Quote Originally Posted by Camate View Post
Greetings,

The development team is aware that rune fencer is in need of some tuning and they are planning further adjustments.

Rune fencer has been created as a tank that is especially strong against magical attacks, but when it comes to physical damage, the team envisioned that rune fencers would adopt ninja or samurai as their support jobs to evade or parry the attacks that come their way.

We plan on adding more equipment moving forward to ramp up their defenses, but the development team would also like to improve the issue where it’s difficult to generate enmity. The current popular trend to use Rune Enchantment over and over to generate enmity is making it difficult to attack and offer support, and we feel this is not the right direction.

Due to this, we are looking into adjustments for the future to eliminate the enmity from Rune Enchantment and increase enmity generating methods in a variety of ways.

As we are still in the planning phases for this, I’m unable to give any specifics for what adjustments will be made, but please know that we are planning to make adjustments for rune fencer’s enmity in the future.
I'm all for Rune Fencer getting further adjustments, but I'd like to share some extensive hands on testing I did with Rune Fencer since the last update:
At level 99 with all level 109 AF1 gear (at least) and some 109 pieces of the Fulhark Set, I decided to try out some subjob combinations with Rune Fencer.

I didn't feel SAM worked well as a subjob for tanking, but it was nice if I wanted to be a bit more of a damage dealer. I tried NIN as well, but felt that shadows were too easily wiped, and I didn't see much value in the subtle blow or increases to parrying.

Next logical choice was WAR. Provoke is helpful for holding enmity, but with my equipment I saw little increase in overall attack power. Double attack seemed to proc more (I have the double attack neck and earrings from delve, and an eponas ring and windbuffet belt). But statistically speaking, the overall bonus from WAR was mostly for provoke.

Interestingly enough I found most success subbing RDM on RUN. The bonus fast cast trait cuts down on cast time a lot, the haste spell speeds up attacks and recasts, and with a handful of cure potency pieces (the belt from WKR, ring from WKR and Bismark neck) made my cure 4s jump up to a serviceable level both for myself and for party members.

With RDM being my goto choice for subjob, I then rethought my macros. My main ones are something like this:

WARD-ME: runs through all of the single target wards plus swordplay.
WARD-PT: runs through all of the party wide wards plus magic barrier.
CURE-ME: Uses Vivacious Pulse with a 1 sec wait and cure 4 on myself.
And then I have a macro for each elemental rune with whatever the minimum wait is (I think 4 seconds now).

I Also have a swipe/lunge macro which will do a swipe, rune recast, and lunge and I just modify which rune depending on what I'm doing at the time.

All of these are enmity magnets. I decided to further test by joining a Yumcax shout.

To my surprise I main tanked the entire fight. There were two Aegis paladins and an Ochain Paladin as well, but by staggering the above macros and tossing flash in occasionally, I was able to not only hold enmity, but also survive (keeping foil up always is key for that). That is, until I ran out of hallowed water XD.

There was a Kumhau fight immediately afterwards, so I figured I was on a roll, might as well join.

My friend, an Aegis PLD joined, and then the rest of the group decided to go to Cezik Battlegrounds (after we enter of course). So we decided to just start anyway and see what would happen.

We were both pretty surprised that a PLD and RUN duo managed to hold Kumhau without any issues for about 15-20 minutes until more people started showing up. Having a PLD and a RUN in the same party works great– Paladin excels at absorbing more raw damage, and can cover or help heal the Rune Fencer, while Rune Fencer avoids a lot more enfeebles, and can take over while the Paladin recovers from those. It was very much like a tag-team in wrestling in a way.

As that fight went on, we continued that strategy, which worked great until about 1/4th of the way to go where something got the PLD. I survived on Rune Fencer the entire time, and got some in-game applause from other players haha.

So yeah, as of right now, Rune Fencer is a functional tank in some situations! Maybe not for the most challenging end-game content yet, but certainly for some current some-what challenging content. My recommendation is to try to stagger self wards with party wards, toss swipes and lunges in when you can afford to be without a rune briefly, and stack some cure potency items while subbing RDM and I think you'll also find it a lot easier to be the focus of the enemy.