Quote Originally Posted by Donjo View Post
Referencing the FFXI Ninja at all in a discussion about tanks is a can of worms. I know I never played the game, but I still know that Ninja was not developed to be a tank and was only given enmity generating abilities once bad design allowed the community to use it as one. The main question here is "was the Ninja hate shedding move meant to help it perform its originally intended DPS role, or was it an ability specifically tailored to help them tank?"
I don't recall it ever actually being given enmity generating abilities. We generated enmity through a combination of provoke from warrior subjob, spinning the elemental wheel and damage (coupled with some SATA,but again I'm going wayyy back before the level caps were raised so maybe there was some enmity updates afterward). You may be thinking of them adding enmity decay to shadows, which wasn't originally there and why at the start the players jumped on it as it was SOOO effective as a tank.

It is completely irrelevant though, because my comment was steered more towards "the idea isn't COMPLETELY terrible and can be situationally used look at how it was here", not that I thought the design of Ninja as a DD turned Tank able to DD again was something to model Paladin after. I would prefer to see paladin modeled after, well, Paladin in XI if anything, with maybe a splattering of ideas from other games. Combat-caster classes can be super fun to play, but right now paladin doesn't "feel" like one.