Isn't it strange how Ninjas are tanks?

Talks about pld tanks always make me chuckle.
Pre Abyssea 90% of the parties wouldn't even start if the leader couldn't find a pld or a nin. But I guess no one remembers.

The only time I remember leveling with a PLD post-ToAU was when I leveled it for Maat's jobs.

No its not strange that ninjas are tanks, they can take hits.. The only Requirements to be a tank is to be able to hold hate and to take hits. In that demeanor even a RDM or WHM could be a Tank if they could do any of that.... Also unlike pld Ninjas can also negate magic Damage. PLD could have gotten an AoE enmity gaining spell... but this game clearly is not Aion so :D

I think it's more strange how paladins CAN'T tank.

PLD cant tank anymore cause DD abuse of ... well damaging..... if people would allow them to they would properly but nowdays you want fast kills so forget about it... unless really needed.

SAMs... they are awesome tankin... they can do it even way better than PLD and NIN in most stuff.... sadly the people playing SAM usually ignore about tankin and just think in kill faster(alot of times like a mater of, "i kill it first or i die"), i not tellin there dont be one or another SAM who actually does worry about tankin and avoid get hitted hard when they get hate, but lets be honest, most people doesnt.

NIN.... i remember when i was about to be impaled by all my LS partners whenever i defended NIN....tellin me they crappy, "they cant tank", "they cant damage"... blah blah blah... Look nowdays.... everyone want be NIN....

yeah everyone want to be nin because nothing is hard

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Seha

Talks about pld tanks always make me chuckle.
Pre Abyssea 90% of the parties wouldn't even start if the leader couldn't find a pld or a nin. But I guess no one remembers.

---

90% of pickup parties were terrible because people still thought you had to fight IT+ monsters (Lesser Colibri at 52? What a great idea!). If you fought appropriate monsters and had proper party setups, you didn't need a Pld or Nin.

Sadly, none of the party makers realised this and continued to build mage + tank + 4 DD parties whilst targetting IT+ mobs. And because it was so standard practice to do it badly like this, those who could make good tanks against appropriate mobs like Sam, War and Mnk never realised their potential and assumed they couldn't tank and you needed a Pld or Nin as well.

At the time if you even dared to ask a sam or war to tank they'd quit the party lol.

Our characters exist in a world where time both passes and doesn't pass, a mage can make your an individual poo so hard that he or she attains new levels of power, mute purple dogs with horns can master a virtually unknown spell, every beetle in the world shares a genetic deformity of the foot, and an entire pizza is eaten instantly then lasts for three days. We exist in a world in which this topic has 45-ish replies. Compared to all these things, Ninja being a tank is not strange at all.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Seha

Talks about pld tanks always make me chuckle.
Pre Abyssea 90% of the parties wouldn't even start if the leader couldn't find a pld or a nin. But I guess no one remembers.

---

Think I kinda lost myself along the way, what are we talking here? Big NMs? (so alliances, not parties) I absolutely agree, it's just like you said.
Or are we talking about XP pts? Because if that's what we're talking about then ToAU (and not Abyssea) and the new way of making XP with TPburns pts is what destroyed PLD in XP. And even before, PLD wasn't THAT common, think about weaponburns pts in sky, arrowburn, KRT burns etc. I don't really remember a lot of XP camps where you used PLD to XP. Lufaise meadows sure is one (rams/birds) and I'm sure there were a few more but it's not like "PTs didn't start if you didn't have a PLD", and you could go with NIN as well.

TBH before the Shield Mastery/Sentinel patch, NIN was usually considered a much better tank for the majority of content that required a classic setup. I remember that well because I was burning through CoP missions back in 2005 and everybody was going with NINs and have it the easy way while we were stuck with a PLD and had to re-do certain BCs countless times lol.
We didn't really have a lot of job flexibility back then, many of us weren't even 75 in ONE job xD (I was 72 when we killed Promathia :P PLD was 73)

Edit: I was kinda talking about end-game XP pts. So not necessarily merit pts but let's say at least 73+
All the way from 1 to 75 was a different story and yeah, PLD was very much apreciated there as well as NIN (especially after Utsusemi: Ni :P). I still remember dual nin/dual thf pts, with lots of SATAs goin on :D

The situation of the "Trinity System" inside of FFXI is very very odd. Currently there isn't a clear necessity for the Trinity System in most situations, but at the same time you can also clearly see that the game wasn't planned that way (there are indeed games planned NOT to have the trinity system since the beginning, but you can clearly see the difference).
So yeah, it gives me a lot of mixed feelings.
FFXI is a game planned on an expanded view of the Trinity System, but things have been balanced so bad through the years or, rather, they refused to fix/take counter action against certain habits raising within the player-base, that when they decided to do something it was too late and those habits were too strong and had been going on too long to just make them disappear, so they kinda tried to "adapt" themselves to those habits and allow them to exist, but at the same time they didn't really try to change the core of the game... It's like they wanted to keep a foot in both camps. I dunno, it's strange to see the situation of Tanks in FFXI when you compare it to most other mmorpgs, where the scenario is much clearer.