Weapon of Choice for future Tanks?

[Izsha]

The series has a history of just making up weapons as needed to fit a character, job or aesthetic concept.
Gunblade, Paint Brush, Bell, Dice, Harp, Blitzball, A peice of cloth/sash, Dolls, Megaphones.
Those are just a few of the non-traditional and/or made-up weapons for the series. I think they are pretty free to make whatever they want as a weapon as long as it makes sense with the concept of the job they make.

To me the limiting factor isnt really what type of weapon is available (as you pointed out, SE gives no Fs about conventional weapons), but I DO think it is limited by armor and keeping tank gear bound together. Ie: Tank gear is 99% 'armored' gear. So sure they could add dancer with a whip for a tank, but if SE isn't willing to create a second line of tank gear that isn't Darklight path, then I don't really see it happening.

If SE isn't willing to create some 'lighter' line of tank gear starting now and continuing forever, I don't see them adding Blu, Dnc, etc as tank classes living in darklight and all the other heavy armor War/Pld/Drk live in until the end of time. Artifact is cool and all, but will not be sufficient for people playing the class. Though I still don't know why every melee has its own left side set while mages get 1, healers get 1, ranged phy get 1, tanks get 1. Melees never have to share

So with that in mind, I suspect something like Great Hammers and 1 handed Mace/Hammer as next in line with a slight chance for something like gunblade style the Empire sports. Things that can be in heavy armor and make sense. The class could be anything from battle cleric, barbarian, Viking, Berseker, Onion Knight, Other variations of Knight (We have Holy/Dark but there are a million knight classes), Soldier, Beastmaster, etc and wield these kinds of weapons while wearing armor.

[TouchandFeel]

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I agree with what you said about the kind of gear that roles use and how shared gear for roles determines some level of general aesthetic for jobs within certain roles; such as tank jobs will, whether or not people like it, kind of have to wear heavy armor.

As far as an obvious "gimme" job for a tank, there is Mystic Knight, which I personally would like to see using a dual-sword staff as a weapon. That would cover the elemental magic knight archetype to go along with the holy and dark.

I personally think that Blue Mage could be incarnated as a tank in this game, it would just require a bit of a re-imagining which honestly isn't that far-fetched for them to do since the core aspect of Blue Mage, learning and using monster abilities, has manifested in many various packages through out the series.
However, while I think a version of Blue Mage as a tank would be cool and something I would like to see in this game, by no means do I think that people should expect it to be a tank; but who knows, if there is enough demand it could be, we'll just have to see.

As far as Dancer, yeah I don't really see that being a tank. I'm not going to say it is impossible, but I would definitely put it in the category of unlikely. I personally am in the camp of wanting Dancer to be a healer that use sashes or maybe fans as their "weapons", although chakram would be fine too.

As for a hammer/mace type weapon user as a tank, I think that a 2-handed version of the weapon is more likely. As far as what job would use it, I too wouldn't be opposed to a tech/magitek based tank job akin to Nero. If done properly, it could be very cool and it would also provide a very different aesthetic to what we already have for the tank jobs.