But I think in another game, in a different type of MMO, you absolutely could negotiate those waters. One way would be to give tanks broad, sweeping attacks that deal severe damage if they aren’t actively attended to (via the targeting mechanic, thus causing the enemy to have to target them). Another way is to give them an ample supply of CC abilities that are devastating to targets but said target is immune as long as they haven’t attacked anyone else for X number of seconds.

Of course, if you are giving tanks that much power, you need mechanics and UI elements to make sure that people don’t get screwed by tanks ambushing them, or don’t take stupid damage and penalties simply because of a misclick or a lost target. So there are a lot of details to flesh out. And it would take a very skilled development team to make that happen, no doubt. But it would only take one team to set that precedent. Hell, maybe Blizzard will work that into their new, super secret MMO. Hah, then the rest of the industry would be right and proper screwed for sure!

D&D 4E, for short, brings something D&D has never had before – a way for players to actively encourage “enemy ai” behaviors. These encouragements are known as Marks and each class that can Mark (who are, not ironically, the classes with the best defenses and largest hp pools – the Defenders), have different ways of punishing those who attack other targets. This is different for each class and varies from making the non-Defender target take less damage (Sword-mages with the Aegis of Shielding class feature) to making the enemy more vulnerable to damage (the Warden class with appropriate powers taken at char-gen) to making the enemy take a portion of the damage they deal (Battle-mind with the appropriate powers taken at char-gen) to provoking bonus attacks from the tank (Fighters. Period.)

This is not a threat based tanking mechanic so much as an ai encouragement system. By attacking the tanking or doing aoe attacks that include the tank as a target, not only do enemy mobs not incur a penalty to hit based on the nature of the Marking mechanic itself, they also avoid whatever dickery that tank specializes in for punishing a target for going after softer targets. -Most- times, it’s just more economical to focus on the tank rather than have the magic man with a sword and personal force field show up in your face from across the room and stun you for the next x number of rounds.

How you would -code- something like that is a can of worms that I am certainly not trained to open or speak upon. But it’s an interesting system that makes a lot more logical sense than the threat mechanics of current mmos. If the healer or that nasty rogue break ahead of your line at the start of the fight, then yes the enemy will gleefully take that opportunity to take out the easier targets. Likewise, the enemy artillery will hang back where the tank can’t Mark them and pelt your healer.

The funny thing is, in many ways D&D 4th Edition has tried to make D&D more like an MMO. Perhaps MMOs can learn some lessons from D&D now.

The only thing I would point out is that a while back — I forget exactly when — Blizz did implement a tool in the default UI where you can turn on threat display. Enabling it will show what % threat you have on your current target. It’s not exactly beautiful, and I still disable it in favour of Omen, but it -is- there.