Quote Originally Posted by Nominous View Post
Nail on the head! Exactly my point. Let's say Samurai was Tank like (some) people wanted. Then what, you have SAM/WAR locked, with PLD/DRK both dead for an expansion? It'd be nice for those interested, but then you'd do more damage to the tanking community than good. All in all, the lesser of two evils happened.
Simple. If SAM is a dps style tank like WAR, make WAR and SAM noticeably worse MTing. Make it so they cant use defensive CDs in DPS stance or offensive CDs in Tanking stance. This way while they are capable of MTing, their dps is noticeably weaker when being hit by the boss and switching to DPS stance is inherently risky since while in DPS stance they lose all access to mitigation. It means you usually wont want a PLD or DRK in an OT position but on the flipside you won't want a WAR or SAM in the MT. Thus you only really need to balance WAR vs SAM and PLD vs DRK.

On of the biggest issues with balancing tanks and healers is that people don't seem to get that there are two types of both classes. Each role has two sub roles. SCH doesn't compete with WHM because SCH cant fill WHM's role. You will never lose your WHM role to a SCH. This is why its such a mess. They are trying to balance 3 jobs for to different roles while leaving them with unique strengths and weaknesses. That isn't ever going to work.

This is why I am sceptical. You cant balance all the tanks and healers perfectly with each other and keep them unique. You either have them become pretty much the same but with different themes or you specialise them. You cant do both.