Flaws of the combat system

[Mikey_R]

I've heard about old aggro management, and I think it would lead to an interesting amount of depth that the game feels lacking in with the normal dungeon content.

But what depth can you effectively add to an enmity system? You either have hate, or you don't. The discussion on enmity has been talked about alot, especially once ShB released. I do not know how much you know about the old tank system, but to break it down.

All tanks had a tank stance, this reduced damage incoming and outgoing and increased enmity, they also had a DPS stance, which is just more damage and lacked the tank stance effects. They all also had a combo that done less damage than the other combos, however, each one had increased enmity generation.

Now, a tank in Tank Stance, just doing the DPS rotation (no enmity combos) could easily keep hate on any DPS (as long as they were appropriately geared), however, turn on DPS stance, and it is a different ball game. A tank could keep enmity without outside help if they were either overgeared compared to the DPS or they used the enmity combo. This should give you an idea how enmity generation was balanced.

However, with SB, all DPS gained Diversion/Lucid Dreaming, which either cut enmity generation in half or halved current enmity respectively. With the DPS/Healers now being able to reduce their enmity, tanks could now be in DPS stance and do their full DPS rotation, as long as the other members of the party co-operated. Obviously, in normal content, good luck with that.

This then creates a weird synergy. Using Paladin as an example, their MP management was so tight in SB that missing just 1 DPS combo would put them short on MP enough that they wouldn't get enough MP to use Holy Spirit 5 times in Requiescat. Similar things could be said about the other tanks, Warriors losing out on Beast Gauge and Dark Knight losing out on Blood and MP. So you have the situation that tanks do not want to be in tank stance (who wants to lose 20% of their damage for effectively no reason) and use their DPS combos and DPS who are potentially too lazy to dump enmity. This meant tanks could effectively be punished based on the DPS that they got, were they good, were they bad? Who knows. Even if the yare good, some DPS, like Monk, could easily rip aggro from a tank, despite using Diversion, reason being, Diversion was a 2 minute cooldown and Monk's burst was 90 seconds. This meant Diversion would only line up with the burst at the 6 minute mark again, by that point Monk is already acting as a tank.

Now, I know what you are thinking, why not just add in the extra benefits of the DPS combos to the enmity combos to prevent the lack of resources and to that I say, what is the point of having 2 combos that are basically the same and people will still aim for the highest DPS combo anyway. It might help keep tanks rotations flowing better, but it is verging more towards button bloat which could be used for other things.

We can then go onto how to balance it. Assume all members in a dungeon are of equal gear and equal skill. Now, since enmity is based on damage, do you balance it around the strong Black Mage, or the weaker Bard. Though, on the topic of Bard, it had insane burst damage right at the start of a fight, do you balance around that instead? With that out of the way, do you balance around Diversion or not? If you allow a tank to hold enmity in DPS stance without Diversion, then you essentially have no issues with enmity, you can out enmity the burst from the highest burst DPS, so you will have no issues throughout the fight. Balance around Diversion, then you need to have the tank in tank stance. So the tank is being punished because the DPS is being lazy. Balance it around being in tank stance, then you will have tanks complain that they have to stay in tank stance and gimp their damage for no reason (people will still get an enmity lead, then switch to DPS stance).

That is just the decisions for equally geared party members. What would happen if your tank is overgeared and your DPS are lesser geared, you can suddenly use your DPS stance for the whole thing, reverse it and the tank has to stay in tank stance just so the dps doesn't rip enmity.

So, if you end up with 2 combos that basically do the same thing, reduce it down to 1 combo that does everything you need. Then, to help players, just increase the enmity of everything. People also hate the damage reduction and everyone is trying to stay in DPS stance anyway, so lets take that away. What you have left is essentially how the game is now, just the damage mitigation is built into every tank as a trait and the tank stances just increase enmity so you can toggle it on and off. I suspect a similar thought process was used to get to the decision of the ShB changes. Enmity is just a messy thing to work with, especially when you take everything into account.