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.