BERSERKER!!!!!!!!

[Kitru]

My thought actually was that it might be a decent potential tank archetpe for the pugilist.

Yeah, I've done the math on it. It doesn't actually require all that much work to turn PGL into a tank and Greased Lightning offers an *excellent* mechanism to coopt into a tanking buff (just change the 9% +dam per stack into ~7.5% evasion; add a stance that increases hp by 40% and makes Raptor form generate 3x enmity and Coeurl form generate 5x enmity; all the job would need to add would be a few tank CDs to round out what PGL already brings to bear). The major problem I see with Berserker is that MRD already gets Berserk, which is the defining feature of the Berserker. As such, unless Berserk gets renamed, it's likely that Berserker is going to ride along with MRD as its DPS job.

[Sylari]

Isn't berserker traditionally a fist weapon class in FF?

[Kitru]

Isn't berserker traditionally a fist weapon class in FF?

It actually really weird. It vacillates between different weapon types. If you go by developer intention, Berserkers have traditionally been a weapon using class, specializing in either hammers or axes. The "fistiness" is derived from one of the more popular player strategies for Berserkers, generally because the math for unarmed combat means that your fists tend to be better weapons than most weapons actually are, at least until the extreme endgame and you start getting ultimate weapons (even then, sometimes going unarmed is still better). The only Berserker that outright went "unarmed" was in FFX-2, where the Berserker dressphere turned them into beast-mimicry martial artists. In this implementation, they're actually a decent model of an evasion tank. The classic model, with them wearing heavy armor and reducing their defense in exchange for ubar damage, has a much more DPS oriented vein to it.

Something I probably should have mentioned in my original post. It's something of an obstacle to turning MRD into a DPS: all mDPS have positioning requirements for DPS maximization. While it's not necessary, since it could be construed that whatever Wax/Wane mechanism is used constitutes as an equivalent complication/distraction, it's still something to consider. It would be possible to have the removal of the high enmity modifiers be accompanied by the addition of positional requirements, likely to gain the secondary benefits that MRD/WAR get for "free" (e.g. Maim's damage buff becomes a flank effect; the debuffs on Storm's Path and Storm's Eye are back effects).

[Nahara]

Berserker

Fixed the URL code for ya.