Roles for Samurai, Red Mage, Dancer

[Welsper59]

Are we still talking about FFXI? I would not cite FFXI to be the sole reason that a job should be anything. But okay, I'll go with XI.

MNK definitely did not have better mitigation. It also had paper armor.

Could it be turned into a tank that makes sense? Sure, with some tweaking. Was it used as a tank in XI in some cases? Yes. But we already have MNK, and it isn't one, and I can't think of any good example of it being anything similar to a tank in the FF franchise. So I don't feel there is any need to argue for MNK being a tank, and I personally would not do so, either.

The only way THF could tank better than SAM was with /NIN. That wasn't THF tanking. It was quasi-ninja tanking. The only thing THF had was unreliable high evasion. I still will not count an ability you can use every 2 hours as an example of tanking. 30 seconds was hardly enough time to tank anything.

Samurai is different. It's always had heavy armor. In its original form, it had Shirahadori. Shirahadori makes a return in FFT as a notoriously overpowered defensive ability. Even if you don't go out of your way to exploit the ablity's mechanics, it's extremely powerful for most characters. And on FFXI, despite it obviously being a DD, did have some explicit tanking abilities as I already mentioned.

To bring up Overwhelm one final time. They could have chosen to give Samurai any positional requirement. They gave it the front position. I don't think this was chance or coincidence. I think it was intentional with the Samurai image in mind. Now, if they gave them that same position on this game, there has so far only been one role that uses that position. Sneak Attack is the one exception, but that isn't used as often as most attacks. In this game, the front is far more dangerous than many other games. Regularly used cone attacks are commonplace, and they hit like a truck if you're not a tank. So if they make it a front position fighter, the most likely role for that position is tank.

Then there's the job image. Unlike a lot of the jobs in FF, this one has a real life counterpart. And with that real life counterpart comes an image. In this case, probably the most popular image is a result of Bushido. Much like the chivalric knight, which is the quintessential hero of legend. These two images are pretty much analogous. Most things you can apply to the chivalric knight you can apply to the samurai. We already have the knight job; here we call it Paladin. I would not consider it far-fetched to see Samurai being added as the eastern-themed knight.

Someone else mentioned Log Horizon, which has a great example of a Samurai tank. That said, that's a more flexible game, and it can also be played as a dps. In LH, Samurai is actually a region exclusive class for Japan. The Western Europe version of Samurai is Paladin.

I'm not mentioning any of these as strong arguments for SAM tank individually. I'm looking at this all as a whole package. Overall, taking all of these things into account, I think SAM tank would make a lot of sense and would be a perfect fit for it. As also mentioned before, it's one of very few existing jobs in FF that make sense as a tank.

I hope you realize that the only reason the SAM from XI argument even continues now, is because you brought up the trait as an example of tanking to begin with.

And you brought up FFXI's Samurai before. They had a trait that gave them an attack boost when facing the enemy face to face. Good luck getting that to work in this game.

Keep playing it out like I mentioned SAM not being able to tank, which I have NOT ONCE stated. In fact, I frequently mentioned it'd work both ways. The only reason I originally brought up XI SAM is to showcase that it's an example of it working in an MMORPG as a fulltime DPS, something that you can't really prove the same for with tanking (show me a SAM tank doing what normal tanks, or even MNK or THF could tank, while the content is endgame relevant and I'll concede the XI argument entirely). Also, to point out about you saying a THF/NIN isn't a THF tanking... just wow. You expect SAM to be able to keep threat without Provoke? Even PLD wasn't capable of reliably holding threat without /WAR for Provoke and beneficial stats/abilities/traits.

Again, I have to always point this out because you folks can't read or understand past certain points of words, I'm not saying SAM can't or shouldn't be a tank. I'm saying that nearly all arguments for it to be a tank, can be used to argue benefits that DPS partake in (including the risk vs reward Overwhelm trait). Other posters have even agreed on that point lol.

Now if you want to talk about examples elsewhere, like FFT or other non-FF games, yeah, we have far better examples of potential that don't contradict other non-DPS type of jobs/classes (or what seems like would be a "tank", for games without official roles like FFT). You, however, wanted to go into examples that XI SAM has to defend it being a tank (which it officially wasn't accepted as, unlike NIN). I then pointed out counter examples of defensive abilities, traits, stats, etc from other non-tank jobs to show that it doesn't mean much. Thus, here we are.