What about creating an ACTUAL Dark Knight?

[ADVSS]

And, like I said, you can probably make a tank out of this, with abilities costing HP to do damage, and a drain line of spells. Technically, you could use the absorb line as a justification for mitigation (Like putting Vulnerability while reducing damage received, absorbing defense, etc...)

What seems wasted to me is that because they only half-baked the "tank with high HP" concept, they completely thrown it away in 2.1. After all, since PLD had Rampart and Sentinel, WAR could have multiple "tier" of ToB, Inner Beast could have stayed at 300% damage converted into healing, but with any overheal increasing your max HP for a few seconds, etc...

Yeah, it's really interesting that you bring this up, which is a really good perspective on how they couldve done things differently, at least starting in HW, but even more so the direction leading outward till now. I think I'm gonna need to Edit this in a bit, you got me thinking. In that given hypothetical, like you said they changed up WAR identity quite a bit, but left that identity to where it might have been better suited for a DRK later down the road. I often wonder, how drastically job identity got lessened due to the cross role line up of additional skills over the latter(HW and before SB), Hmmm.