SAMURAI SHOWDOWN

[DWolfwood]

I've been tanking in ffxiv for 5 years :P ...

... Damn. I read this and was like, holy shit XIV isn't that old is it? Made me realize I've been a tank main a decade now, since the PLD75/WAR37 days. Wow.

So i wouldn't mind if i got to play SAM a lot more with it being a tank, but i'd be sad because i have this image of SAM being a 'bringer of destruction'.
Seeing it have tank damage would totally destroy that image for me.

This is being pretty dramatic. Even the Ronin image in my head, which is most certainly a DPS is not a "bringer of destruction." I think you're confusing it with BLM. Not to mention, they can do a lot with animations to make a SAM tank look pretty badass.

Oh, and yeah. It seems pretty boring to get more of the same tanking stuff. But hope that someone can present a nice SAM tank concept that looks appealing.

You know, there's a few who keep saying that adding a new tank doesn't bring in new players to the role, which I absolutely refute, but if we humor that idea for a moment, then we gotta look at what the tank population enjoys. Completely disregarding SAM's place in the picture, I gotta say a RDM or BLU tank look boring, and will be the first tanks ever in an FF game that don't interest me. In XI, I leveled PLD, NIN, WAR (zerg tank), SAM (merit pt tank), MNK (Salvage tank), and was working on DRK (new zerg tank) before quitting.

I always level every tank, but a RDM/BLU tank just doesn't appeal to me. It needs to be said that being completely original doesn't mean interesting. In fact, Yoshida has directly touched on this subject in regards to Samurai and Red Mage specifically:

Michael A. Cunningham (RPGamer): ... How are you looking to move forward with new jobs from here?...

Yoshida: We're trying our best to create jobs while keeping the traditions of the Final Fantasy series in mind. This includes looking into bringing back jobs from previous titles such as summoner, thief, ninja, samurai, and red mage. Rather than obsessing over originality, we want XIV's jobs to evoke a true Final Fantasy feel while remaining balanced within XIV's battle system.

Cunningham: ...how are you looking to make them different? How about the same?

Yoshida: We aren't setting out to radically change jobs just for the sake of being different... ...Our focus is on implementing jobs to adequately fit roles in XIV's battle system.

When you start making jobs just for the sake of being "original" then you start running into the niche job territory. The only thing truly unique about RDM and BLU being tanks is that they're jobs we wouldn't expect to be tanks. I think making a RDM or BLU a tank would be an injustice to everyone because it would attract even fewer people overall than any of the current tank jobs, and the majority of people who want to play these jobs would not want to tank.

Red Mage does have a history in FF series for being able to equip Heavy Armor which does allow it to fit into a Tank for FF14...

You're really stretching to consider the single outlier of FFIII a "history" where RDM could use most of the heavy armor, though not all. In every other iteration, RDM has cultivated a history of not being able to wear heavy armor. Their very next appearance, they pretty much established themselves as mostly relegated to cloth armor.