What makes Taunt more complicated though, is that it acts like soft CC on enemies, but hard CC on PC's, because it removes control from your character.
I think the real problem here is how taunt works on PCs in the first place. Losing control of your character is far more punishing than taunt is supposed to be. Just mirroring exactly what happens to taunted NPCs isn't fair (ie. the AI taking control with a modified algorithm).
The solution seems pretty simple to me:
Instead of losing control taunted PCs gain a debuff that heftily reduces all damage done to all targets except the taunter (say -75% for example just to illustrate).
That would be a major hinderance and actually give you a good reason to "give in" to the taunt without losing control. Optionally, maybe +10% dmg to taunter also.
If you want to make it even more punishing and remove most of your ability to ignore the problem by spending the time supporting your team (with buffing, healing ect.) rather than attacking you could also make all characters except for the taunter untargetable for the duration. (this still leaves some loopholes with AoE abilities, but would still be very punishing).
In either case I think it would acomplish the goal of taunt - which is more to discourage a character from harming your friends moreso than actually force them to attack you.
You could argue that this could be mirrored for the effect on NPCs too to make it consistent. As long as the AI is capable of weighing the now drastically altered damage it can do to the possible targets it should normally choose to attack the taunter - and if it doesn't then you just mitigated a lot of the incoming damage anyway...
TLDR: How taunt works in general could use an overhaul along with it not being resisted by armor.
-Stigma
