Quote Originally Posted by Askio View Post
Which only leaves being an archer I suppose. Viable in this game? I've only stuck to Summoner and Gladiator so far when it comes to duking it out long term. But my favorite two things to play are tanks--mage tanks and range tanks in particular. So I'm bored and need ideas to make the range tank viable, until the dark knight comes out to satisfy the tanky mage in me.
Any suggestions?
Well, let's define a "ranged" tank, first.
I assume you mean a tank who focuses on kiting, yes?
Keeping their distance and dodging hits while keeping aggro and moving it around the arena.
There's a couple of reasons why that would be very difficult to make work:
Even when running, you still get hit with unavoidable damage, which, for any non-GLA/PLD/MRD/WAR, can easily slaughter you. Even if you avoid all the AOEs, that large amount of damage can still hurt you a whole lot.
The melee DPS are the biggest reason this probably won't happen. Even if you designed a tank class that kites in this game, the melee would be very unhappy with you. Most melee DPS have some form of a directional requirement that makes them want to attack from the rear or the flank, which would be made near impossible with a tank that's moving everything around all the time.

A mage tank is definitely more viable, but in of itself wouldn't really make it a ranged tank. There's always the puppet tank, where it uses a summon of some sort to keep aggro and take damage, but with the current AI of companions in this game and the large delays in between keys and your pet casting their skill, I wouldn't really see it happening. I mean, I know we have summoner and Titan Egi, yes, but Titan Egi is a very poor tank and loses aggro very fast, with no way of taking aggro back if it dies. It also has a pretty big lack of enmity generation in general and isn't designed to really tank very well. A proper puppet tank would have to be an entirely different class, with a much bigger emphasis on their pet taking damage and generating hate, and likely a rework of the way you command your pets to use skills.