Ranged Tank...

[Khalithar]

Wow, did no one in this thread ever play the Star Wars Old Republic MMO? Guess not. Alright then, let me say that yes a ranged tank absolutely can work, does work, and could work in this game if it was designed in a similar vein to the ranged tanks in SWTOR and adjusted accordingly. If you do not believe it can work, you are in fact mistaken and I will explain why.

To elaborate, I will explain how the ranged tanks in SWTOR worked and add that while I didn't main it as my tank I absolutely had tons of fun playing it. I will go in to more details about it using the Empire version which was what I played. One of the four classes of the empire was the Bounty Hunter and it could go in to an advanced class (similar to the job system only you change at level 10) called a Powertech which had a tank spec. The main weapon of the Powertech was a pistol and that's what it used for it's attacks, also the majority of it's weapon skills were ranged attacks such as missiles and flamethrowers along with some powerful AoE attacks. Mechanically speaking, the tank had the same cooldowns and mitigation tools as any other tank but the majority of it's "weapon skills" were ranged attacks.

Now I hear you asking, "but Khalithar you charismatic stallion, don't enemies run up to the tank and melee them making the ranged point moot?" To answer your question, yes but no. There were indeed many enemies that were melee and you as a Powertech tank would just stand close to them and hit them point blank in the face with pistol shots, missiles, and your flamethrowers while CCing, aoeing, holding aggro, controlling positioning and mitigating cooldowns. The only real difference were that in situations where you had to run out of melee range, the Powertech could maintain their DPS on a target better than the other tanks in addition to having better AoE damage.

So yes, a "ranged tank" could absolutely work in this game if they follow a similar route. I'm not saying they will or they should, but as I said, SWTOR already proved that you CAN have a ranged tank even with melee focused enemies and it can absolutely work in FFXIV if they were to make say... a Magitek style tank armed with a ranged weapon and similar Magitek gadgets. It probably wouldn't work with a spellcaster though since you can be interrupted while casting and during magic casting you can't parry or block.