Also you can code things such that 'moving away from the Tank' also builds Mark empowerment bonus, just not Enmity.
Y'know, if you were the type to ask your engineering team to do that in order to make the gameplay experience more enjoyable for players with certain preferences.
I would definitely be that kind of evil person
You'd trust
me
to it, right? You should trust them tenfold. So the mechanic is still perfect, they just have to do everything else correctly and make a good fun engaging balanced kit that will make Tanks useful in PvP and they're done.
Yeah, I'm sure it's gonna be the easiest thing to do for them. And then balance it all in the context of augments. And other classes. And pve. And build it in such a way that leave space for future growth and great changes. I'm certain it's gonna be E to the Z
(ok my last post went a little far and made me slightly queasy so I'mma dial it back and be slightly more serious)
The benefit of the design type so far in my runs has been that the only thing you really need to think about or balance is the impact of CDR itself.
It is one of the rare cases where you generally do not have to care how overpowered the ability has the potential to become
in a long fight
because it is entirely in the control of the Marked player, presuming your 'Threat Values' weren't terrible to begin with.
And since it ties directly into Cooldowns for abilities that are chosen by the Tank player, and in Ashes (and our design space) we mostly know what abilities will be available due to Tanks having a clear skill tree, it's sufficient to not worry about it.
More Damage would please some tanks and not others. More defense or percentage reductions in damage help some situations and not others. More CC or buffing other people's attacks makes the game less interactive for the Tank and turns them into a Totem.
More CDR is literally telling the Tank "Oi, that person wants to ignore you playing the game/having an impact with whatever you chose to do. Whaddya say I make you able to do it even more/faster?"
And even better for the opposing side, if the enemy Tank was useless in some way due to their build, i.e. you have easy counters for their Abilities, you know that you actually
can
ignore them because all they will do is use the same non-effective abilities more often. Then one can balance just the abilities and not grind out thousands of slightly different 'but what happens when the Tank has this much extra melee damage from being ignored?'
Everyone gets to play their style, and everyone gets the outcome they expect (though not necessarily want) with the correct tradeoffs.
Now if only I could find a way to make it so that Marking PvE enemies and then having someone else shred them didn't result in boosted Tank DPS, while still being understandable to most players...
I'm kidding of course, our design space explicitly works around that, it's Ashes that would need to actually solve anything like that. But they have Javelin on Tanks still so it's probably fine.