An idea to add/return some identity and complexity to tanks

[Iscah]

It doesn't really make sense from a concept point of view. You build enmity by hitting the enemy and getting their attention. This proposal would involve spending enmity to hit the enemy even harder and getting their attention even more.

[waterboytkd]

I think it's a neat idea, but ultimately, it would probably be unneeded. If implemented well, the way I'd see it is tanks would have 2 different rotations: tanking and offtanking (which would just be dps). The tanking rotation would incorporate the enmity spenders such that you would never actually lose enmity. And offtanking (dps) rotation would simply max out dps, enmity be damned. The idea of "are you good enough to ride the enmity line" would be solved almost instantly by the community with an optimized rotation, I would guess. It would, I suppose, raise the minimum skill required to tank effectively, though.

I could see this idea being really good, though, if they ever moved away from the Trinity model, turning all classes into "role and dps", where role is tank, healer, or ??? (buffer/debuffer maybe?).

[Iscah]

I think it's a neat idea, but ultimately, it would probably be unneeded. If implemented well, the way I'd see it is tanks would have 2 different rotations: tanking and offtanking (which would just be dps). The tanking rotation would incorporate the enmity spenders such that you would never actually lose enmity. And offtanking (dps) rotation would simply max out dps, enmity be damned. The idea of "are you good enough to ride the enmity line" would be solved almost instantly by the community with an optimized rotation, I would guess. It would, I suppose, raise the minimum skill required to tank effectively, though.

That is prettymuch back to where tanks were before. One enmity-raising combo, one higher-DPS combo, spend as much time as you can doing the higher DPS.

[Bravely_Default]

I still think that taking damage should lower the enemies emmity towards you, would make utilizing all your damage smoothing tools important in fights and could be a means to make a tank have to focus on keeping emmity without it coming down to party aggro management. aka "tank use your cooldowns please you are losing your aggro so fast!" heck they could make the tanks damage reduction cooldowns even include effects like "lose 50% less emmity for the duration of this skill" to go together with this can even make boss tankbusters naturally shave away more of that emmity when the tank gets hit by it. (angry guy punches thing making him angry and now he is focusing on other things) obviously provoke would either get a cooldown increase or it would just be an "aggro swap" with whoever the bosses current target is. honestly there is so much they could've done instead of just pretty much scrapping down the aggro system to bare bones like they did

[Snek]

My biggest problem with this suggestion at the moment is flavor. What's the the thematic reason that doing those actions makes you lose aggro? How would you explain it lore wise? With the aggro gaining actions we used to have, you can kind of make sense of it that they're actions that might provoke enemies in a certain way, making them aggro to you more but how would you make sense of a DPS ability that makes you lose aggro? You instill fear or something to the enemy? It'd be a little weird but probably doable, just personally cant make sense of it yet because they are the actions that do most DPS.

I do agree that the enmity burning it doesn't make sense in that way. I'm not saying it's a perfect idea, but I think it is a unique enough mechanically and one that can be iterated upon uniquely enough to significantly distinguish the tanks and make them very varied in how they balance the parties enmity. I'm also sure it can be written in to make sense lorewise (you're no longer doing taunting-like maneuvers to maintain the bosses interest, and he's just noticed his rear-end is being sliced in two by a much squishier samurai).

Because no game does this for a reason. They either have the raid group manage thier hate, or have the tanks be so far ahead on hate its not an issue. One of the most undesirable aspects of tanking would be managing hate when before managing it with aggro combos actually got IN THE WAY of how the jobs would flow and were counterproductive (IE not gaining any MP as a DRK, or being a beast guage generation loss as a WAR). Tanks would clamour/demand for the return of hate management skills for other jobs again, and I would be doing the sme with the system you have brought forward. Hate management is the one part of tanking that is never/has never been 'fun' for anyone to deal with. It's an annoyance.

But why would you want to build an extreme amount of enmity and lower your damage instead of keeping it as low as you can to maximize your damage? The idea here is to make the management not annoying but a mechanic that's integral to the job. The entire job can have skills around managing enmity (such as oGCD skills, and GCD skills that grant you a huge amount of enmity thus actually being a DPS plus to use). Instead of having it as an annoying extra GCD combo, something I think should be avoided.

For example: Think of healers. You can keep HPs full all the time and overheal like crazy, or heal just when necessary to make sure nobody dies to damage/tankbusters/etc. This way you maximize your damage output and avoid using GCD heals. This is the idea I'm trying to pull into tanks. Sure you can build enmity into the sky like you can now, but then you're going far overboard and not maximizing your damage output as you would if you floated just above the next persons enmity. If anyone who isn't a tank gets an enmity control tool it should be hold a serious downside. Like vercure. It's something you never want to need to use, but can in an emergency.

Clarification on what seems counterproductive: DRK gains the same enmity it does not via its normal combo (and the mana from blood weapon/syphon strike). Since you gain a lot more aggro a lot quicker than any DPS, you cast Dark Arts to lower your enmity but refresh your mana on demand, meaning if you do a lot of damage and try to maximize your enmity generation, you get more mana and do more damage. Since you have an oGCD skill that gives you a huge flood of mana but sets your enmity just 1 above the next person in the list, you want to make your enmity as low as possible before casting it to maximize how many Dark Arts you got off, thus maximizing your mana gained. A mana management system tied into their enmity management system. Sorta the same idea for WAR except the idea is a "gain as much enmity as humanly possible in 80 seconds then explode for an insane amount of damage". Kinda like it is now but more interactive. Build around the mechanic.

Tanks should absolutely not have actions that spend enmity in exchange for increased damage. The rest of us have no enmity management actions anymore. Even back when we did have enmity management actions, I could use Diversion and Dreaming on cooldown and still steal aggro five minutes into a raid/trial. I shouldn't have to play my job worse in order to avoid getting killed, and that's what I'll have to do if tanks get actions to spend their enmity in exchange for more damage.

If you can rip aggro off tanks now they're very much not in tank stance or not hitting the enemy at all. The idea is that tanks have sorta the same aggro generation as they do now (maybe a tiny bit less), but have spenders. Thus if you, at any point, rip aggro off a tank it means they're playing very poorly and not doing their job. That scenario would be the equivalent of having a healer who refuses to heal nor raise anyone in a dungeon. Think glare only healers. Sure we'd have more terrible tanks, but we'd also have some insanely good tanks and they'd have unique methods to maintain their job mechanic.

[Mikey_R]

Not going to lie, this seems not well thought out. It might seem like a good idea at first, but take it to the wider spectrum of how you manage everything and it falls apart completely.

The first thing I will address is the enmity value itself. You would need a dynamic gauge that told you what your enmity is and at the very least how far behind the second in the list is. This will cause a fluctuating gauge that changes constantly, which makes it difficult to plan ahead, it makes it difficult to know when you should use something and when not to. There is a reason monks hate the RNG on chakra stacks, it just is not consistent.

Next is gearing. What you suggest is a lower geared tank has to use more enmity tools to keep hate over higher geared DPS. So the tank is going to do less damage just because they might not have the highest gear for the dungeon, but to top it off, since they have to use more enmity skills to keep the hate, they will do even less damage. You essentially punish the player for not being a high ilevel, despite the fact they might be running the dungeon to get to the higher ilevels. Add to that that the higher DPS might also have to slow down their DPS so that they don't out enmity the tank, causing even slower runs. With the current system, these issues are non existent. You are not punished just because the tank happens to have a lower gear ilevel.

Next is skills and how they manipulate enmity. How do you determine what each one costs in terms of enmity, how do you manage how much you gain from a skill. If you make enmity generation proportional to damage, then better geared tanks will generate more enmity and by extension, have more enmity to work with. This then ties into what do the enmity skills cost? Make it a static value based on level or change it based on gear? But, changing it based on gear or even level is not going to be fun. Having to potentially rethink how you do a fight just because you changed a piece of gear won't be fun. There is a reason they normalised MP across all levels after all.

then, as an addition to the above, how do you deal with crits and direct hits? Do they give more enmity, or are they ignored. Again, noone like RNG on the gauge, it makes things too messy to plan out, plus, the same would be true for the DPS. When they crit/direct hit, you will suddenly lose a chunk of your enmity lead. This is just a messy situation. Even if you ignore crits and direct hits, just individual potencies on DPS abilities will change how the fights go. Dropping your enmity and then having a summoner suddenly use a 650 potency Revelation from Demi Phoenix, or a BLM using a 380 (before AF3) Despair and then an insta cast 750 Xenoglossy straight after. That would be a nightmare depending on where you are in your rotation and it is something that is completely out of your control and you cannot plan for. You should not be expected to keep track of where a DPS is in their rotation just so you can keep track of your own enmity better.

I haven't even touched on your suggested abilities but as an example, Bloodbath. Why would you want to convert enmity to HP when your entire goal is to build enmity. Use it too much, you won't have enough for your fell cleave spam and you could even lose your lead in the process. 15 seconds is a long time in your system for someone to not be building enmity.

Now, lets break down the points and try and find a system which isn't riddled with faults and failings. The long and short of it is this, you want a gauge that you increase with abilities and you can spend it on others. Now, with all the inconsistencies that come with having it tied to damage and gear, lets normalise that and base it on potency. But this can still come with issues of massive DPS bursts happening at the wrong time and you losing it. The only way I can think to fix it would be to have the DPS not affect your gauge at all. This obviously goes against what was envisioned, but it is the only way I can try and get rid of DPS burst inconsistencies. So, what we are left with is a gauge that, at this point, might as well be separate from enmity, so we will normalise the gauge increase and cost. However, if you still want the tank to have to focus on enmity as well, then you can have your 2 combos to deal with it, an enmity one and a DPS one. Going on from that, it depends on how the 2 combos are balanced as to how they will be used. In the end, if the enmity combo, with all the enmity skills to go with it, produces less damage than that DPS combo, people will try and use it as little as possible, which defeats the point of building up enmity, however if the enmity combo does more, then what is the point of the DPS combo, even the OT would use the enmity combo because more damage, if they are equal then what's the point. The first case where DPS > Enmity is basically what SB tanking was, noone wants that. Enmity > DPS just cuts out the DPS combo from ever being used, so what's the point. Might as well have 1 combo that does it all.....Wait, that sounds familiar. 1 combo for damage, a gauge that fills and empties based on what the tank does and is independent of others, that sounds alot like the current system in a nutshell.

I am interested to see if you have any counter points, but there is a reason the system has ended up as it is, not only in FFXIV but I believe in other trinity MMOs as well (though I have no personal experience and this is based on what I have heard). The current system was inevitable and is the natural progression of following the logical steps based on the fact that the ability to do your job at a fundamental level should not be impacted by the rest of your team.