Opinions: Should tanks work for aggro?

[Gawbles]

Probably in the minority, but from my view, yes, tanks should have to concern themselves with enmity beyond just turning on tank stance. Going to bury myself into an even further minority opinion and say that outside of Provoke, which could have had a equivalent version with a different name and animation for each tank, and PLD's block not working on magic attacks - that I liked everything way better about how each tank played in Heavensward versus now. Also liked that DPS had enmity reduction skills and Ninja's could redirect extra enmity to help the tank, giving everybody a little extra purpose. It was a group effort to be able to have your tank turn off the defensive stance and DPS a bit more and that appealed to me for some reason. Bascially, HW Dark Knight and tanking was more fun to me: cross class skills, enmity combo, stances and all.

[Lyth]

MMO players tend to fixate too much on how "complex" their rotation is. So you can type out the lyrics to "Mary has a little lamb" while doing the usual memorised raid DDR. I'm so proud of you. But how is the game challenging your ability to adapt and react?

Tanking is about controlling space. You deny your opponents good positioning, and give your team the positional advantage. In PvP games, this is usually because the space around the tank is dangerous. Perhaps they can drag you over and stunlock you into oblivion. Perhaps walking past the tank to the squishies gives them attacks of opportunity. Or perhaps it's simpler, in that they actually present a genuine, credible, physical melee range threat. One does not simply walk into range of Reinhardt's hammer.

So why does enmity exist in MMOs? It exists because of melee dps. If your tank does damage on par with dps players, then you just replace them with tanks. Enmity is just a fictional multiplier that justifies why tanks keep the boss' attention while doing less damage than 'real' dps players.

The problem isn't enmity, though. It's the lack of consequences. If your tank dies or dps pull ahead of you, it doesn't really matter too much. The mobs do not mash your team into paste these days, as they would have back in the days of ARR and T13. Your dps can tank. You're actually not all that important.

This was done to make tanking friendly to new players. But the people who do choose to be career tanks specifically do so because they want to differentiate themselves from everyone else. So if you decrease the risk of tanking poorly, you drive away the select few that could be bothered to take it up in the first place.

Enmity is not the problem with tanking. Do you know what is? That tanking just doesn't matter anymore.

[Spartan_Aoues]

MMO players tend to fixate too much on how "complex" their rotation is. So you can type out the lyrics to "Mary has a little lamb" while doing the usual memorised raid DDR. I'm so proud of you. But how is the game challenging your ability to adapt and react?

Tanking is about controlling space. You deny your opponents good positioning, and give your team the positional advantage. In PvP games, this is usually because the space around the tank is dangerous. Perhaps they can drag you over and stunlock you into oblivion. Perhaps walking past the tank to the squishies gives them attacks of opportunity. Or perhaps it's simpler, in that they actually present a genuine, credible, physical melee range threat. One does not simply walk into range of Reinhardt's hammer.

So why does enmity exist in MMOs? It exists because of melee dps. If your tank does damage on par with dps players, then you just replace them with tanks. Enmity is just a fictional multiplier that justifies why tanks keep the boss' attention while doing less damage than 'real' dps players.

The problem isn't enmity, though. It's the lack of consequences. If your tank dies or dps pull ahead of you, it doesn't really matter too much. The mobs do not mash your team into paste these days, as they would have back in the days of ARR and T13. Your dps can tank. You're actually not all that important.

This was done to make tanking friendly to new players. But the people who do choose to be career tanks specifically do so because they want to differentiate themselves from everyone else. So if you decrease the risk of tanking poorly, you drive away the select few that could be bothered to take it up in the first place.

Enmity is not the problem with tanking. Do you know what is? That tanking just doesn't matter anymore.

dam dood, hit me in the feels

[Spartan_Aoues]

Probably in the minority, but from my view, yes, tanks should have to concern themselves with enmity beyond just turning on tank stance. Going to bury myself into an even further minority opinion and say that outside of Provoke, which could have had a equivalent version with a different name and animation for each tank, and PLD's block not working on magic attacks - that I liked everything way better about how each tank played in Heavensward versus now. Also liked that DPS had enmity reduction skills and Ninja's could redirect extra enmity to help the tank, giving everybody a little extra purpose. It was a group effort to be able to have your tank turn off the defensive stance and DPS a bit more and that appealed to me for some reason. Bascially, HW Dark Knight and tanking was more fun to me: cross class skills, enmity combo, stances and all.

i think we share alot of opinions. but how would you balance it? if u where yoshi?

[Gawbles]

As glad-handing as it sounds, it's nice to hear from at least one person who has a similar view on tanks.

To answer: If I were Yoshi, I wouldn't worry too much about balancing between the tanks (outside of the PLD being able to block magic change and baseline provokes for each tank job) and just revert game play completely back to Heavensward and find a way to get Gunbreaker to somehow fit it within HW's style of tanking - maybe they can be the highest damage burst combo yet most vulnerable tank of the pack for the min-max people to use. In the end, if any party composition can clear the boss, they can clear the boss - let the min-max groups have their perfect, speed clearing compositions and the rest of the savage statics can earn their clears from learning the fight and doing well enough. That's balance enough... to me, any way.

(Rant) It's not likely to ever return, but I just prefer the HW version of how a job feels to play, with its advantages and disadvantages was better than the Shadowbringers version of the tanking and healing jobs being on a pretty equal playing field. Can understand why Yoshi & co. did the homogenization, just prefer the old way more: the tanks felt more unique among themselves and it seemed balanced enough where you didn't need to bench one in raids. In the end, it'd be nice to have fun playing a unique job (for me, it's HW version of Dark Knight) in all content and be able to try savage fights with the awesome people of my static, that's all.

[Canadane]

I think everyone should work for enmity.
Stormblood had it right, where tanks could generate it easily but at a cost, so everyone pitched in with their enmity reducers to help boost the tanks dps output by keeping them out of tank stance.

It was really fun, teamwork oriented, and meant something.

[DRKoftheAzure]

I know that back in Stormblood SAM, BLM, and MNK you NEEDED a NIN to make sure they weren't ripping threat from the tank(s) due to certain mechanics of abilities just clashing with job or role identity, sometimes both kinda like how we see with some tanks mechanics just clashing with either the job or role identity, and your job had a base class then the job identity and role identity needed to be integrated into the base class identity, from basically an educated guess.

Heavensward did do a good job on the DRK identity,my favorite was using Dark Arts on Dark Passenger and Dark Dance for evasion tanking and with Darkside aura just basically enabling attacks to go through without any damage to you but you can hurt your enemies (TL;DR version of this explanation is Obito Uchiha's Kamui Mangekyo Sharingan ability, and I just showed how much of a weeb I am.) and the Bloodbath cross-class skill for lifesteal tanking, and how cool animations for GCD stuff before Bloodspiller spam.

And sometimes, some questions just do not have a simple "yes or no" answer to, the question the thread is proposing also made some valid points that some people(not all) can agree on.

My answer is this; PLD and GNB should just have the toggle, but DRK and WAR need to work for their enmity, but still need to have the toggle in case of BLM, SAM, or MNK, if they do bring back enmity management back for everyone, and they should make enmity combos be as DPS neutral as possible, have a well designed burst mechanic that isn't Fell Cleave spam/Bloodspiller+Edge of Darkness/Shadow spam(can only get away with that lazy design if your class/job is a pure caster or PLD with the Holy Spirit spam though I think the devs are wanting to move away from that kind of spam in general).

[Shurrikhan]

Yes, tanks should work for aggro, but not in the ways previously done. All it formerly amounted to was potency sacrifice and bloat skills (Diversion, especially) being used on cooldown. All that literally... did... not... matter. (It was at best a pretense the streamlining removal of which helped placate us while the devs took away an increasing number of actually significant features of tank play.)

The sad thing is anything more in regards to threat management would rely on having more than the barest of mob AI, which this game doesn't seem to have even the faintest interest in. But, there's still quite a few other ways to empower tanks: impactful positioning, more frequent (but unforced) swaps, sacrifices (beyond just potency for enmity), active mitigation, etc., etc.

[Vyrerus]

They need to spice up tanking in some regard. As it is now, there is no real way to show good tanking skill. Cooldown management is fairly braindead, because the fight tells you when you need them(and there's a disappointly low and weak amount of tank busters in Shadowbringers). DPS rotations on tanks isn't really any less complex than DPS rotations, but there are less skills devoted to DPS, because otherwise they'd deal just as much damage as DPS, making DPS irrelevant outside of LB.

I'd prefer they spice tanking back up by making enmity management relevant again, but they won't.

They've opted to go down the other truth of Tanking, and that is the fact that Tanking involves being present and willing to tank. That's pretty much what turning on the tank stance now means. It's good from the perspective that it places the responsibility of tanking directly and only in the Tanks' hands, but it's bad from the perspective of it removed an entire facet of being good at the job. It also removed another consideration from group wide optimization.

We can't go back to Stormblood's system, because that made the enmity management more a group feat, and made tanks seem like prissy divas(most high end tanks are, anyway). That takes responsibility out of the tanks' hands for their own role. In my opinion we should limit the tanks' ability to generate excess enmity, such that enmity stances are temporary buffs. That would take even more skill, depending, because hate would largely depend on damage dealt, and then whether or not the tank actually learnt the fight, having to save their enmity bursts for adds or not use it before the boss goes untargetable. It'd make swaps mildly more interesting too, especially if fights were designed in ways that limited your ability to Stance > Provoke > Hit.

[Argyle_Darkheart]

No.

Enmity generation in the past was little more than an annoyance that also happened to cause job balance issues.

When you look at tank's core gameplay loop, they're essentially a glorified melee DPS. With that in mind, enmity generation at its best was thoughtless, but at its worst it actually stood in opposition to tank's core gameplay loop. That is, tanks would sacrifice as little DPS as possible for as little enmity as they need. If you thought this was fun or particularly interesting, then I don't know what to tell you.

Currently, tanks are too easy/simple. I won't contest that point, but enmity generation/management isn't the answer to this issue.