Predictions on RUN Merits!

[Zagen]

I don't know how you extracted any kind of pro-SE, they'll-do-us-right sentiment out of that...

Honestly it wasn't that I got a "they'll do us right" sentiment it's that Barlight/dark was my new "hopeful" take on a realistic "dream" of what our merits will be.

But maybe going back to what I envisioned for RUN and thus what I would have thought merits would have looked like will give you an idea. When RUN was pitched as a "magical tank" and then a party friendly magical tank here's what I expected.

A JA around level 5 that converted physical damage into non-elemental magic damage (excluding WS/TP Moves mainly because those in many cases have elements attached to them) with a 1 minute recast and 5 minute duration (hurts our DPS to reapply but allows RUN and /RUN to keep it up nearly full time). So this only gets boosted by MDT/MDB gear and shell keeping it from getting over powered. At level 5 this doesn't really do anything, at level 17 (never speculated RUN would get shell for some reason) with a WHM though it allowed you to take 9% less damage again not doing anything major. Obviously once you got higher level it became more beneficial.

Runes themselves surprised me a bit because I didn't expect the en-spell effect but the element resist was obvious to me so I went off that and expected a JA or trait in the 50+ levels to allow a RUN to convert the damage dealt from the JA above into elemental damage of the monster's strong element (i.e. Ladybugs would deal wind damage). This would allow a RUN and only a RUN to further reduce the damage taken from melee attacks to the point where it wouldn't matter that they didn't have a shield to mitigate damage because let's be real here on anything "hard" evasion and parry are crap, though Inquartata forcing parry above crap to not so crap helps a little it isn't enough.

I also expected RUN to be able to transfer all of the above to people within the party to enable them to share the tanking roll because I honestly don't see how SE can truly fix Enmity to need dedicated tanks.

On top of being able to share those effects I also expected to get a version of Sacrosanctity tied to the rune elements used. Also it would differ in that instead of further reducing damage it would be 3 minute duration 10 min recast buff that wore off as soon as the player absorbed magical damage. Sounds overpowered at first but if the RUN converted the monsters melee to magical damage that means absorbing 1 hit from melee eats the buff so the person who's tanking now looks at eating the damage of an AoE nuke instead of absorbing it.

Oh and I expected Barlight and Bardark to be spells we could learn or a version of them which would push us above the magical resistance competition already in game.

We got none of that or anything close to it which is why I didn't bother with merits that would relate to these type of abilities because they would equate to "dream" ideas instead of something plausible. Like I said already SE's idea that they would see how the players used the job and then buff it accordingly in order to build it like the players wanted just doesn't work when you release the job at such a weak state. At this point RUN is competing with BST, PUP, BLU, SMN, and DNC for the "go to solo job" which I guess technically counts as a tank role...