use that threat combo to stay top dog. Push comes to shove, you can have dps have 1 threat mitigator on a 3 minute CD so that incase you need to reset it, you can, but you shouldnt be incorporating it into your kit as a must do X. If not, just take it out entirely and have threat be a tank issue and work the numbers around that.

There are a lot of ideas I think that would work for threat management but they didnt do that. They went to press x to tank, and it works. It's just a bunk system.

[NanaWiloh]

Exactly. There should be nothing wrong with tanks having two damage combos - one that produces threat and one that produces raw damage. What mightve been a solution is to REMOVE tank stance all together and Jack up threat generation on things like Rage, Butchers, and HardSlash to the point that if you did nothing but those combos, you wouldnt lose threat, ever, and the balance then becomes how often you can use the Damage combo before you have to use that threat combo to stay top dog. Push comes to shove, you can have dps have 1 threat mitigator on a 3 minute CD so that incase you need to reset it, you can, but you shouldnt be incorporating it into your kit as a must do X. If not, just take it out entirely and have threat be a tank issue and work the numbers around that.

There are a lot of ideas I think that would work for threat management but they didnt do that. They went to press x to tank, and it works. It's just a bunk system.

They really could just remove Tank stances as they are just enmity boosters now. Put threat combo's back but balanced around actually being used more then once during a fight, encourage tanks to tab target and watch their enmity meters. I just started focusing on my dark knight and noticed I only had one button dedicated to enmity gen, I knew enmity was instant but one enmity gen button is just insult to injury.

[Cabalabob]

Personally I really liked aggro management in Stormblood. The tank dps meta had firmly taken hold and it became a lot more widely accepted that aggro management was a group activity and not just the tank’s problem. It gave something else for the other roles to do other than pump out the most damage and made it so there was something that could separate a good dps from a great dps.

I’d also like to point out that enmity tools are useful outside of normal group content. For example undersized duties without a tank where you didn’t want your WHM tanking everything or you needed to do a “tank swap” you could have a dps cut their enmity so the second dps could take over. The party pretty much has no control over enmity anymore other than making sure a tank has it.

[Fynlar]

In FFXI, yes, good tanks mattered -- but agro management was often less about the tank and more about the DPS riding the line between "elite" and "stupid." That was the balance, and that's what made it fun! A good tank allowed more DPS, but really agro management came down to DPS being smart and not just mashing buttons.

I'm not sure FFXI is the best example to cite with regard to tanking. I don't know how it is nowadays, but for the longest time, tanking in XI was complete garbage.

The hate ceiling was ridiculously low and ridiculously easy to hit, meaning it wasn't long before hate was ping-ponging no matter what a tank did to try to bring it back under control. In addition to this, almost everything that mattered had a means of hate reset anyway.

There's a reason why many groups in FFXI eschewed tanks and simply just followed the "whoever does the most damage is the 'tank'" mindset. There's also a reason it was often joked that the best way to control your aggro as a DPS was to let yourself get killed.

[Claire_Pendragon]

I'm not sure FFXI is the best example to cite with regard to tanking. I don't know how it is nowadays, but for the longest time, tanking in XI was complete garbage.

The hate ceiling was ridiculously low and ridiculously easy to hit, meaning it wasn't long before hate was ping-ponging no matter what a tank did to try to bring it back under control. In addition to this, almost everything that mattered had a means of hate reset anyway.

There's a reason why many groups in FFXI eschewed tanks and simply just followed the "whoever does the most damage is the 'tank'" mindset. There's also a reason it was often joked that the best way to control your aggro as a DPS was to let yourself get killed.

Are you talking about the newer version of XI, when they raised the cap past 75? I heard that was the case at Lv99, but at Lv75, that was definitely not the case. But thats what happened when someone else took over the game, and changed things.

[Fynlar]

Are you talking about the newer version of XI, when they raised the cap past 75? I heard that was the case at Lv99, but at Lv75, that was definitely not the case. But thats what happened when someone else took over the game, and changed things.

I'm talking about the entire time I played the game, both 75 and 99.

[Vyrerus]

Kind of funny that this devolved into a talk about Shirk vs. WAR being OP vs. Tanks in Stormblood(mostly) vs. Tanks now. I feel like so much emphasis was placed on WAR, that people forgot that there were parties without them. Parties without NIN too. HW gets mentioned in passing, but people seem to be equating it to Stormblood, for some reason, despite big differences.

I remember PLD having Royal Authority combo off of Savage Blade to keep PLD's hate high. The playerbase complained us out of that. Since there was no Shirk, once the OT caught up on enmity, management became a concern to keep the boss from swiveling. An even worse management time was PLD/DRK vs.WAR if the PLD/DRK needed to be the MT to use a CD, but WAR's damage combo was Butcher's Block in HW and unlike some are claiming, almost every WAR and their mom would not be caught dead doing Path unless there was damage coming soon that shields couldn't stop(See: Almost Never). It was a DPS loss, needed to spam that BB combo baby! DRK/PLD having to hold up against that was a nightmare. Swapping took more effort, because of stuff like this. You had to stance on, other tank stance into DPS if they weren't, and then voke while doing your hate combo to swap. Much more involved than, "Voke > Shirk." How did this change with NIN? Shadewalker for the initial burst so tank could go into DPS stance asap, and then a SW every other swap, maybe. Smoke Bomb on the WHM, almost exclusively.

HW also came with the first big tank nerf, when they reduced tank ATP to becoming 45% of STR+VIT, a tacit way for the devs to answer the, "STR Accessory tanks are bad." outcry from people not playing tank well. Cause I mean, it wasn't just STR accessories, it was also the 30 allocated stat points. You could put them into your VIT or into your STR or into your PIETY if you so chose, but STR made the most sense as a tank, for agro generation and damage until the 45% ATP nerf. All tanks literally lost 20~30% of their damage potential outright, and enmity generation took that blow to the chin too. People saying tanks did one combo in tank stance and stuff forget that a large portion of the playerbase was exercising VIT spec, and there was no way you were doing that in VIT spec. I can't remember if they addressed it in the next patch or not, but later on down the road they actually had to increase enmity generation across the board for all tanks. This happened again at the start of Stormblood, when they nerfed tank ATP again, by reverting them to STR, causing that dumb, "Use the HW i270 accessories." bull that a lot of people tried to pull. They had to buff up tank enmity then too.

They haven't had to touch tank enmity as it is now, because it's so disappointingly simple. I liked it at first, but now the more I play tank, the less involved with the game I feel. I've done more roulettes on DPS/Healer than at any other time in the game's history, and Healer doesn't feel all as fun as it used to in HW either.

[FF16Necromancer]

At the very least they should give aggro dumps back to jobs. There are cases where even a tank pulling in tank stance could lose hate to a DPS doing extremely high damage at the very beginning of a burst window... and sometimes they die to a tankbuster that's 6 seconds into the fight.