Preventing homogenization in tank mitigation

[Cabalabob]

I think the ship has sailed on tanks getting unique mitigation. I like the idea, I just think it’s too late.

PLD to me worked well in stormblood, lacking personal mitigation in favour of group mitigation, intervention to support the MT with the ability to give up their personal mitigation to enhance it further and then using cover as their go to cooldown where other tanks would have to do a swap so they won’t need that personal mitigation anyway. I hear a lot of people say they feel like PLD should be the defacto MT because it has a shield. But I point out to them if you look at classic FF titles, how does a PLD protect their party? Do they take aggro? No, they cover them. Provoke and taking aggro has always been the job of the WAR, while the PLD provides support mitigation.

On the same note I liked the idea of the WAR being more about generating large aggro and rather than mitigation it would focus on just having a huge HP pool. I always think they overcompensated in ARR when it came to WAR, the change to holmgang letting them prevent themselves from dropping below 1HP was enough. They didn’t need the change to vengeance or inner beast, it could have just been a tank that focused on keeping aggro and staying alive (with support from the PLD).

DRK I think could have been a drain based tank. In FFXI DRK was essentially a melee job that could use dark magic, it had a line of spells that absorbed enemy stats to buff their own, this would have been a great concept to build on for a tank iteration of DRK, absorb strength to lower enemy damage dealt, absorb vitality to reduce damage taken, drain to self heal, dread spikes to absorb damage taken as HP and blood weapon to drain HP with every attack. They also had other dark magic like bio that lowered enemy attack power, this could have been a full uptime DoT similar to WARs old storm’s path. They also had some moves like scarlet delirium that increase their damage dealt based on how much damage they took from the next attack, this could have been reworked into a mitigation tool that decreased your damage taken more after a big hit.

GNB could have been an evasion and parry tank. I know people cringe at the sound of that but if the game had evolved in a different direction it could have worked, look at ninja in FFXI. It could have had moves that allow it to dodge 50% of the time, so rather than mitigating damage consistently it would just negate damage half the time. Abilities that allow it to force a parry, abilities that allow it to guarantee a dodge. Similar to WAR it would be a tank that focuses on keeping aggro and staying alive with the help of the support tanks like PLD and DRK.