Mystic Knight Mage Tank

[spelley]

*snip* I'm looking forward to see what you can come up with.

Actually, I think I've come up with a better "Magic Tank" idea that would fit with RDM really well. Use "Convert" as a tank ability.

- Convert: MP and HP switch places. Then you have abilities that regen mana, and the goal is to keep switching out your HP and MP. Combine that skill with...
- Refresh: Mana regen spell similar to FFXI RDM (if I'm not mistaken).
- Various "Shield" spells: These don't have to reduce damage now, they can just do damage + effect on being hit. Fire = Increased Enmity, Ice = Slow, Thunder = DoT.
- Enspells: Provide effects based on hitting. Fire = Enmity, Ice = Mana Regen

Equipment could be Heavy Chain w/Caster stats. I think I really like the idea of "Convert" though as a basis for the tank.

[Kitru]

- Convert: MP and HP switch places. Then you have abilities that regen mana, and the goal is to keep switching out your HP and MP.

All you're doing is creating an arbitrarily complex self-healing tank (you're equating mp with hp via convert and then increasing mp regen through other effects) that doesn't have the self-healing scale with incoming damage, which makes them an unbalanced tank (just consider WAR in 2.0: either self healing is designed around high incoming damage scenarios and is completely overpowered in normal/low damage scenarios or it's designed around normal incoming damage scenarios and is basically worthless any time damage gets high).

The only way that mp as a survivability resource would work as a balanced mechanism would be if a portion of incoming damage equivalent to the amount of damage other tanks mitigate with their stances (i.e. 20%) were shunted off to reduce mp while providing the class with some controllable and comparatively powerful form of mp regen that scales up effectively (e.g. Riot Blade that recovers % max mp) so as to render the "damage" done to their mp easily nullified (which negates the need for anyone to "heal" that damage). The problem with this, of course, is that you can't use MP as any kind of appreciable attack resource because you're converting it into a survivability resource; the closest you could get would be creating some CDs that consume mp to increase survivability for a short period because that's just trading a mitigation resource for mitigation (imagine an ability that consumes hp to provide you with an absorb shield; same basic idea). If you try to do it in any other way, all kinds of problems arise.

Tanking mechanisms have to scale with incoming damage, and those effects have to actually reduce external support requirements appropriately without disproportionate cost to the tank itself. Any tanking system has to keep that in mind when you're coming up with the mechanism as well as the access/implementation.