The problem with Gladiator was it's basically the poor man's FFXI Paladin. It does well enough against a single target, but this is FFXIV, a game where roaming parties are pretty much the only way to exp, and fighting several different mobs at once. We get very little in terms of viable AoE tools, War Drum wasn't all that effective, Circle Slash is garbage, they utterly destroyed the blocking system to being trivial, Warmonger is weaker than on MRD, the list goes on for days.

Whereas with MRD, they have a wide array of AoE abilities and weaponskills, Storm's Path alone could allow you to tank for most fights, pretty good defense, and far from terrible HP. I really would love to hear the dev's reasoning behind the changes to these two jobs in 1.19, and how someone didn't stand up and say, "...wait, isn't this terribly unbalanced?"

Regardless, the "Oh shit, let's rectify our mistakes yet again" patch that's coming up looks fairly promising for Gladiator. Enmity should no longer be an issue, even with a large group of enemies, and defense seems to be beefed up even. I am only curious as to if they fixed blocking, that will make or break the job. If you use an ability like Deflection, you damn well better be getting at least a 50% proc rate on it.