How to make tanks more fun to play (devs please read)

[therpgfanatic]

Something about this game makes tanks so boring. I can't quite put my finger on it, but every other MMO I've played (EQ, EQ2, DaoC, WoW, Lineage, CoH, and more) the tank or tank-types were always interesting and fun. Well...okay they weren't much fun in WoW, but that's WoW...

In other games, it helps when the tanks' DPS feels like a meaningful contribution to the party. Off-tanking sucks completely because you do so little damage you may as well not even be there.

Auto-attack might be 25% of a Paladin's damage, but that doesn't mean it's significant damage. I'm pretty sure autoattack isn't 25% of anyone else's DPS. And the 25% assumption only works if you look at a specific, long time frame; auto-attack isn't 25% of the damage a Paladin does on weak trash mobs that die in a few Halone combos. There is too much theorycrafting held sacred by players that doesn't work off the spreadsheet and limits their viewpoints on how actual gameplay works.

I also hope Ninja isn't a tank job. Samurai I can understand, since they wear armor, but it doesn't make any real sense to me for Ninjas to be tanks. Ninjas should be dual-wielding DPSers as they are in most FF games. I'm pretty sure Ninjas as tanks in FF11 was an exploit that never got addressed.

In my opinion new tank jobs should be Samurai, Dark Knight and Rune Knight (Mystic Knight). Maybe a Beastmaster too, that'd be interesting to have a Coeurl pet helping an axe-wielding plate warrior tank the boss.