Dark Knight

[Bloodclaw]

You've basically picked and chosen points out of a wiki that support your argument. If you go back and actually play the games you'll see that every single DRK job has exceptionally high defense. On the point of soldier the class that doesn't exist in any game whatsoever save for maybe a splash in tactics. In every other game its defined as a generic character who is usually only temporary. Unless of course you mean Knight in which case we have that already. It's called Paladin.

There are good arguments for having it for a tank and as a dps. But why dilute the game with something that has the potential to be a tank (with a 2 handed sword even) that way we can make way for things that are guaranteed to be dps (ninja, red mage, anything else). DRK, and SAM are both instances that could be potential tank jobs and leave room for other things that can't (or shouldn't) be a tank.

You can say that the job was focused on dealing damage but guess what? Every job pre XI was focused on doing damage save for the ones like whm that were dedicated to healing (holy, and summons aside). This is because there was no trinity in Final Fantasy before XI. Why shouldn't a high armor high health target be used as a tank? Just because they aren't proficient in shields doesn't mean they can't tank. See MRD/WAR.

So again i reiterate, why saturate the already heavily saturated dps pool with a job that could be used as a tank?

I agree I was probably biased, but calling this a straw-man is in itself a straw-man argument here, I did try to look at it as unbiased as i could. I went into it trying to find out where people calling for a tank from the DRK came from. What I found was that in all cases but 1 (In FFX-2) from the selected games the focus of the class was to to do damage and wield two handed weapons and magic to do so. Yes they maybe a tough class in other games, but different games require different class mechanics. Wiki was the best thing I could find as to an unbiased 3rd party. Feel free to develop your own list from wiki (An agreed unbiased 3rd party?).

However in the end, the one time the class acked like a tank, it played very similarly to a berserker. These berserkers wore leather and animal hides, and if you look at the Warriors AF2 art, you will see we already have our DRK tank version, its called the Warrior job. So that job is about literally already in the game and thus filled. I mean look at the warrior's art, it does look very similar to a dark even with those black horns; more specifically the AF+1 armor is even darker, but was having trouble finding a good pic of it.

Again, feel free to use the same resource and produce your own list. I would be interested to see what you come up with for key defining aspects list of a class from the various wiki references.