Samurai, why Tanks?

[AzumaKun]

I hope they do bring in Samurai, and I hope to God that it will be a tank. I'd love to play a SAM without it being flooded with every other DPS type player (read:80% of the current population).

[AzumaKun]

Are you seriously trying to logically explain why Ninja, historically the equivalent to a modern spy, should be a tank instead? FF11 made dumb mistake with ninja that we don't need repeated. Maybe Samurai shouldn't be a tank but Ninja sure as hell should not be a tank over Samurai.

Also, SE didn't intend for Ninja to be a tank when it was implemented into FFXI.

[Exstal]

I liked this little snippet. Isnt that the show with people summoning fireballs and monsters? Sorry but that would fit really well into final fantasy, especially since those things are already here in the game. It would be really unthinkable that a Ninja would have a skill to increase evasion by 40% amirite? Featherfeet, that's sooooo naruto.

I'll read the rest when i can get past the parts with snide little undertones.

I'll tl;dr;

Samurai - two french guys wearing expensive clothes and scary dragon emblems on the back, dueling with guns
Ninja - the butler who poisons both of their tea so the winner of the duel dies anyway

[Viridiana]

If you take a close look at earlier FF series, you'll see that SAM actually is more of a tank. There are numerous threads regarding this matter on this forum. You'll find them.

I could just as easily point out that Tactics had Samurai being a magic-based DPS class. >_>

[MomoOG]

I liked this little snippet. Isnt that the show with people summoning fireballs and monsters? Sorry but that would fit really well into final fantasy, especially since those things are already here in the game. It would be really unthinkable that a Ninja would have a skill to increase evasion by 40% amirite? Featherfeet, that's sooooo naruto.

I'll read the rest when i can get past the parts with snide little undertones.

The whole point of your original post was to point out historical/logical reasons why samurai doesn't make sense as a tank. When people use your own logic of history to explain why ninja makes far less sense of being a tank over samurai you then jump to naruto and how this is fantasy game and so its okay for anything to happen? In that case you don't have an original argument to begin with because its a fantasy game and so samurai can be anything. Maybe they should be healers.

[MeeDeggiThePunisher]

Troll, it has to be.

Why is everyone calling him a troll? I've played XI 2004-2009 and don't ever remember people asking SAMs to tank. Except maybe for Valkurm Dunes. Ugh the dunes. /shudder

[Duelle]

I dont know what version of 11 you played but these were never things.

Only because people refused to adjust. SAM was designed with the highest parry rating out of the jobs. Its weapon skills had easy-to-stack mods and their gear originally leaned towards high parry with STR supplementing. Since parry mechanics in FFXI were garbage people used it as DPS, taking advantage of the easy mods on their weapon skills (the design combined with gear swaps meant SAM ended up doing a ton more damage that other jobs, specially once people discovered how store TP worked). It was easier to veer it towards DPS over having to fix how parries worked, figuring out a better mechanic for SAM tanking AND admitting they were wrong. This was Tanaka's FFXI, and at that time they never admitted they were wrong, much less clean up their own messes.

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That said, I like the idea of a SAM tank. I'd probably base it off the WoW Monk's stagger mechanic (basically damage taken is split by half into direct damage taken and a stacking self-DoT called stagger. The design revolved around parrying stuff and managing your stagger stacks so that damage taken would not overtake heals tossed at you by the healer).

[Kitru]

That said, I like the idea of a SAM tank. I'd probably base it off the WoW Monk's stagger mechanic (basically damage taken is split by half into direct damage taken and a stacking self-DoT called stagger. The design revolved around parrying stuff and managing your stagger stacks so that damage taken would not overtake heals tossed at you by the healer).

How they do SAM is probably going to be heavily influenced by what kind of SAM they're going with because there are 2 fundamental archetypes of the samurai that they could go with: the samurai wearing flamboyant armor who gets by on intimidation, strength, and sturdiness and the samurai wearing normal clothes and defending themselves entirely with their skills with a sword. It's kind of like the difference between a fencer and a knight.

A SAM built around wearing heavy armor would, in all likelihood, be STR based with a lot of self buffs and debuffs generated by kiai and other forms of intimidation (which would probably be their "shtick"; they could even operate as tank with support functionality with a mechanic like this, reducing their own mitigation/enmity/damage to improve the performance of others). A SAM built around wearing light/no armor would most likely be DEX based and, mechanically, be a parry/evasion tank by necessity; in all likelihood, have some form of controllable dramatic increases to parry and other forms of mitigation (akin to Inner Beast providing a burst of DR) possibly derived from katas (e.g. there are 3 combos, each of which provides you with a passive buff of some kind that can stack up to 2-3 times; they are provided with 3 job abilities that consume one type of said each and provide a dramatically increased condition of the consumed stacks for a short duration after; this wouldn't hit the same problem that Wrath had pre-2.1 because you'd still have the other 2 buff types active).

Much of the implementation for any class depends heavily upon what vision the devs have for a given class. They made WAR follow the noble savage/barbarian archetype, as opposed to the emotionless/focused weaponmaster that other games make them out to be, and the abilities followed suit. They had WHM designed to be more akin to a druid rather than a cleric/priest (nature magics and whatnot) which heavily influenced the story and base class. We won't really know what the devs imagine one class to be like until they release it (or explicitly tell us about it, like they've outright said that NIN isn't going to be a tank if/when it's introduced).

[Aaramis]

Kitru, your comments about Samurai and Ninja are fairly accurate, although we also have to keep in mind that Samurai changed significantly over time, including their weapons and, eventually, their armour.

Nevertheless, there's little point getting into debates about it since FFXIV is a *game* and has no real requirements to base their classes/jobs on reality.

If they wanted to make their Samurai in heavy bulky armour and as Naginata-wielding tanks, then so be it. Similarly, they can make them gi-wearing dual-wielding DPS if they so choose.

In other words, you're right in your second post: there's a wide range of variety they have to choose from, so it's also impossible to determine which way they're going to go with things. All we can do is speculate based on previous FF games which, also, have a lot of variety in how classes/jobs have presented.

[Kitru]

In other words, you're right in your second post: there's a wide range of variety they have to choose from, so it's also impossible to determine which way they're going to go with things. All we can do is speculate based on previous FF games which, also, have a lot of variety in how classes/jobs have presented.

The intent of my first post was to correct the OP on his belief that NIN would make a better tank than SAM based upon their real life counterparts. Where their real life counterparts are concerned, NIN makes absolutely no sense as a tank whereas SAM makes a *really* good case for being a tank. It's entirely possible that SAM will be implemented as a DPS job, but, if one of them is going to be a tank, it's damned well *assured* that it would be the SAM and not the NIN.

The second post was simply there to describe how there are multiple possible implementations of SAM that are based upon entirely different (though still historically accurate) depictions.