Victimize recast and Simian Thrash

[KRose]

provoke / featherfoot. then when you evade you can smack em in the mouth for big damage, after that ur tank can take back over.

Typically it'd be Taunt that you'd use since it forces you to tank temporarily. There's technically nothing wrong with that method but it's one of those things that works well on paper and not so well in practice. Featherfoot I & II aren't 100% Evades so you might be taunting just to get smacked, or simply might not even get the chance to evade before Taunt wears off and it goes back to attacking the tank since it only lasts a couple seconds. It isn't viable for Haymaker/Jarring Strike but you can mess around with it for Simian Thrash.

thing is archer is gearing up to be a buff or CC class, and pugilist has to be right next to an enemy to dps, even more so than lancer.

Thing is, none of us know what Pugilist is gearing up to be. As you stated, any +evasion gear Pugilist gets at the moment can actually be worn by any of the DoW so there's no real unique aspect to it. I don't know how you're geared, how you play or your skillsets or anything but if I pull hate in strongholds (which happens fairly frequently actually) I can quite easily hold my own until it dies or the tank gets hate. It's not like Pugilist really has any strong AoE attacks so I'm almost always picking something off with Victimize II and countering it down.
Now I haven't even bothered trying to tank any of the stronghold mobs. If you wanted to gear to tank you could. It's not like another DD is gonna equip Sipahi Shirt and things like that just because they can too. I've wanted to mess around with it but I haven't done a lot of key-farming at this point... just spiritbonding.

by increase cost i mean, any means of associating a cost with it, so it doesnt make its on evasion feature useless,
some examples
mp cost
increased timer
increased tp cost
when not used in evasion, thus you get the added benefit when used in counter, but pugilist has some skill that is powerful that it can use whenever it can get the tp, rather then when tanking, since apparently we arent going to be given the gear or skills to tank effeciently.

We have no idea what kind of skills we're going to get until 1.20 rolls in with the whole adjustment thing. It does feel like PGL kind of got the short end of the stick gear wise but hopefully that's addressed too. But if they make it so you don't nee to evade to use Simian Thrash, I wouldn't expect it to be as powerful as it is right now.