Quote Originally Posted by Welsper59 View Post
The XI SAM being a tank thing is actually not true, or at least not confirmed as far as I know. The devs did a lot of questionable things with the jobs there. I mean, THF had Perfect Dodge, which sounds like a GREAT tank 2hr... but THF clearly weren't designed for that at the beginning. The only one that was confirmed unintended was NIN being a tank, but originally released intending to be DPS. SAM in that game was following a lot of the conventions that the FF series gave it from before, as a heavy armor using powerhouse with attacks that debuff (though XI's version didn't really have much of that).
The evidence is all there that SAM was meant to be a tank, likely an offense styled tank not unlike our Warriors in FFXIV. They could wear heavy armor, had abilities that allowed them to avoid damage etc. But the big indicators are the stats upon the job's Artifact Armor. Not only does it boost stats such as evasion and parry (It was thought SAM was meant to be a parry tank but parry skill ups were difficult to grind out making it very hard to rely on said parrying.) but the body piece had a chance to boost your TP when you were hit (DPS don't get hit etc.) And the biggest one of all is that their AF also had +enmity on it. A trait only shared with 2 other job's AF, Paladin and Warrior. No DPS job has +enmity on their job armor, nor any reason to have +enmity, especially on a job that has no enmity reducing abilities like DRG had etc. These things combined easily show the job was likely intended as a tank, if not some kind of pseudo-tank.

And SAM throughout Final Fantasy isn't particularly known to be a powerhouse stat-wise. They boast strong physical stats usually, yes, but most of their strength comes from their abilities to outright instantly kill an enemy which would never translate into an MMO. In some games SAM even had weaker attack stats than even the Knight class.

But yeah, ultimately SE will decide what role it has and what kind of Samurai it will be when it eventually arrives in the game (Pretty much just a matter of when, not if lol). I will play it regardless of it's role.