Community Challenge: Turning a non-tank job into a tank job (Lancer)

No, not Dragoon, but Lancer. Lancer with access to GLA's and the other class abilities should be an interesting challenge.

Ideally, for this challenge you have an ilvl weapon that is 90+, so hopefully you have the wave or Allagan weapon. As far as stats, let's do some testing to see if re-rolling with pure VIT makes a difference by offsetting with flash and provoke being available to hold hate.

And why not? Back in FFXI, Ninja meant to be a ranged job until players, months down the line, figured that it was even better as a tank than anything. SE continues to place LNC in the ilvl gear sets, so maybe there's something there.

It also serves to break up the monotony of dungeon crawling and atma/book farming of late.

Please share your results, strategies, and even videos below.

Without an enmity boost, you won't be holding any mobs unless the other DPS are gimping their DPS output.

Also, good luck with any big hits of 6k damage and above meant for REAL tanks.

Perhaps, though it may be viable in other situtions and should be interesting nonetheless to try!

Lancer doesn't really have any exploitable mechanics to help them tank damage like ninja did. And good luck keeping aggro, even with flash and provoke it will be impossible against good dps. Remember you'd be unable to keep Heavy Thrust up (unless you wanted to repeatedly spin the boss), and you couldn't get disembowel/chaos thrust either. Combine that with loss of strength stats and jumps, and you will have to both outgear and outplay dps to keep aggro.

I guess you could have them tank a 4man or something, but most classes could do that if you outgear the place/healer is good. For anything serious it's not really feasible right now. I think I remember hearing of a group that had a DRG go LNC for provoke on Garuda EX, then they just burst down one of the sisters and he provokes spiny as needed. But that's probably not what you are going for here.

Maybe not full on tank, although that's an interesting use there for having provoke on the spiney.

Wasn't there some video of a Dragoon(or Lancer, not sure) tanking Titan HM back before 2.1?
I could imagine making use of either Savage Blade or Skull Sunder (both creating enmity and cross-class skills) could at least give you a small amount of enmity generation.
Also don't forget that buffs that enhance your damage(which Lancer would get a load of) also enhances your enmity generation (especially for Flash).

Regarding the necessary HP: If "normal" dpsing Dragoons/Lancers already get like 5-5.5k HP, i could see them easily breaking 6-6.5k with allocated stats/fending accessories/food.

If all that suffices to tank endgame content tho? No clue but personally i'd doubt it. Surely a nice alternative if you wanna run some easier content with your FC tho.

In theory it may seem like you can use Skull Sunder or Savage Blade for threat, but they really aren't that strong. Both of them have a damage potency of 100 and *3 threat multiplier for a really meager 300 tPot. I must admit that I have no clue if 100 potency on a Dragoon does any similar damage to 100 potency on a Warrior, but even if we assume that it might do as much as 50% more, that's still just 450 threat potency per CD. A Defiance Warrior performing his BB combo does 3225 tPot in 3 skills (damage malus accounted for), or 1075 per cd. You don't need as much on a prolonged fight, but grabbing threat in the beginning if you're only doing 1/3 of what a similarly geared tank would do is gonna be a pain...

Yeah it would certainly require some mad shenanigans from the Lancer/Dragoon to pull it off. Doubt he'd ever hold hate on anything noteworthy or against well geared DPS :)
I'd still be interested if anyone could pull it off (not me, mind ya, DRG bores me tremendously xD)

Interesting thoughts op
Try it and let us know how it works out

..could just give it emnity modifiers on their skills and remove the positional requirements.

I wasn't very well geared due to not having a very high weapon, but managed to get some damage-resistant gear (put my HP around 4000, but it was infinitely more survivable than 5000 HP without the magic defence). I suspect it would be a lot easier with a Coil or Leviathan weapon, but LNC is not very good in Brayflox HM to hold multiple enemies. I didn't have any real issues holding hate on the bosses, per se, but any more than one target (most of the run), the hate just keeps getting thrown around. I'll probably try again when my LNC has better gear options, but it was certainly fun, if not a slow run.

Conclusion for now from me is that LNC is a decent tank (not better, but it is an option) for boss fights or single-target scenarios in low- to mid-tier content, but nothing else.

Just use a bard. Dodges tons of stuff.