When is enmity or aggro generated in Bravely Default

Question

This is sort of a compound question with regards to the enmity/aggro system in Bravely Default.

The first part is: when is enmity generated? When I attack an enemy, is that player going to be targeted by only the enemy that that player attacked, or by the whole party of enemies? I figured that actions done by your party generate enmity through the whole party of enemies such as with casting cure causing all enemies to attack the caster.

The second part is, when do enemies decide who to attack? I know that from the player standpoint, all battle decisions are done on your turn, so you decide who to attack, and if the battle state changes during your attack phase, there is nothing you can do until the next turn. However, with regard to enemies, if you do a 4 brave healing spree, will the enemy attack you on that turn or on the turn after the healing spree?

I had figured initially that the enemy just attacked at random, but seeing that there are items that you can equip to affect enmity, I wanted to figure out how I could get my tank to actually work as a tank.

Answer 1

Having tried to build a tank in that game, I can tell you it doesn't work. At least, not the way it would in a MMO "holy trinity" type of game that most people think of when creating party structure nowadays. The items that make the equipper more likely to be targeted only do so by a small amount, certainly not enough to be noticable in my experience.

To answer your question, the enemies will decide who to attack on their turn. That is: when they're about to go, right before each hit, assuming they don't brave. They are also reactive to what your characters have done, not to what they are about to do. If you queue up a 4-brave healing spree, the aggro is generated when those heals are cast, not before.

Granted, even with the aggro, there seems to be a random factor involved to prevent "perfect" tanking. Because of this, the game seems to encourage powerful healers and group durability more than glass cannons and solid tanks.