Can we please get aggro management back?

[MariaArvana]

Third choice would have been to separate the tanks based on playstyle. Make at least 1 tank have to work for its enmity, while the rest got it for free. But in return, one of the other tanks have to work for its mitigation (with enmity/DPS being free) and the other having to work for its DPS (and enmity/mitigation being free) which gives GNB a nice "in the middle jack of all trades" identity, that it sorta already is trying to be now.

Now if a tank doesnt want to deal with enmity, they dont have to. For the players who do enjoy controlling it, they have a tank for that. (Plus I miss having enmity control on my healer/DPS, in case im stuck with a bad tank)

There'd be a few glaring flaws with such a thing:

1) You'd have people that love the 1 tank that has to work for enmity complain about why it has to work for it when the other three don't.
2) The single tank that'd have to work for enmity would never have to work with it in 8-man content, as all you'd have to do is let any other tank build enmity, then have the hard tank voke. Done, their one weakness gone.
3) Fight design would be a mess. Do you balance mitigation around the tank who has the hardest time with it, thus causing the other three to utterly trivialize any mitigation requirements of the encounter? (I.E - Ultimates/savage floors), or do you design it around the tanks who have the easiest time with it, making it extremely difficult for the bad mitigation tank to keep up? Likewise, how do you balance dps? balance it around the tank that has to work for its dps + the tank that has to work for its enmity and thus give a huge advantage to any group that runs the other two tanks that have no issues outputting their full dps?

If they're going to adopt a system for tanks, it's gotta be all or nothing for all of them, or it just creates a whole nightmarish mess of balancing issues, compared to the very strong balance the tanks already have at the current moment. Considering that with SHB its clear they wanted to reduce the barrier of entry for newer tanks by simplifying aggro in response to how tanking ended up in SB, they made the right call. I've had a couple friends who were scared of tanking in SB actually try it this expansion and loving it due to a lot of weight being lifted off their shoulders from having to not worry (too much) about enmity.

[Claire_Pendragon]

There'd be a few glaring flaws with such a thing:

1) You'd have people that love the 1 tank that has to work for enmity complain about why it has to work for it when the other three don't.
2) The single tank that'd have to work for enmity would never have to work with it in 8-man content, as all you'd have to do is let any other tank build enmity, then have the hard tank voke. Done, their one weakness gone.
3) Fight design would be a mess. Do you balance mitigation around the tank who has the hardest time with it, thus causing the other three to utterly trivialize any mitigation requirements of the encounter? (I.E - Ultimates/savage floors), or do you design it around the tanks who have the easiest time with it, making it extremely difficult for the bad mitigation tank to keep up? Likewise, how do you balance dps? balance it around the tank that has to work for its dps + the tank that has to work for its enmity and thus give a huge advantage to any group that runs the other two tanks that have no issues outputting their full dps?

If they're going to adopt a system for tanks, it's gotta be all or nothing for all of them, or it just creates a whole nightmarish mess of balancing issues, compared to the very strong balance the tanks already have at the current moment. Considering that with SHB its clear they wanted to reduce the barrier of entry for newer tanks by simplifying aggro in response to how tanking ended up in SB, they made the right call. I've had a couple friends who were scared of tanking in SB actually try it this expansion and loving it due to a lot of weight being lifted off their shoulders from having to not worry (too much) about enmity.

1) No problem with that, they can pick a different tank, which is why the system is designed that way ^^; (Essentially 3 of the tanks would be no different than they are now)
2) Nothing wrong with that, that would be perfect teamwork by my book... but.. based on how you phrased this...
3) I think you misunderstand what I mean by "Difficult" I dont mean its inferior in ability. Like I dont mean a tank who only uses rampart, and no other mitigation. I mean stuff closer to how some jobs have longer/more complex rotations, vs those with simplistic rotations. (PLD vs DRK) Raw intuition has no prerequisites to use, but TBN requires holding onto MP, all the while the DRK is also trying to pump out that MP for DPS. (IMO these are pretty bare bones basic comparisons to what im suggesting) No one is saying DRK is struggling to handle tank busters, if anything, quite the opposite. No one is saying PLD is struggling to do good enough DPS because of its rotation. If these classes suffer from mitigation/DPS its from a completely different type of design. But due to how tanking is now designed in this game, I'd have to say the only example I could think of, is to make an oGCD that puts up the tank stance. But unlike others, it has a time limit, like 30 seconds.
but the oGCD is still on CD for... idk, 2mins? (maybe 1, im not sure) And to extend it requires another action apart of thier rotation. (But it cant be at the cost of DPS, or it has to refund it, just like how TBN refunds lost DPS) In short, its playstyle, not performance. Oldschool tanks had to suffer DPS loss for enmity control, this would need to avoid DPS loss, just as mitigation cant be at the cost of DPS either. (I'd go on about more details, such as the focus of enmity control, rather than just having to work for it.)

From a design perspective its no different than maintaining a dps buff, that has slightly different flavor. In this case, we also add mitigation or enmity flavor.
I think the current tank system is absolutely perfect for a tank who focuses primarily on DPS. (Mostly for PLD, being the most "complex" out of the 4, and GNB feels like a middle ground to an extent) I think DRK comes close to the tank who has to focus more on mitigation.
In the end, I'm glad they finally incorporated this style of tanking, as I've been saying its possible to do, despite how many people opposed it. But at the same time, I didnt want them to throw away enmity for all tanks either.

[MariaArvana]

snip

1) Not everyone wants to 'pick a different tank.' believe it or not, people like certain jobs thematically or rotation wise, and throughout this game's history, there's been plenty of threads/rants/vents about people's job they love getting shafted hard. (PLD in HW, DRK in SB, MNK and to lesser extent RDM essentially 4ever, etc.) Arbitrarily making the tank they love to play harder to play than the others enmity wise is just going to annoy many people who love the job while tickinling the itch of a potential minority. The current tank setup allows all 4 tanks to effectively do their job on all fronts, with minor variances that only come in to play in the highest of end content, compared to your theoretical setup where they'd have major variations present in all content, casual or hardcore.

2) The purpose of your setup was to make certain tanks stronger in certain aspects while weakening them in others. I was simply pointing out a quick flaw that makes the 'enmity weak tank' basically have zero weakness compared to the other 3, which is a balancing issue. A tank that has a harder rotation can't fix his damage by hitting a single button, neither can a tank that generates resources needed for mitigation slower can speed it up by hitting one button, whereas provoke would knock out the enmity weak tank's issue, leaving it with only its strengths. WAR from 2.1-5.0 has historically shown that when your job has all the strengths with basically none of the weaknesses or almost non-issue weaknesses, it becomes the desired tank and inevitably forces another tank onto the bench. (PLD in HW, DRK to a lesser extent in SB). With how close in balance the tanks currently are, I'd rather not they invest in a system that could easily re-create such days.

3) The Inner Release debate in SB is proof enough that people aren't very fond of one job having to execute tons of weaving/optimizations in order to achieve its max dps threshold (SB DRK), vs a job that can unga bunga spam and deal just as much, if not more damage for basically zero effort (WAR). Rotation complexity should be pretty standardized across all tanks which honestly, is something they still need to work on a bit.


Aggro management by itself is intrinsically boring, it's just a simple binary yes/no system, and for any skilled tank during SB, it basically didn't exist due to how absurdly broken WAR was at generating it, combined with shirk use. Focus should shift away from aggro and more towards fun aggro-based mechanics for the tanks to deal with, like:

-the aggro drops in Neo-Exdeath
-more boss mechanics that target #2 hate instead of #1, making control of the fight who's MT/OT at certain times more important than it is currently.
-a phase where aggro gets dropped and then inverted, so the tanks want to drop tank stance to stay at #7 & #8 to keep aggro
-boss randomly swaps #1 & #2 hate through the fight right before certain mechanics/tank busters, placing more emphasis on pre-emptive planning mitigation & positioning.

The thing about your OGCD stance idea is that it inherently limits fight design by its nature, or becomes irrelevant. What if they wanted to design a boss that constant auto'd #1 -2 in hate throughout the fight forcing both tanks to pop their ogcd at the beginning, but quickly into a fight, they wanted to spawn an add around the time after the OGCD wears off? And if you can refresh it by using stuff, then how would it be designed to be refreshed without making it completely irrelevant and permanently up (DRK' darkside as an example), without it also being a dps loss? If you make the refresh too forgiving, then it might as well have never existed, and if you make it too harsh, you just run into the same situation as SB where bad tanks were constantly losing aggro, and is just an extra thing they had to keep up and failure to do so gets the healer/dps eaten alive and having the tank get yelled at, potentially scaring them off the role and completely defeating the purpose Square intended with making tanking easier? It's a much more complex solution with tons of variables that would require much more dev time to balance than the eloquently simple solution they have now.

Also, a tank stance OGCD would be a logistical nightmare for dungeon groups. "Okay, lemme pop my tank stance and - oh, everything's dead in 25s, my stance fell off and can't refresh it, and now I can't gain aggro on the next pack due to the OGCD being on cd for another 1:30." At that point, the group either pulls and lets the dps/healers tank, or waits 1:30 for the tank to get his stance back. (oops)