Quote Originally Posted by Peregrine View Post
A gladiator is already a waste of a party slot in the entirety of the designed game thus far. They're already going to have a hard time getting invites to these new parties that reward effort and innovation. If you invite a gladiator to field SP party right now, you will get less sp because of it. As bad as mrd is at tanking, a glad is even worse at DD'ing. I'm saying these horrible things now because no amount of politeness or pretending is going to hide that truth from the population eventually when **** hits the fan and it's your sp per hour on the line when the TNL's are 230,000.
Your mistake is assuming grind parties for SP. I have a feeling a good chunk of content and progression as a whole is going to be tied to dungeons...where you need a tank to get through as much as you need healers and DPS.
If you make mrd anything other than a mediocre tank then you completely eliminate gladiator's usefulness. If you enhanced gladiator's damage capability then you completely eliminate marauder's usefulness. If you make them both about the same then what is the fundamental point in even making them different at all, why don't you just make it a heavy nuking class that can heal.
You're thinking all or nothing, whereas I like to think of emphasis on player choice. The comparison to healer/nuker is pointless and baseless at best, because they're both melee classes with tanking potential. People do things for reasons other than most DPS or most damage mitigation (hence why I am a melee Red Mage enthusiast). It can remain this way provided the devs don't do something stupid like start copying the timesinks and risk/reward ratios from FFXI. Ideally, if a guy likes tanking with a two-hander instead of sword and board, then by god he should be allowed to. Specially so if it helps increase the pool of available tanks.

We need to stop this crap about choice being non-existent. Multiple playstyles per weapon class is a good thing. I just wish the Matsui had opened that option for the upcoming jobs as well.