Enmity Management, Do we want it back?

[vetch]

This is stupid, overall group damage output is still lower because the tank has to sacrifice damage to keep aggro, there is no "making up for lowered damage" lmfao overall it punishes the whole group that an already under geared tank has to give up even more damage.

Then gear the tank.

If gear stops being automatically funneled to DPS first because the tank needs it equally since he doesn't get free top aggro from a babyproofed tank stance multiplier anymore, this is sounding better and better.

[aodhan_ofinnegain]

Then gear the tank.

If gear stops being automatically funneled to DPS first because the tank needs it equally since he doesn't get free top aggro from a babyproofed tank stance multiplier anymore, this is sounding better and better.

I mean yet again this is also a stupid take, why wouldn't you funnel gear into DPS to speed up reclears and help with week 1 clears of the final floor, funnelling gear into tanks and healers does not help with DPS checks...remotely as close as it does funnelling gear to DPS.

[vetch]

I mean yet again this is also a stupid take, why wouldn't you funnel gear into DPS to speed up reclears and help with week 1 clears of the final floor, funnelling gear into tanks and healers does not help with DPS checks...remotely as close as it does funnelling gear to DPS.

Uh, changing that is the point. The whole topic of discussion in this thread is introducing a different system that shakes up how the game is played. If we are literally talking about designing the game differently, then of course gear priority might also see shifts under the new system.

Wanting some week 1 pieces to go to non-DPS isn't a weird thing to do in a case where you actually need them to ensure your reclears go smoothly.

I cannot control the gear level of the random tank that comes into my roulettes. This is something that needs to be considered across all content across all players, not isolated to static environments.

It doesn't matter in roulettes. If you have to baby a bad tank or he has to spend the whole fight in tank stance, whatever. It's all normal mode, 99% of it has no enrage timer.

In Extremes and Savages you can set an item level requirement on the PF.

However, in a static environment, the thought of enmity management is even more distant that it is in a PUG environment. Everyone will use their enmity tools and, as I have stated, any time you get the chance to coordinate a Provoke > Shirk, enmity management is non existent anyway. So it isn't a system that the hardcore raiders would even interact with except at the start of a fight anyway.

Easily solved in simple ways, for example by making Shirk dump the enmity instead of transferring it to another party member.

You do also see fights with tank specific mechanics, like picking up tethers, or being at the front of a stack. However, what I would like to see is more interactivity with stuns and interrupts.

This is a good idea, but having job systems be interesting in and of themselves is necessary for when lackluster boring fights DO inevitably get released. The DPS job designs mostly understand this. You can still expect to have some decent fun on a DPS just by managing your rotation, even when fighting a terrible boss like the boredom cube in Mt. Gulg.

[aodhan_ofinnegain]

Uh, changing that is the point. The whole topic of discussion in this thread is introducing a different system that shakes up how the game is played. If we are literally talking about designing the game differently, then of course gear priority might also see shifts under the new system.

Wanting some week 1 pieces to go to non-DPS isn't a weird thing to do in a case where you actually need them to ensure your reclears go smoothly.

I'm sorry but can you actually stop. The thread is asking if we want enmity management back, not if we want to shake up how the game is played, and you're asking for a DPS centric game not to allocate gear to DPS jobs for a flawed and god-awful design that, punishes the tank if they do not have gear, and the party's overall DPS because we have to sacrifice damage for more aggro, which at the end of the day is arbitrary and Adding enmity management adds nothing of engagement, it means cuck my damage at the start when raid buffs go up, then cuck my damage every once in a while for a top up of enmity, while my co-tank can do his maximum amount of damage without any issue, which punishes for no tangible gain.


What actually adds to tank gameplay that is engaging, is actually having adds that are active on the arena floor at the same time as the boss again, (the best designed floor 3 fight has yet to be matched in o3s), boss positioning, crowd control. While I agree with Valkyrie, there will be some players griefing for not positioning correctly, players will adapt to the fights, in SB we had to often position bosses, to help execute mechanics better or get more uptime.

Week 1 gear always exclusively goes to DPS lmfao with the exception of if the weapon drops for a non DPS job on the final floor.

[Mikey_R]

1. It doesn't matter in roulettes. If you have to baby a bad tank or he has to spend the whole fight in tank stance, whatever. It's all normal mode, 99% of it has no enrage timer.

2. In Extremes and Savages you can set an item level requirement on the PF.

3. Easily solved in simple ways, for example by making Shirk dump the enmity instead of transferring it to another party member.

1. This isn't about how quickly you can clear things, this is about feeling you can contribute. If you are being punished for no reason, it is going to feel bad.

2. Yes, but it is expected to have a certain gear level when going into those encounters anyway. Doesn't dispute the point at all.

3. Double Provoking becomes the way to increase your enmity over everyone else, tank swaps are now done with Shirk. Oh, you want to reduce the enmity lead Provoke gives? Makes Shirk useless, but then it is back to the points of, how do you balance things.

However, I think it is weird how you have focused on one point in my post, which isn't even the main issues I have with the old enmity system. There is a reason I didn't go into how to balance between gear levels etc. and instead, focused on what would a tank with their enmity/stances look like first, as that is going to be the biggest contributor in how a tank feels to play. It was post number 10 in this topic (Post #10.

Until a firm foundation is established on what a tank looks like skill wise with the enmity system and how this will affect gameplay and the feel of the job, then the talk of how exactly it will be balanced around gear and skill can be started. As I addressed in my post, the enmity combos just felt bad and really weren't used much, making them feel like dead actions taking up space for no reason. If you think there was no issues, that is fine, but it would be nice to know why you think that way, potentially commenting on my points and why you don't necessarily think they are an issue (and this does go for anyone).

[Mikey_R]

Then gear the tank.

If gear stops being automatically funneled to DPS first because the tank needs it equally since he doesn't get free top aggro from a babyproofed tank stance multiplier anymore, this is sounding better and better.

This might come as a shock, but not everyone runs everything with a static. I cannot control the gear level of the random tank that comes into my roulettes. This is something that needs to be considered across all content across all players, not isolated to static environments. However, in a static environment, the thought of enmity management is even more distant that it is in a PUG environment. Everyone will use their enmity tools and, as I have stated, any time you get the chance to coordinate a Provoke > Shirk, enmity management is non existent anyway. So it isn't a system that the hardcore raiders would even interact with except at the start of a fight anyway.

Hmm I'm bit torn on that one after having experienced tanking during 3.0 as well (granted I played WAR back then and it felt quite fun to stance dance but...) I think it's quite unneeded most of the time - not to mention most DPS would have to use quelling strikes again and healers use lucid to cut hate.

I'd rather have a focus on tank specific nuances like protecting the party by standing in front of them, pick up a target marker from others or even shield a healer with your special 25s mitigation to protect them from unavoidable damage.

Warrior was the only one that had some sort of flow in stance dancing, it felt really bad on PLD/DRK.

You do also see fights with tank specific mechanics, like picking up tethers, or being at the front of a stack. However, what I would like to see is more interactivity with stuns and interrupts. I won't go into detail here, but they are mechanics that could form something interesting. This is all for making it so that tanks control where damage is going and potentially what form it takes (massive hit, done in a DoT, split etc.).

[Renathras]

This is stupid, overall group damage output is still lower because the tank has to sacrifice damage to keep aggro

Howso?

If the tank is doing damage, they're 60% of a DPS. Say them doing the agro rotation makes them 55%. Meanwhile, your BLM gets the gear and is doing 115% of the damage they were doing before. Tank -5%, BLM +15%, party net +10%. The group damage output is still greater.

It's the same argument for a Healer using a GCD on healing to keep a DPS alive. One lost Glare will NEVER be equal to the lost DPS of the DPSer dying. Sometimes, it's so lopsided the WHM casting Cure 2 instead of Glare on the BLM so the BLM can stand there and finish that Flare cast is enough of a DPS gain that it makes it worth doing. If your DPSer getting gear is doing enough damage to rip agro off the Tank, it SHOULD be enough damage that it's a party DPS increase even with the Tank switching to a lower damage agro rotation.

I think it's quite unneeded most of the time - not to mention most DPS would have to use quelling strikes again and healers use lucid to cut hate.

To be fair, Healers basically use Lucid on CD at this point anyway, so nothing would really change as far as Healers are concerned.

I think the problem with SB enmity was that it was pretty much pointless. Even for PLD. Turn on agro stance. 1-2-Rage of Halone. Congratulations, you're now a mile ahead of even that overgeared BLM in enmity on the boss. Worst case scenario, you can flash it on later for a Rage of Halone or a Shield Lob if you're desperate...or just use that Provoke button you have sitting there feeling lonely. Yes, the tank stances reduced damage. You would THINK this would translate into "Tanks stay in them to reduce damage or 'flash' them for mitigation", right? Well, you would be wrong. In practice, it just meant Tanks would use some CD or another, or the healers would adjust.

The problem is, enmity Tank stance in ShB/EW is also worthless. You turn it on and that's it. Why not just have it be on all the time? "Because you may not be the main tank?" Shirk exists. Just give it a 30 sec CD. Problem solved. There's no reason for tank stances, as they presently exist, to exist. They could just make them passive like MNK's Greased Lightning and lower Shirk's CD to match Provoke's 30 sec. They're borderline obsolete as it is.

I think the IDEA of having tank stances has merit. The problem is the execution doesn't work that way now, and didn't in SB, which is why they made it into the ShB/EW version.

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I don't think that means we shouldn't try it, but the really haven't managed to get it right yet, either. I DO think having an enmity system should be a thing, I'm just not sure the how...

[Shurrikhan]

Howso?

If the tank is doing damage, they're 60% of a DPS. Say them doing the agro rotation makes them 55%. Meanwhile, your BLM gets the gear and is doing 115% of the damage they were doing before. Tank -5%, BLM +15%, party net +10%. The group damage output is still greater.

It's the same argument for a Healer using a GCD on healing to keep a DPS alive. One lost Glare will NEVER be equal to the lost DPS of the DPSer dying. Sometimes, it's so lopsided the WHM casting Cure 2 instead of Glare on the BLM so the BLM can stand there and finish that Flare cast is enough of a DPS gain that it makes it worth doing. If your DPSer getting gear is doing enough damage to rip agro off the Tank, it SHOULD be enough damage that it's a party DPS increase even with the Tank switching to a lower damage agro rotation.

This. What Ren said.

When looking at any job producing sustain, Enmity, or any other secondary output (i.e., anything that doesn't, in itself, cause the fight to eventually end -- which in XIV's case is only ever damage), you need to consider the intended difficulty of the content and, given that, what additional primary output (in XIV's case, damage -- though it'd be net HP generated in a heal-boss-to-X% HP fight, etc. if XIV every had any) that can be produced because of those secondary outputs.

If the devs decide that they want the fight to, even at 100% hyperoptimal play, take at least 7 minutes to clear at minimum ilvl... it hasn't taken longer because tanks deal less damage while DPS deal more, but simply because that's the amount of HP they decided to give the fight relative to what DPS any party, as a whole, can theoretically produce.

All that will have happened is that they've given tanks deeper swing in how much offense they can trade to Enmity or sustain (damage nullification + effective healing done)... or have pigeon-holed their total contribution more towards sustain or Enmity.


By all means, insist on tanks and healers not being pigeonholed too deeply into secondary outputs so they aren't eye-tearingly painful to level solo, but tanks and healers not doing nearly DPS-level damage atop their secondary outputs is an indicator of at least decent role-balance, rather than a reason content would have been made harder.

Said content is, again, tuned around the whole party's damage anyways. Those dynamics just affect the relationship between roles and the balance of secondary to primary outputs normal in their gameplay. They do not affect the total output; only tuning changes ultimately do that.

___________


All that being said, Enmity (or "threat", "aggro", etc.) is just a ridiculously shallow and bloated concept insofar as we've seen it used in XIV. It's literally just been a "Price is Right" mechanic wherein one guesses how much damage your top Damage-Dealer will produce over the fight and how badly they'll fail to use their aggro-reducing abilities (if they have any), and you ride out tank stance until you've exceeded that guessed-at amount by as little as possible, and then drop it for the rest of the fight.

And then it took up to 7 buttons (Savage Blade, Rage of Halone, Shield Oath, Sword Oath [to get back from Shield Oath], Provoke, Shirk, and Flash [though at least that one doubled as mitigation with diminishing returns]) just to support that shallow crap? Hard pass.


I'd be interested in a return to Enmity management only if it were replaced with something with actual available nuance, like mob script manipulation, Focus (like Enmity, but determining only the next special attack and built up more or less independently in just the brief time prior to the attack, such that a tank could force formerly "random-target" attacks to itself instead of a DPS or healer), etc., and wasn't just a simple tabled value that sees no interaction outside of being halved by certain actions.

Even then, I'd spend only one discrete button on it: either Provoke revamped to carry additional effects, or the tanks' respective <Tank Stance> keys, revamped to be capable of instant or near-instant aggro that would quickly fade unless sufficiently followed up on. Let positioning and timing handle the rest.

[Mikey_R]

If the tank is doing damage, they're 60% of a DPS. Say them doing the agro rotation makes them 55%. Meanwhile, your BLM gets the gear and is doing 115% of the damage they were doing before. Tank -5%, BLM +15%, party net +10%. The group damage output is still greater.

The issue here is you are using arbitrary numbers to prove a point, whereas in reality, this isn't even close. Now, whilst I do not have numbers, upgrading your gear is going to be closer to ~1% damage increase, which is all you needed to theoretically bump your damage high enough to pull enmity.

To put some numbers to the potency loss for PLD to do their enmity combo, here are the numbers:

RoH = 640 total potency
RA = 760 total potency

This means, for every RoH combo you do, you reduce your damage by 26% for that one combo. Obviously, this isn't realistic, so, add in the good old GB + 2 combos from back in SB, and the nubmers change as follows (as a reference GB is 1090 total potency):

GB + 2*RA = 2610
GB + RA + RoH = 2390 (5% reduction)
GB + 2*RoH = 2370 (10% reduction)

So, increasing a DPS's damage by a few % can have lasting detrimental effects. This is before we then start taking other things into consideration, like the lack of recourses, the fact it took PLD 1 GCD to swap to tank stance and another to go back to DPS stance, which also both took MP in a time where PLD's MP was so finely tuned, you had to rely on the passive MP regen over a minute to ensure you had 10000 MP for Req. And then, to top it all off, being in tank stance cost you 20% of your damage and you pretty much had to be in tank stance if you needed to build up any reasonable amount of enmity, as your enmity combo in DPS stance did not build up much at all. It was a very similar situation on the other tanks, with Warrior being one of the better ones due to oGCD tank stance swapping and access to Unchained to mitigate the damage loss (though they still lost access to Fell Cleave).

However, irregardless of this all, it still felt bad for you to be actively punished because the DPS was playing well. It could have theoretically been a DPS gain for the party in some circumstances, however, it doesn't change the fact it felt bad to do and THIS is the core reasoning why the tank stances were bad, especially in SB.

Though, if I recall correctly, you only needed 4 Riot Blades per minute to reach 80% MP (alternating 4 and 5 RBs/min to maintain 80+%)?... Which meant you could still spend the majority of the time between Goring Blades on Savage-Halone and your MP still would be fine?

Your aim was getting back to 10000 MP every minute (since HS cost 2000 MP then), in order to get that MP, you had to Riot Blade every time, so, with 3 GB and 4 total RA combos, that is 7 total Riot Blades per minute and even then, you had to rely on the natural MP regen on PLD in order to only just get back to 10000MP before Req came off of cooldown. This could be supplemented by Sheltron giving back some MP when hit, but by doing that you also 'wasted' a defensive cooldown. Things were tight back then.

[Shurrikhan]

Your aim was getting back to 10000 MP every minute (since HS cost 2000 MP then), in order to get that MP, you had to Riot Blade every time, so, with 3 GB and 4 total RA combos, that is 7 total Riot Blades per minute and even then, you had to rely on the natural MP regen on PLD in order to only just get back to 10000MP before Req came off of cooldown. This could be supplemented by Sheltron giving back some MP when hit, but by doing that you also 'wasted' a defensive cooldown. Things were tight back then.

At the time, 7080 was your maximum MP; MP wasn't standardized until Shadowbringers, after Enmity was basically removed from the game as a mechanic. Holy Shock cost 1440 MP. Riot Blade generated 600 MP and Shelltron generated 960. Under Sword Oath, each Holy Shock and auto-attack generated 5 Oath, together granting enough for almost 3 ~2.5 Shelltrons per minute. Passively, you generate 40% of max MP per minute. If you never used Shelltron, even just to "waste" it for the free MP from OT position, you needed to actively generate 3288 MP, alternating 5 and 6 Riot Blades per minute. If you didn't perpetually overcap your Oath Gauge, however, you needed only actively generate 1368 MP, barely over 2 Riot Blades per minute. The 4 Riot Blade value before was assuming you, for whatever reason, were only able/willing to use Shelltron once per minute.

Things were not particularly tight back then. If not overcapping your Oath Gauge in any fight with even just 3 raidwides per minute (or if you just... at least occasionally used actually tanked), you could refill your MP completely off 2.28 just Riot Blades per minute, which you did anyways just from maintaining Goring Blade.

However, irregardless of this all, it still felt bad for you to be actively punished because the DPS was playing well. It could have theoretically been a DPS gain for the party in some circumstances, however, it doesn't change the fact it felt bad to do and THIS is the core reasoning why the tank stances were bad, especially in SB.

I'm not sure why Tank Stances as they were would even play into this conversation. They're not at all mentioned in what you're quoting, and Ren, too, said that SB Tank Stances were bad. No one's been advocating for the thing you're now critiquing. He said only that the general "IDEA" of them "has merit" -- something clearly very different from pre-ShB Tank Stances.

Which then can only leave us with the High-Enmity Skills themselves... and nor do I know why you'd consider using Enmity skills --at least up until the portion one can no longer maintain their less frequently available effects (Storm's Eye, Goring Blade, etc.)-- as being "punished".

Like GCD heals, those high-Enmity weaponskills would only ever be used in the first place they were a net gain to be used, which then means that your "punishment" is just to have a higher cap on that more-efficient resource whose limitation is just that it has a cap to its usefulness. This would be like complaining that a fight has damage enough that it's finally worth it to GCD heal because it "punishes" the healer's own DPS (despite that the fight is tuned accordingly).

If so much of the role's gameplay is spent on the role-specific stuff that there's no room to, say, maintain DoTs or other added complicators, sure, that'd be an issue. But a tank or healer losing some direct damage of their own to generate greater net damage for the party... is neither a problem nor "punishment", I would think?