In your darkest hour: DRK's identity crisis

[Lyth]

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It's always better to negate damage. It frees up your healers, who might be otherwise occupied. If you think back to a fight like A7S, there's a tankbuster during the second cat phase which was a popular choice for Hallowed. One healer was targeted with a flamethrower, the other was trying to raid heal. Having an invulnerable tank was one less thing to worry about.

When you create these sorts of differences as "flavour", you are always going to run into situations where one tank has a less effective solution. But if you do that, you should also give every tank a chance to shine, as well. There are plenty of situations in which you can find a "workaround" on DRK, but it's clearly less optimal than the other two. But you don't generally see the reverse (i.e. a situation which DRK handles more smoothly.) That's part of the issue with identity.

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The original artwork by Amano was actually completely different from the NA box artwork, the latter which was probably designed to evoke the player's memories of Dungeons and Dragons. To be fair, there are a lot of miscellaneous weapons in Final Fantasy games. Whips, Maces, Bells, and Axes. There's even a character who uses an Anchor/Harpoon as his primary weapon! I'm sure if you look hard enough, you'll find something. Not that you should feel bad about liking a particular aesthetic of course - it's just that there are some things in the series' 30 year history that players are particularly attached to.

[Shurrikhan]

It's always better to negate damage. It frees up your healers, who might be otherwise occupied.

Oh, I'm not disagreeing with that. I just meant that all three are still 100% damage negation. The difference is in what, if anything, they left to spare when their durations ended, or alternatively, the conditions for that damage negation. Pedantics, really.

When you create these sorts of differences as "flavour", you are always going to run into situations where one tank has a less effective solution. But if you do that, you should also give every tank a chance to shine, as well. There are plenty of situations in which you can find a "workaround" on DRK, but it's clearly less optimal than the other two. But you don't generally see the reverse (i.e. a situation which DRK handles more smoothly.) That's part of the issue with identity.

Completely agreed. It would be nice to miss DRK at some occasion, but such are few and far between. But on the other hand, I'd much rather see differences between tanks and have one occasionally left behind or one be clearly favored in some way by the timings or types of situations within a particular fight than for all three tanks to essentially become one over time. Better sometimes n-1 than just just ~1, so to speak.

The necessary equilibrium, compromise, or mutually exclusive factors involved in such are frequently overstated, of course, but IF it came down to that, I'd rather have players be forced to play multiple tanks, swapping between them, than for all tanks to feel mostly the same -- especially given the whole "all jobs on one character" concept to this game (despite that actually following that concept can be largely disadvantageous).