Quote Originally Posted by MagiusNecros View Post
Xande seems to do well for a Mage Tank. Could easily pull idea's from there. Or throw a curveball with RDM and make it a Tank.

Plus a lot of people have wanted Dancer for a while and what better way for a physical healer to enter the fray then Dancer?

Or are you really insinuating that the Dev team is running stagnant on idea's for job classes and will remain incompetent and utterly rely on Melee classes to make up 80% of all party composition? Which currently is the case.
Even if you went with a mage tank, it complicates itemization. You think the devs have the time and resources to continue adding unique classifications for armor for every job? There's reasons tanks and healers share gear, and part of it is to certainly allow tanks to level multiple tank jobs and gear them simultaneously so they have the freedom to switch to a different one to fit whichever they need. This helps by giving tanks players options and gives them some incentive to continue to be tanks.

And Xande? He has all of about 4 moves, most of which could never be used in the sense of a player job. Also, half his attacks are melee attacks with his fist or cane. Plus, by that standard PLD and DRK's are already Mage Tanks as they have magical abilities that perform AoE damage or healing/shields. You cannot make a "ranged" tank at all, not in a game where everything attacks in melee. So yeah, tanks will always be melee.

You also didn't answer how a melee healer would handle those boss mechanics or any future ones similar to it. Or how about the fact throwing more melee into the mix that aren't dps will make many other mechanics much harder.

I'm not insinuating the dev team isn't capable of coming up with these ideas, I'm saying they're choosing to keep things simpler so that there can be solid balance between jobs and roles that make every combination of jobs viable. They have been adamantly clear that that is their position when it comes to jobs in this game and attempting to do something so extreme such as adding a melee healer completely goes against that.