Quote Originally Posted by MaraD_ View Post
FF4 introduced a system where you HAD to have at LEAST 2 people take more melee dmg, and at least 2 people dealing less melee dmg, but resisting it.
Almost every character had an option for being put in the back row (with the exception of PLD Cecil)
But unlike me as a child, who put everyone in the back row, and just turtled every fight, i was forced to put people in the front row.
everyone who had means to help survive the melee attacks of the front row, also had melee options that actually did decent dmg.

In short, if it was able to go to the front row, it was a tank.
but not everything that could go to the back row was a tank.

FF5+ changed this, and the jobs that had back row options sometimes lost those options starting from this game. (While also losing some of their survival)

back on topic:
2.0 made the mistake of keeping rampart/sentinel/shield oath as -X% of an enemies dmg, rather than being like foresight, raising your own def by a %.
this caused the issue we still suffer from today, that causes tanks to be too limited in their unique mitigation options.
All of this is really an issue of how awfully sterile the game is as a whole.

Everything is a set specific percent that doesn't scale. Defensive cooldowns should have actually scaled on a stat, or multiple stats, instead of just "Flat buff or percentage of some type". WAR used to have a few things kind of like this, and it was my favorite job.

Hell now even MP is a flat amount across the board. I've been criticizing SE for years on their completely sterile padded room of a game, well now those hens are finally coming home to roost for everyone else. They didn't know how to balance things in the extremely non-lenient system they built for themselves, so to balance they just homogenized even further.