Can we please get aggro management back?

[Saccharin]

MMO players don't seem to like aggro management in general. WoW also ended up doing the same thing with tank threat (enmity) back in 2012 because there were too many complaints from players who hated having to hold back on DPS until tanks had a sufficient threat lead.

Personally, I think aggro management should be a part of group play in MMOs but those of us who feel that way seem to be a small minority. I don't think it will ever return in a meaningful fashion.

It's to the point that MMO developers should probably stop designing around the holy trinity and just let whatever DPS is dealing the most damage become the main aggro target, enhancing toolkits with additional personal and support mitigation tools.

The problem WoW had/has was that dps players damage scaled much higher than tanks. The nature of the gear curve means it eventually gets to a place where one tier is a huge leap so if a player is 15 ilevels behind it caused them to loose aggro. No one wants to wait five minutes so a tank can gain enough threat to stave off your fun buttons.

Blizzard redefined tanks with what they called active mitigation - tanks had to do stuff other than keep threat to stay alive. It was a model blood DKs had used since they were introduced.

Personally I'm in the school of thought that tanks and healers should not do significant dps and if they have spare time then bosses need to be tuned better or do more, or more frequent damage.

The problem with abandoning the Trinity is that you get boring encounters. GW2 started out like that and has introduced it slightly.

Games without the trinity have weak boss damage and become roll out of danger games. That got really boring in GW2 base game; hopefully it's improved in recent ex pacs.

Besides, being a tank is more about knowing what you're doing and how to treat boss mechanics. In particular, knowing when to dodge an AoE and return while it's visual effects are going off (ability permitting!) so you dont move the boss and kill peoples' combos etc.

It's astonishing how many 'tanks' take the boss for a walks. Don't get me started on tanks that go to dps and take a bosses cleave to the group...

[SamRF]

I definitely much prefer more distinct roles than less. It makes for much more interesting game imo in which you can roleplay into a role archetype, much more immersive RPG experience. I even wish this game had a distinct "support" role from the start.

[SpeckledBurd]

I'm okay with it as long as Monk doesn't get the short end of the stick by having to spend its entire gauge on an aggro cut when everybody else's aggro cut is basically free.

[Shizue]

Tank stances just seem silly. I don't mind the idea of having a few threat generation abilities/combos and more DPS-oriented combos but skill bloat is already a big issue. Most FFXIV players have been historically too lazy to actually pay attention to which target a tank focuses on, use threat mitigation abilities and prioritize/focus down targets. I would really enjoy more complexity brought in by the way of CC and elemental resistance/weakness, skillchains/magic bursts like FFXI, combo effects like GW2, etc.

There's a lot of options to add depth and complexity but it seems the majority of players are just fine with "pull all the things and AoE" over and over until they reach a boss and memorize patterns. Dungeons and raids overall are just too easy, IMO.

Savage content isn't too hard but for me personally it's troublesome trying to keep a regular group together on a scheduled basis as real life doesn't allow me or a lot of the folks I play with to game regularly.

[Limonia]

Pretty sure people used Selene for Fey Wind in an optimized raid environment and then swapped back over to the better faerie. Been awhile, though.

Yes, like you say, in an optimized raid environment. But if you did progression content with pugs, or even normal modes when they still were new, you'd meet so many healers that just heard somewhere how Selene was better for dps and thus didn't use Eos at all. Then they either used Succors where Whispering Dawn would have sufficed, or if you were unlucky, wouldn't help healing AT ALL. But maybe I've just met too many of those kinds of healers. The tanks who wanted to have large dps numbers and not caring for aggro because of that were the same.

That's why I'm glad that both aspects are gone from this game. Could they have handled it much better than just removing Selene and all aggro management? Of course. But at least what we got is something that makes the game much more fun for me since ShB.

[Fynlar]

No thanks. Tanks who were convinced they were DPS with blue icons, particularly Warriors, were just grating on the nerves. They don't need a resurgence.

When I ran into tanks like that I simply tried to kick them to leave the group. Seems odd to not want something because bad players will be bad. Should we really balance the game from the bottom up?

If I tried to kick every tank that was like this (assuming I even could, because I'm pretty sure vote dismiss has a cooldown), I wouldn't ever get anything done on healer or DPS, except low level dungeons that don't even really need a tank.

[Videra]

No thanks. Tanks who were convinced they were DPS with blue icons, particularly Warriors, were just grating on the nerves. They don't need a resurgence.

It really doesn't help that going into Deliverance/Sword Oath was objectively the better way to play. Higher DPS ended fights faster, end of story. And if you were playing with remotely competent human beings, threat was a non-issue. Plus, by pushing damage, you also pushed aggro generation.

[Fynlar]

It really doesn't help that going into Deliverance/Sword Oath was objectively the better way to play. Higher DPS ended fights faster, end of story. And if you were playing with remotely competent human beings, threat was a non-issue. Plus, by pushing damage, you also pushed aggro generation.

You can say whatever you like about its efficiency, but the fact of the matter is I was getting tired of ripping hate (and often dying from it, which does the opposite of making fights go faster) from tanks who did not seem to realize (or care) that they should actually be, you know, tanking.

After enough instances of this, you kind of get the impression that most of them are just looking to play "DPS" but with the fast "tank" queue times. Would you tolerate healers who seemed to care more about throwing out Holy or whatever than they did about actually doing their job?

[Videra]

You can say whatever you like about its efficiency, but the fact of the matter is I was getting tired of ripping hate (and often dying from it, which does the opposite of making fights go faster) from tanks who did not seem to realize (or care) that they should actually be, you know, tanking.

After enough instances of this, you kind of get the impression that most of them are just looking to play "DPS" but with the fast "tank" queue times. Would you tolerate healers who seemed to care more about throwing out Holy or whatever than they did about actually doing their job?

I don't know what to tell you other than you had shit tanks or weren't pressing quelling strikes.

God that's not a name I've typed in a long time.

As for healers DPSing, uh - yeah. Like 80% of your GCDs in everything but ultimate or Floor 3 savage fights are probably gonna be Broil 3. This is because of how predictable the damage in-take in FFXIV is, and how they've done nothing but provide us healers with OGCD healing tools that are obscenely powerful.

Addendum: They also took away a lot of DPS skills and gameplay complexity from healers because why not?

[Ultimatecalibur]

It really doesn't help that going into Deliverance/Sword Oath was objectively the better way to play. Higher DPS ended fights faster, end of story. And if you were playing with remotely competent human beings, threat was a non-issue. Plus, by pushing damage, you also pushed aggro generation.

Part of that was Tanks having ways of boosting dps and/or enmity generation to the point that enmity combos and tank stances were unneeded.

For example, during HW the following roughly happened: A tank outside of stances did 1000 dps. In tank stance they would do 800 dps and this dps would generate 1600 enmity, in dps stance tanks did 1100 dps, and dps jobs were tuned to deal ~1500 dps. Now lets say the tanks had a way to increase their base dps by 25% (*cough* Str Accessories *cough*) suddenly tanks are doing 1000 damage for 2000 enmity in tank stance and were doing ~1375 dps in dps stance. You now had tanks that could nearly keep up with dps and if given a good enough head start could hold enmity through a 10 min fight while having nearly 100% dps stance uptime.

StB was a caused by a theoretically enmity neutral tank swap tool (Shirk) combing with other tank swap tools (Provoke and Ultimatum) to create a combo that could increase the MTs enmity to 156% and the OT's enmity to 93.75% the MT's starting enmity every 2 minutes.