Disciple of Magic Tank?

Ready for this? Final Fantasy X-2's Dressphere - "Psychic". A spellcasting tank with lots of creative potential! If you've never played FFx-2, the Psychic job focuses on stat boosts, guards, and basically being untouchable by negative status modifiers.

Picture: Mighty Guard like abilities cast on allies, status defects on enemies generating enmity. Floating, they could be stationary or glide around. In FFx-2 they have "Eater" abilities, so elemental damage instead heals them; could be like a placed AoE making party members absorb a percentage of elemental damage taken. Psychics can Teleport: instead of Shield Lob they dash into a mob with a flashy spell; or they can Teleport out (without breaking enmity) forcing enemies to chase them.

I mean, it's officially in a Final Fantasy canon job in a game which includes Samurai, Dark Knight, and other old favorites. I think if any of the developers are taking notes, they've got a lot of chances to mess around with Psychics.

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Here's a video of the Psychic-ers from FFX-2 for reference.

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Originally Posted by Beelz

[I know this is a double post, but the text limit won't let me add things so...]

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Edit your post to remove any feasible text limit.

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Originally Posted by Beelz

Ready for this? "Psychic".

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you wrote "Blue Mage" Wrong.

we already have Dark Knight as the magic tank. Dark Arts, Abyssal Drain, Unleash, Unmend, Blackest Knight... all magic stuff. the last hit of the enmity combo has also an animation with a magic attack.
then we have Paladin, wich also uses magic to heal and attack.

do we really need a third tank with magic stuff?

I actually think that we'd need a second physical-only tank (WAR currently is the only one). No magic stuff, only purely physical abilities. With muscles and stuff.

A cloth wearing tank will indeed look strange.
May be something like a beast master will fit the role more.

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Originally Posted by Beelz

they can Teleport out (without breaking enmity) forcing enemies to chase them.

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You just upset every single person who plays melee DPS in the game

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Originally Posted by Moogly

A cloth wearing tank will indeed look strange.

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Cloth tank has actually been done quite a few times in various games. SWTOR, for instance, has their Assassin tank, which wore the lightest armor, but gained massive defenses through their tank stance. The issue with that here, is that the Assassin stayed in their tank stance because it was required for their rotation to even work. Here, we switch stances all the time. There are times where we even stay in DPS stance as much as possible to push out as much damage as we can, and if a tank cannot do what the other three tanks are capable of, due to their non-tank stance being oneshot by boss autoattacks, then there is no reason at all for the class to even be brought to an instance.

That being said, there could be a passive trait that would give it massively increased defense ratings, even out of stance, and that would function just as well, but at that point, why not just stuff it into heavy armor anyway?

Isala
When I think about it yea, in the other big mmo, druids wear leather, and at some point, warlock transforming into overpowered demons could have eventually evolved into a tank spec (it might even be the case now, havent logged in there for more than a year XD)

I see the points everyone is making, and they are good ones.

In response to Tint directly: Absolutely Paladin and especially Dark Knight use magic in their jobs; and as I understand it, MP is even the Dark Knight's main currency instead of TP. But, I'm leaning more towards an esthetic mage class who is also a Tank. Paladins and Dark Knights still wield swords however, and what I would like to see is a Tank that is strictly a disciple of magic. The Psychic job could use headgear as their main weapon, equipping sick ass magitech to their heads in order to focus their telepathic powers. They shoot beams, could be more mobile than the other classes (with skills and techniques that mitigate its flaws), and put up walls - maybe they could have a literal ability to section off a portion of the field that enemies can't cross and negates all area of effect damage/statuses while inside it.

The Psychic class would be like a Tank version of an Arcanist. It hits with dots, AoEs, and super effective status ailments/debuffs. All the while giving out a passive aura of protection on people close to them, keeping allies from taking damage and avoiding decimating status effects or mechanics. It's Limit Break 3 could be like some time reversal: after it casts, it resets all team member's health, raises all fallen allies, resets everybody's timers like nothing happened, even reset the Limit Gauge so it can be immediately followed up by a second Limit Break (barring the Tank from executing it a second time). An almost meta-tier protection, where not even the games own mechanics and rules break through. Oh, the boss is casting it's special and we're all underprepared? Psychic job swoops in, breaks the game, and your entire party dodges the unavoidable, field-wide attack without a scratch.

This is the vision I have: Tank executes Limit Break 3... finishes casting... static quickly flickers over the screen, and it all goes dark for a second before "turning back on" and everybody is 100% okay.

On top of everything else, think of the story potential. Plot potential. Maybe we're introduced to the job by a team of Psychics who say they can travel dimensions. This is not unthinkable, given the lore of Eorzea. They say that while in this dimension, they want to recruit more people to go along with them. They teach you the basics of the job, then thrust you into a vortex that spits you out into another dimension (read: dungeon). What fun we could have with that! A Stargate in Eorzea with the power to travel dimensions using the aether. Lots of opportunities.

And like... yes, all of these functions could fall into the category of what a "Blue Mage" is. I'm not denying that. I'm trying to make the argument that Blue Mage might just be a little too close to heart (and close to Red Mages...) for fans of Final Fantasy. But here, in this obscure game that a lot of fans would outright say they don't like or have never cared to play, rises a mountain of new opportunities in the Psychic class. And if you think the two are similar enough that you might enjoy its play style if but under a different name, then why not give it a shot? And give newer or more ignorant fans of the series something fresh to play and fall in love with. And if the worst you can say about the job is "I wish it was a Blue Mage" then to that I say: mission accomplished, boys.

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Originally Posted by Beelz

super effective status ailments/debuffs. All the while giving out a passive aura of protection on people close to them, keeping allies from taking damage and avoiding decimating status effects or mechanics.

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Congrats, you just made a tank that outclasses all the other ones and makes them entirely inferior. And that's not even touching your completely broken idea of a new tank LB3.

I for one am glad you're not involved in the decision making for new jobs because your idea is a mess. This is the most ridiculous thing I've read with my own eyes regarding a job idea and my sanity dictates you have to be trolling.

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Originally Posted by Shippuu

Congrats, you just made a tank that outclasses all the other ones and makes them entirely inferior. And that's not even touching your completely broken idea of a new tank LB3.

I for one am glad you're not involved in the decision making for new jobs because your idea is a mess. This is the most ridiculous thing I've read with my own eyes regarding a job idea and my sanity dictates you have to be trolling.

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I'm making a proposal to highlight the benefits of the job. This discussion process requires an exchange of ideas in order to grow and come to fruition. Obviously the next step is to find ways to balance the abilities with cooldowns and other restrictions. It would force players to concentrate on resource management, and if you screw up or don't know what you're doing, you die in a single tankbuster and your party wipes.

What are some other suggestions in expanding the Psychic mechanic?

PLD- Close range Phys & Magic Tank
DRK- Close range Phys & Magic Tank
WAR- Close range Phys Tank

1.All scale off VIT. So make it fair and scale it off that or make it original and scale off something else.
2.We need a ranged PHY and MAG tank so consider that.
3.This game's MO is lots of jobs so the question is are these new jobs going to be flavors of each other or drastically different without being broken.

I expect when it is all said and done at some point for XIV to have 25-30 DOW/DOM

Yes, all the current Tanks are close rang and mostly physical, and they sort of need to be, because that is how we understand Tanks to work. Is it possible to have a ranged Tank or a Magic-only Tank just by the very nature of how Tanks have to work?

I think we need to explore what it means to tank a raid or dungeon. Your role is gather enemies, hold their enmity, keep them from moving, and soaking up damage so you don't die right away. I argue all of those things can be accomplished without dumping everything into VIT. A Psychic would be powered by INT or MND. They could use their telepathic power to set down a beacon or projection of themselves that draws aggro and stays stationary. The would give this class the unique opportunity to be the most mobile of the Tank classes.

But in context of having a mechanic to both challenge and reward the player, this clone would have a time limit or a health bubble that will pop after time, and all that enmity comes back to you. And that's bad, because they would wear light armor, like comfortable cyber-punk clothes. Because they aren't supposed to get hit, why bother with heavy armor? You haven't been investing in VIT, so you're squishy, barely breaching the 20,000s in HP at level 70. You'd have to really manage your spells and cast timers to make sure you're providing enough buffs, doing enough damage, holding all the enmity and making sure your hologram doesn't run out of juice so you can keep doing those things for your allies.

And if you do your job right, and you're on top of your cooldowns, and the Healers don't have to worry about healing you, they can focus on other teammates who might need more help, or pump out crucial damage in their downtime.

A tank that doesn't wear fending armor and use tank stats is likely never going to happen in this game. Adding more types of gear into already polluted loot pools is something they will strongly resist doing. The same goes for having different roles share gear. There's a reason that out of 9 dps jobs none of them wear healer or tank gear.

Having a tank that's squishy and meant to completely avoid damage is something impossibly hard to balance in the first place, they already have a hard time balancing the existing tanks that are all very similar to each other.

Your idea is just continuously all over the place and simply isn't feasible in the reality of the situation.

I know what class your asking.....
I can only thing of one but it's not final fantasy.
So, here it is...
https://youtu.be/l5aFt8GtlDA

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Originally Posted by Moogly

Isala
When I think about it yea, in the other big mmo, druids wear leather, and at some point, warlock transforming into overpowered demons could have eventually evolved into a tank spec (it might even be the case now, havent logged in there for more than a year XD)

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Actually, something worse happened. They created the Demon Hunter class, gave them a transformation, and ripped it completely away from Warlocks. That's not to say the DH wasn't fun. But man, it felt pretty bad to be a former Lock main and get crapped on. I LIKED tanking in DA...

If we were to have another different mechanic tank class with similar ideas, I am thinking using Blue Mage and Beast Master abilities might be best. The only way I can think of for allowing a tank player to be ranged at times would be to use a pet to stabilize hate / aggro for you. Just simply having a separate pet may be too fussy on controls since we already have slow AI with Summoners and Scholars. Something more might be needed like FF6 Gau's Leap ability to mount the pet and control their movements to get them out of fire. It might also end up being a class having 2 GCD timers for your character and the pet. Also so you don't just keep rezzing the pet to cheese mechanics, an aether bond sharing health between the 2 may be needed as well. As for pet choices to tame, Behemoths (Tank Stance) and Coeurls (DPS Stance) come to mind at the moment. If those pets aren't wanted, we could probably have a "glamor" thing for changing what your tank or DPS pet is. The mounting could also contribute to increasing the threat / enmity generated by the pet while dismounting frees you up to cast more DPS spells.

It's a long shot for this idea since I imagine this could be very difficult to program.

Although I'm partial to my Psychic idea, and still feel like it could work without over burdening the game, I would love the idea of a Beast Master over a Blue Mage. Summons/Pets are cool, and it sucks that the arcanist job is the only job that leads to that mechanic. A TP-based Beast Master who could also ride their pet/mount during combat would be awesome!

Psychic as the job appears in FINAL FANTASY X-2 feels more like a DPS than a tank, and a blue mage is typically able to do everything. I don't believe either one should be considered for the tank role. If we want a new Disciple of War tank, I'd probably go with FINAL FANTASY III's Viking with a warhammer and shield combo.

I've toyed with the idea of a Disciple of Magic tank before. I don't think a lot of people will like the blink tank idea, though (think Utsusemi from FINAL FANTASY XI on ninja). I do think, however, the time battlemage from FINAL FANTASY XII: The Zodiac Age would probably work. Your weapon would be a crossbow, your armor would be the same heavy armor used by tanks already in the game and your actions would be short-range combos (within 8-10 yalms) and time magicks to speed yourself up and slow enemies down, increasing the time a healer has to get your HP back up. You'd have some ways to do damage over time as well.

I LOVE the idea of a Tank class with a Mage Aesthetic.
but there are some limitations you have to work around.
1. They have to wear "Tank" gear. Which means their stats are going to be heavily based around existing armor stats and mechanics. So they have to have their offense based on STR, not INT.
2. They have to be in melee range. Being a ranged tank, and therefore being able to nullify close range attacks meant to challenge the tank is not really feasible given the mechanics in play for most of the game.
But I can still see it working.
I think Gravity Magic might be the key. You'd still need high VIT to work with High Gravity environments, so that gives you a good reason to have that sort of training. The gravity spells could act as barriers, preventing damage by forcing the attacks away from you, but you'd still need STR to stop the force from pushing you back (equal and opposite reaction). But Really, any sort of Barrier Mage concept would work as an Aesthetically 'Mage Tank' concept.
Surprisingly, this would lend itself to a "physical mitigation tank" in the vein of a WAR more than a Magic Defense tank like a Paladin.

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Originally Posted by Tzain

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so we go original and make blue mage a force magic tank that uses multiple monster magics learned through class quest but we also go ahead and imlement 2 classes in one since lots of people like so much beast master and we make blue a pet class and we can summon beast tanks that tank for us but hurts our vit kinda lika a STAND works in JOJO bizarre adventures, if you don't know what it is is basically the spiritual projection of our soul and we are able to manifest and do crazy powerful magics with it but hurting our stand accurately hurt us on the exact way since it's our actual soul, so now we have:

- a range/meele magic tank blue mage since our beast/stand/monster will be the tank for us.
- force magic scaling on str but able to use monster magic

meh idk whatever that isn't a disciple of sword/pointy blades/axe will do for me I just want something that feels different as all 3 tanks feel the same gameplay wise when we have dps ranging from one style to other even smn and black mage feel dirrenet from each other.