DRK being compared to past FF games.

[BlaiseArath]

That's because Final Fantasy really doesn't have tank skills. Provoke and Cover are pretty much the only two that are recurring enough and actually feel like something a tank would use. But there are still ways to turn a Dark Knight into a tank and have it feel like a Dark Knight. Warrior still feels like a Warrior, when all it's ever had for "tank" is Provoke. I don't see why Dark Knight would be any different.

I agree there are no real "Tanking" skills in offline FF, but there are clearly healing and DD skills, and attribute spreads to support certain roles... and DRK has a buttload of DD skills that would be significantly counter intuitive to a tanking class if it drew inspiration from other FF titles... Thats mostly what I was meaning to say, which... again is only that if you look at DRKs repertoire you'll see it has a lot of abilities and traits designed around hurting itself to hurt others, its just going to be hard to repurpose those abilities into a job that feels like DRK but it designed to tank, not die less fast than the enemy. I can envision how DRK will play out (probably having Drain/Aspir type attacks, maybe a few DoTs... perhaps Darkness/Souleater in a way that consumes ~10% of your HP to deal moderate AoE damage and increase enmity, an off GCD like Circle of Scorn). I feel like they'll be able to do it... its just going to be awkward and out of place for a lot of players at first. I'm sure people will adapt though.

I guess I get WAR feeling like WAR because in a lot of FF titles, WAR did have high HP and DEF, and in its original appearance turned into Knight, the closest thing to a tank any offline game sees. Plus in XI it was the original tank and I played a lot of XI lol. But still I see the point there, WAR has always been a master of combat, not so much a tank, its even kinda the same in XI, being able to wield almost every weapon with some proficiency (though its best weapon was Great Axe/Axe).