In FFXI, any group prior to Melee/Magic burn levels depends on two key positions.The tank — the position that holds the monsters attention, and makes the trade off of offensive power for defensive fortifications.  This job is able to absorb the damage dished out by [real] monsters. If the tank holds the monsters attention, the drain on the healer’s magic pool is is reduced, and the amount of XP is increased.  If the tank doesn’t do their job (or there is no tank), hate bounces and everyone starts taking heavy damage (unless everyone decides to gimp their damage output and be a mini-tank; like you see in melee-burn parites). When this happens the healers magic pool get drained faster (too fast, and players begin to be KO’ed).

The healer — This position keeps everyone alive.  Period.  If there is no healer, or they don’t do their job, everyone takes damage until they expire.

Without these positions covered, things go to hell in a handbasket.  In short, these are the anchor positions of any party.  Like their real life nautical counterparts, toying with them in the middle of the a storm isn’t the brightest idea.

So imagine my surprise when a Samurai in my last party kept provoking monsters off me.  His explanation to this [when I asked] was “I like to keep a tanks job interesting.”  Between the Warrior/thief doing SA+Sturmwind immediately before or after th [other] Samurai/thief doing SA+Tachi:Empi, and a chain-nuking Black mage, I didn’t need things to be made more interesting; and I said as much.

So next time this Samurai decided to make thing interesting for me, I decided to return the favor.  I didn’t use Sentinel, I didn’t Provoke, I didn’t use Shield Bash — and since the monster wasn’t facing me, I didn’t need to Cure myself.  (although I still managed to take a few hits from damage, and early hate building).

The Warrior either got what I was doing, or didn’t realize what was happening, because they didn’t bother to provoke either.

I imagine the player got a little anxious as his HP dropped below 100, then below 50, then below 20 — as the White mage tried to keep him alive chain curing  (truth be told, I got a little anxious too, because I hadn’t planned on letting his HP get that low, but a couple crits and double attacks will do that).  I dropped a Cure III on the player, Provoked, took hate back and sent a /tell “I thought I’d make things interesting for you.”

I got no response back, but everything wen’t smoothly for the next several scores of fights.