In your darkest hour: DRK's identity crisis

[Reynhart]

Interesting analysis

For me, the first issue of DRK is that no previous incarnation has been a tank, so they had to built it from scratch as opposed to PLD and WAR where they could draw concept and skills from previous FF games. (And, several times, DRK was the exact opposite of tank, sacrificing survivability for more damage.)

The second issue is that they spread the tank skills too wide with PLD and WAR. you can easily create different means of tanking. A tank with self-healing a tank with that takes reduced damage, a tank that have a massive HP pool or get better heals, a tank that counters etc...But PLD and WAR each already spread accross at least 3 of those types, giving very little room for future tanks.

If PLD was, "the tank that heals itself" and WAR "the tank that have a massive HP pool", DRK could have been the "tank that reduces damage" or "the tank that leeches"...In fact, it would have been much more interesting to have a stance that reflects and leeches back 20% of the damage you take instead of a copy-paste of ShOath.

Defining a tank as "a defensive tank" is a dead-end, unless you go all the way there. Make it so that other tanks can't tank whole fights by themselves (4-man content not included), forcing swaps not for mechanics, but to spread cooldown upon two tanks. (On a sidenote, that was how NIN tanked at low level in FFXI, not having enough dodge skill or images to stay 100% on tank duty). On some fights in 2.x and 3.x PLD was frequently the tank that don't have enough CD for every big hit, while WAR and DRK always has something up their sleeves.

He is a greatsword user though, and the game doesn't really have jobs.

Greatsword wasn't even a weapon type before FFXI, so it's not that related to DRK.