Quote Originally Posted by fulminating View Post
Gnb is a generic tank. Going off the few job quests and artefact armour I think bodyguard might have been the theme they were going for or maybe squall roleplay if that counts, but I don’t think it’s come across clearly. Maybe this is a product of being added in shadowbringers. Heart of corundum and aurora can be put on a friend, but paladin feels more like one with wings and cover and clemency and veil. I don’t think it particularly works as the described anti-gun troop from bozja either, but they haven’t really done anything to make garlean guns seem all that dangerous in game compared with literally everything else.
I guess I have to wonder what "anti-gun" is supposed to look like. To me, I'd imagine you'd have the ability to quickly close the distance (full-blitzing in), mitigate that distance through dense cover (guerilla warfare), and/or to disrupt them (either disproportionately affecting ranged attacks or just amping up disruption in general, which rifleman and casters would be especially susceptible to). None of that really comes across on GNB outside of tiny bits of flavor text (Camouflage, etc.).

Speaking of flavor text, though, GNB's naming scheme --Aurora, Camouflage, Gnashing Fang, Heart of Stone-- does at least come off as fairly... primal. It feels Hrothgari. It just needs to actually bring that over to the mechanics.

If anyone's played Mists/WoD Feral Druid, for instance, you might have already run into the idea of a hypermobile harasser/bleeder spec (though more a predator than a disruptor) with a side of offensively-fed deliberate support tools.

I'd have expected GNB to play out a bit more like that, bouncing between enemies as sort of a shock-and-awe or hit-and-run evasion tank (not simply in terms of being dependent on RNG mitigation -- *gag* -- but in terms of wanting to use enemies or their attacks as pseudo-cover for a far more integral sense of movement).