Quote Originally Posted by Arrik View Post
Paladin's issue with Clemency would almost go away if blocking an attack prevented an interruption like in 11. That being said insta-cast spells, auras, channeling abilities could all play some role in how a caster tank could deal with this. Or if you wanna cheese it give them Aquaveil buff that would pretty much do bullet #1 here. Casting time doesn't necessarily need to mean exactly like BLM or exactly like BRD and that's it.
If a majority of their skills/abilities are instant then are they truly a caster tank though? Because in my opinion they'd just be a tank that has some casts. In which case that mechanic can be applied to just about any job in the form of a "charge up" mechanic for certain skills.


Aura that keeps a mob 10' out (the caster's life could be tied to said aura so they aren't invulnerable) or whatever as long as its in a place it could normally go (not pushing Titan off the platform for example). I don't see why you seem to exclude insta-cast for a caster, it'd be pretty easy to give them the standard Flash/Unmend equivalents as spells, and even in 11 some spells were pretty damn quick. Probably a better way to do this I'm not thinking of and I could see this taking the most time to debug.
In a game where positioning is often key something like this keeping enemies at range makes positioning things exceptionally more difficult. It's impractical and thus highly unlikely. It's harder to move enemies when they're kept far away from you. You use Titan as an example but don't consider that Titan is usually kept at the edge of his arena, you simply cannot move him there if he can't get closer than 10 feet from your character. Impractical and ultimately a pointless mechanic, what benefits does this add except giving the illusion you're fighting from range?



Ilvl 240 with a 245 weapon PLD is at 1399 VIT and a BLM is at 918 VIT and 1253 INT. 1399-918=481 481/1253 ~= 39%. Wear the caster gear and trait them to add 40% of their INT to VIT. Ragnarok 2 did similar when switching from Cleric to Monk, there was a trait that messed with int vs att so you didn't have to restat to go from Cleric to Monk at 25 (at that point both str and int helped att). Defensive differences could be fixed with pre-pull buffs, increased amount of mitigation tools, playing with cooldowns, etc.
Mechanically making a tank wear any kind of armor is easy, as abilities can be implemented that passively boost stats to be on par with other tank's defense. The problem comes with things like sharing loot. Role-mixing on loot in FFXIV would provide potential issues. I pointed out that tanks sharing gear is an intentional one that affords tank players the freedom to generally swap out to any of the 3 tank jobs pretty easily. (Same goes for healers). This is certainly an intended design to help keep Tank players playing tanks. If you remove this aspect, you've now introduced a tank that doesn't share armor with other tanks, meaning they have to choose between gearing the new mage tank, or the other 3 tanks. That's a bad decision and splits the tank players.

Now you have a tank that shares gear with a DPS, which means they can gear as a tank and then spend the rest of their time playing a DPS? That's counter-productive to trying to aid the age old problem of low tank population. Not to mention who would want to queue into content to get tank gear when you can be contest by quite possibly every DPS in the party as full mage parties are very common when queueing into duties.

It would be a challenge for sure, but that's not such a bad thing.
The simple reality of the situation is that challenges take time to iron out. And Time is not something this game has an abundancy of when it comes to developing content. Because they release content on such a regular basis they just don't have the time or resources to spend trying to reinvent the wheel. This means that new job additions are less likely to shake up the formula anytime soon.