Realistic 5.0 Jobs

[Talraen]

Dancer as evasion tank. Make it happen SE.

I don't think an evasion tank would work inside FFXIV's system. Unless you're "evading" a certain percentage of damage which happens to very closely resemble the damage reduced by armor and traditional tank abilities.

This game has a problem where its design really doesn't allow for wildly different tanks or healers. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, by the way, as I think it's led to a much more fun overall combat system than would exist if the classes were wildly different. But it's nonetheless true, and it's only going to become more obvious as they add more tanks and healers. Even DPS only have so much room for variety.

Why would Ninja have been a tank?

Because it was in FFXI. Not by design, mind you, at least not at first. But FFXI Ninja has an ability that lets them automatically dodge a certain number of attacks, and combined with getting as much evasion as possible and a few other factors, it made tanking with Ninja not only viable but optimal for a large portion of the game's existence. In related news, Warrior was originally designed to be a tank in FFXI, but they gave up on that entirely after a while. For most of the game's heyday there were two tank jobs (Paladin being the other) and neither was a starting class. Because FFXI is weird.

[jameseoakes]

Because it was in FFXI. Not by design, mind you, at least not at first. But FFXI Ninja has an ability that lets them automatically dodge a certain number of attacks, and combined with getting as much evasion as possible and a few other factors, it made tanking with Ninja not only viable but optimal for a large portion of the game's existence. In related news, Warrior was originally designed to be a tank in FFXI, but they gave up on that entirely after a while. For most of the game's heyday there were two tank jobs (Paladin being the other) and neither was a starting class. Because FFXI is weird.

I was always under the impression that Ninja was a tank in 11 as people cheesed a badly made mechanic the devs never fixed.

[Eloah]

I was always under the impression that Ninja was a tank in 11 as people cheesed a badly made mechanic the devs never fixed.

Didn't they never fix it csuse the devs empraced it? Making Ninja the tank and Samurai the DPS.

[LineageRazor]

I don't think an evasion tank would work inside FFXIV's system. Unless you're "evading" a certain percentage of damage which happens to very closely resemble the damage reduced by armor and traditional tank abilities.

Yeah, this. The trouble with evasion tanks is if they are 100% effective, they are broken (which do you prefer, a standard tank that takes reduced damage or an evasion tank that takes NO damage? No contest), and if they are not 100% effective - well, the rest of the time they die (which do you prefer, a standard tank that takes reduced damage, or an evasion tank that randomly dies from time to time? Again, no contest).

NIN were broken the first way in FFXI for a long, long time. Then SE started adding bosses with attacks that ignored shadows, and they became broken the other way.

NIN in their heyday were AWESOME, and that's why folks remember evasion tanking fondly - but the problem was that they were TOO GOOD. It was very difficult to design encounters able to challenge a party with a good NIN tank. SE eventually gave up and wrote NIN off, designing encounters that only a damage reducing tank like PLD could field, and that pretty much marked the end of NIN tanking in FFXI. I doubt they'll make the mistake again of bringing evasion tanks back into play.

In regards to the original post, I, too, think that the roles should be swapped around. I favor BLU as DPS, DNC as healer, and GEO as tank. I do want to point out, though, that the odds of us getting all three jobs next expansion are slim; doing three for Heavensward just about killed the dev team (and landed us with MCH being underdeveloped, practically a clone of BRD), and that's why we only got two jobs with Stormblood.