Enmity Management, Do we want it back?

[aodhan_ofinnegain]

...

Okay, look, if you aren't going to be serious, then there's no point continuing the conversation.

I was being serious though, do not assume for one second, after I pointed out a flaw in your argument.

[aodhan_ofinnegain]

The clear point there was that Job A losing some damage to provide some buff or secondary output instead doesn't necessarily (or even likely) equate to party DPS going down. See Dragoon vs. Samurai, for instance. Battle Litany existing, in place of greater direct DRG damage, does not fundamentally decrease the party's DPS. There's no reason to assume that content wouldn't be tuned to lower HP or DPS tuned to higher output in exchange for tanks being expected to use damage-sacrificing enmity actions.

I don't even want Enmity actions back, and it still makes plenty of sense.


You don't delay your pot just because you're using your Enmity skills. They're Enmity have multipliers, not flat Enmity bonuses; the more damage you're doing, via the pot, the more Enmity you put out. So unless you'd overcap Enmity within the minimum amount of time for which you could increase your Enmity done (e.g., a single GCD or a single Enmity combo), it'd make zero difference to your pacing. Having +20% damage via pot/raidbuffs affecting an Enmity skill means you'll need that % appgcd less of an Enmity skill later on.


Neither did Enmity skills disrupt rotation. There was always room aplenty around them and/or they literally shared roots with the other combo actions.

I disliked them because they were button bloat, providing very little gameplay compared to their button cost, but what you're suggesting would be an issue... was never an issue, even in the incredibly far from polished version we had previously.

I mean a loss is a loss as soon as you add a minus to the equation, while Ren's example is nowhere near as extreme in reality, I personally, on a fundamental level do not like the appeal of punishing in an arbitrary way, especially as a Paladin main all the way through HW and SB knew how painful it was being saddled as MT at the start of a fight, and next to no way to mitigate the loss of damage.

I am the same the enmity combos can stay dead and buried, but been sadly too much comment regarding them but they never added any value and were a detriment to use. In Paladin's situation, you would forced to aggro combo if pulling especially with no ninja and push everything out of alignment from raid buffs in the opener, not to mention the loss of a GCD just swapping to DPS stance and 500mp just to shed the damage loss. The exception of course as per usual being WAR back in HW and SB where it was actually a gain to use aggro combo and there was no penalty swapping stances bar a 10 second recast.

I wasn't saying to delay the pot, I'm saying it's just yet another feels bad to use a pot when you are knowingly and actively gimping your damage output by using tank stance, because apparently it adds something of value sacrificing damage.

The current system is leagues better even if it invalidates aggro for the most part compared to the old system.

[primarisgoazrr]

Hey everyone! I appreciate all the discussion and feedback, It’s been interesting to hear everyone’s perspective on the matter. My observation so far is that most don’t want it back, some would be open to it as long as it’s not the same as StB, but majority would much rather focus on defending allies, boss positioning and the like. Anyway just wanted to chime with that observation and a little appreciation, please feel free to continue

[Renathras]

Hey everyone! I appreciate all the discussion and feedback, It’s been interesting to hear everyone’s perspective on the matter. My observation so far is that most don’t want it back, some would be open to it as long as it’s not the same as StB, but majority would much rather focus on defending allies, boss positioning and the like. Anyway just wanted to chime with that observation and a little appreciation, please feel free to continue

I think this is a pretty good summary.

Many don't want enmity back at all, some want it back the way it was before, others want it back but not as it was before (they don't think the way it was before was really the best way the mechanic could be implemented);

...but pretty much everyone wants there to be more to do for Tanks. Most who don't want enmity want positioning and defending allies to be more important. But most who want enmity ALSO want this. So there's an overlap of the Venn Diagram circles there.

It's like 45/20/35 on no enmity/exact as before enmity/new version of enmity, but also 90/10 (so lots of overlap) want more to do defending, positioning, etc.

EDIT:

Again, I don't think discrete Enmity skills are a good idea.

The way I would think is most likely/functional if we WERE going to implement it would be to have either a side ability (e.g. Shield Lob already does this) or a branching combo, like Fast Blade -> Riot Blade -> Royal Authority (damage) OR Rage of Halone (agro). This way, it makes enmity relatively straightforward and doesn't require a huge change to the rotation. The smart Tank will look at their enmity list in the party to see if someone's at risk of overtaking them, and if so, they swap out the next Royal for a Halone. In effect, agro becomes an "upkeep buff". We already have this same system in the game for WAR with Storm's Path/Storm's Eye where they use the latter in an upkeep capacity. They could also do something like have Halone generate a small potency heal to be a rotational sustain tool (right now, PLD doesn't have one until level 84 when Holy Spirit starts healing them) if they wanted, but it's really not too complicated with a system like this.

Whether it would be engaging or not is an exercise for the reader, but there's no reason such a system HAS to be as clunky as SB's stance swap and separate rotation where the -2 and -3 steps were both different. All of the Tanks had branching combos at the -2 step (like SAM) and that ended with ShB. Even when PLD had Goring as a rotational DoT, they removed the -2 step to get there (I think there was a third one...maybe it was just for Halone?) to where it's also unified to Riot, just like WAR's "branching" combo is.

If only the third step branches, then it doesn't require a massive disruption to the rotation, you just swap the finisher if you need to pull ahead in the agro race. Or, again, spam Shield Lob, but that's less interesting. Still a backup, considering I think it generates more agro than Halone did while doing still less damage.

[Shurrikhan]

The smart Tank will look at their enmity list in the party to see if someone's at risk of overtaking them, and if so, they swap out the next Royal for a Halone. In effect, agro becomes an "upkeep buff".

Can't say I see the appeal, if that's all its going to be? I wouldn't outright hate it, but it'd have no optimal timing, virtually no optimization beyond maintenance, no way to waste it so long as you minimize excess Enmity by the time it dies. And you wouldn't even have an AoE means of controlling aggro without it costing yet another button.

For context, here are some examples of fairly simple things (typically outright reverts) that would, imo, add more engagement than a return of the earlier enmity system (even if in far less bloated form)....

For now I'll stick to just Warrior for those examples, since these days it would usually seem the most oonga boonga of all tanks:

• Old Storm's Eye / Mythril Tempest / Surging Tempest (non-stacking).
• Old Overpower, so that one actually has to target and may even need to move a bit in AoE situations.
• Inner Release not adding excessive duration of Surging Tempest.
• Old Nascent Flash (%dmg-to-healing instead of flat healing per hit).
• Raw Intuition again only mitigating to the front.
• Having defensive options like Inner Beast and Steel Cyclone opposite Fell Cleave and Decimate, with low enough other sources of sustain relative to incoming damage that they'd be worth using at least occasionally.
• Upheaval and Onslaught consuming gauge.
• Old Inner Release (split from Berserk for separate mini and full burst windows, and maybe with gauge generation also doubled).
• A revision to Equilibrium imitating its old balance.
• Berserk incurring periods of downtime in which one cannot use GCDs for sustain, increasing its risk, but perhaps with Berserk being extendable (with proportionate downtime after).
• Gauge spenders generate stat resource (e.g., Crit and Speed or Tenacity and Leech, depending on type), which fades over time and generates increased effect via Determination and per the multipliers of Direct Hits and Crits. These are set up to offer synergy between each other.

That said, again, a reinvigorated Enmity system that offers far more gameplay opportunities, considerations, and nuances, and pushes us away from the "Whatever maximizes overall DPS (while scarcely even needing to think contextually)"? I'd be all for that. I just doubt it'd be, then, a system that'd vibe with the simplifications everywhere else, so it'd probably need a lot of less jarring stepping-stone/surrounding changes first.

[Mikey_R]

The smart Tank will look at their enmity list in the party to see if someone's at risk of overtaking them, and if so, they swap out the next Royal for a Halone.

Problem, the enmity gains you get, relative to the enmity meter, vary throughout a fight, which makes it difficult to judge when you can effectively just keep up the damage or you need to swap to the enmity combo.

To keep things simple, imagine enmity combo is 100 enmity and DPS combo is 50 enmity. Early on in a fight, if you have, say, 1000 enmity, your enmity combo is 10% of the enmity bar and your DPS combo is 5% of your enmity bar. Get later into the fight, where your enmity is closer to 10,000, that 100 enmity is now only 1% of your enmity bare with the DPS combo being 0.5%. This makes the margin for being able to know when you can enmity and when you can DPS much smaller to the point where you cannot effectively judge whether you can risk it, or you absolutely have to build more enmity.

A potential claim would be that it takes a skilful player to know what they can get away with. However, with the vast amount of variables coupled with the relative enmity issue, chances are you aren't choosing to use your enmity combo based on any rational thought process and more using it 'just to make sure', which, in my opinion, isn't a sign of skill. Skilful play would be being able to hover that line between keeping enmity and losing it based on the information you have, we just do not have the information to make that decision (and I believe there is no effective way to easily visualise that data to allow snap decision making).

[Lyth]

Enmity management didn't really exist in this game, even historically. What we did have was snap aggro checks.

As a tank, the point when you're most at risk of losing enmity is when you grab aggro. We've seen a move away from mid-fight adds, likely because it simplifies the dps balance and allows for tight numbers which the community is demanding. There is no Shadow of Meracydia spawn waiting to oneshot your healers. And even when they did exist, the primary challenge was in accurately remembering the spawn points.

Enmity itself exists only because we don't want tanks doing as much damage as DPS. Additions like tank stance and even enmity combos were just traps for newer players who didn't know any better. It also meant that tanking was more of a knowledge check than an execution check, because you were rewarded for things like knowing to keep stance off and knowing to use strength melds/accessories. And while there are surely some players who would benefit from a return to such a system (big fish, small pond), it's not actually a satisfying one in the long run.

If you're looking to introduce more skill checks on tanks, you might as well make the dps rotations more complex and involved, as well as giving tanks more potential to contribute to total raid DPS. The more you do this, the less a supplementary system around enmity is required.

I get concerned when I see threads like this pop up, because they're usually a mix of rose-colored glasses and straight up misinformation. There was even someone extolling the virtues of TP, of all things, earlier on. The problem with simply tuning these things out is that bad ideas like this accidentally get implemented on occasion if you ignore them. You have to actively speak out and put a stop to it.

[aodhan_ofinnegain]

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 Shelltrons per minute. Passively, you generate 40% of max MP per minute. This meant that, if not overcapping Oath Gauge. 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 tight back then. You could manage off 2.28 Riot Blades per minute, which you did anyways just from maintaining Goring Blade.

Holy Spirit generated 10 guage in Shield Oath, only Auto Attacks generated 5 guage in Sword Oath.

[Shurrikhan]

Again, I don't think discrete Enmity skills are a good idea. I'd much rather just have positioning and timing fill those functions, likely to greater available complexity. I'd remove Shirk as is and combine Provoke and current <Tank Stance>. I just don't think your particular critique earlier made sense.

As for PLD, I don't think it makes sense, either, to exclude significant resources just because they could require taking a physical hit. That'd be like saying Third Eye is never worth considering as a source of damage. Worse, if one is refusing to tank for more than a minute at a time, they and their cotank are actively wasting rDPS by leaving one's defensives to overcharge.

[SargeTheSeagull]

I don't miss enmity management at all. That said, I do miss having something else to occupy my brain while tanking. As bad as enmity was, it was still something to think of from time to time and they didn't add anything in its place. Slightly more focus on mitigation or something like that? Deeper rotations would always be nice.