What about creating an ACTUAL Dark Knight?

[MaraD_]

The first attribute of a tank is to focus all attacks on him, what MMO call enmity. In that regard, DRG are the absolute worst tank precisely because they force the ennemy to hit somebody else.

that is a rule you created, and isnt actually a requirement.
It is a very common standard though.
Allowing the group to win is the #1 priority. If letting the group die, allows you to win, but winning wouldnt be possible otherwise, then it doesnt matter.

You can make an RPG with only offensive options, and no defensive options.
Make the groups total DPS high enough, and you win.
But then its just like the card game war.

This is why "Defensive" options exist. But in the end, it still ends up being a game of war, but 1 exta layer, to make it look less simplistic.
You could make an MMO where the "DPS check" was when everyones HP reaches 0, and HP never goes up.
But you can constantly throw out mitigation on top of mitigation, to extend how long the fight will last.
But you will quickly be able to tell if you'll win or lose a fight, at the very start of a fight.
This is why healing is used to make a tug of war.
Its much harder to judge if you're going to win or lose a fight, adding tension, even to decent players, and giving false hope to bad players.

In short, your options are offense to the win condition, or defense, to make it a more complex tug of war.

DRGs jump ability is mostly a defensive option, even more so since its a DPS loss.
But that DPS loss is backed up by helping the "tug of war" element that "Defensive play" adds to the game.
Survive long enough to heal.
Protecting party members from dying is to prevent a wipe/game over. if everyone dies, but 1 person remains to finish the fight, thats still a win.
in this case, the DRG lives to revive everyone else.
In short, its like giving everyone else holmgang, while you drop threat and gain hallowed ground.
If such a move existed, it would still be good enough to accomplish your task.

Put Cecil in the back row, and he only take scratch damage, far lower than his capacity to heal himsel, which is why a Cecil solo run is just a piece of cake.

It was always useful to make sure weaker characters don't take hits.

any character playing solo gains x5 the exp. this is the primary reason it works. the next reason would be the lack of healing items scaling with your current HP pool, where as a cecil who is nearly double the required level will finally heal more than what enemies do in dmg. (not so much him being in the back row. I soloed the game with him in the front row just fine.)
Also, i never disagreed to putting him in the back row, so long as you didnt force a caster in the front row. My 1st play through, i put him in the back row multiple times as well.

In FFIV, you can manually decide who you want to Cover, on top of automatically Covering anyone with critical HP, again, ensuring that weaker target don't take too much hits.

It does, it always did.

Back row characters still take damage. If they're at critical HP, they would still die if not covered.

im a bit confused here, maybe im miss-remembering FF4, but thought cover only worked when they were at critical hp, and not at full HP.
then again, maybe its a difference between SNES/GBA/DS versions, as some things got changed, and im thinking of a different build.

but on a side note, im not suggesting PLD cecil isnt a tank, so much as the way SE designed the game, all melee were capable tanks by the standards SE set up, but not necessarily by the standards MMOs eventually set up.

"Tanks" arent really an archetype like people tend to think.
There is a trope that gets copied into tanks, but mostly due to how certain games functioned, and they were built to take advantage of the games mechanics.
Most MMOs copied those features, so even in games like FFXI, where they wanted all melee to take turns tanking, and not just simply 1 person tanking, people still made a singular tank, due to FFXI retaining the same features that caused people to make this stereotypical tank in the 1st place.

Mitigation, to lessen healers workload, or save them MP.
Threat control, to force all damage to be filtered by them.
Dealing damage, usually used for threat multipliers.

All 3 of those can be given to other roles.
Threat doesnt need to go to "tanks" but its more defensive, than offensive, so threat control can be slapped onto a healer.
Mitigation can also be slapped onto a healer.

Lets make a game where you grab 10 DPS, and 1 healer.
The healer controls threat, either entirely, or in short bursts.
But lets say they dont control threat. Instead, they redirect most of the damage to another target of their choice. this way no mater who gets hit, they know who to target.
Now the "tank buster" comes out.
They can mitigate that person for the TB.
They can slap on a buff to increase how much they heal that person, also adding a reason to redirect dmg towards them.

with this design, there is no "tank" as anyone can be the target of the healers moves. just simply a partner to the healers moves.

I agree Cecil is "more" tanky than most of the group, both in survivability, AND the ability to protect the group.
but since tanking is far more complex than that, there's other ways to "tank", since tanking is just a play style within the game design of "Defense".
(Which is the more accurate way to describe tanking imo, as it makes it far more clear why DRG shouldnt be considered a "tank" as it implies a gameplay style, rather than gameplay design)

[Reynhart]

that is a rule you created, and isnt actually a requirement.

It's as much a requirement as having a tank in the party, which may not be necessary if you can indeed burn the content faster than you die. Fun fact, I did FF I, III, VI and VII as an "Attack only" challenge, meaning you only can do normal attack over and over in combat (Limit Break are allowed for VII since they "remove" your attack command). And yes, in those games, it works, so you can skip having a "tank". It's still the primary role of a tank.

im a bit confused here, maybe im miss-remembering FF4, but thought cover only worked when they were at critical hp, and not at full HP.

I've double checked and even in Final Fantasy "II", Cecil had a Cover command. The critical part is a passive trait. In FF III, the Knight has only the passive Cover for critical HP.

but on a side note, im not suggesting PLD cecil isnt a tank, so much as the way SE designed the game, all melee were capable tanks by the standards SE set up, but not necessarily by the standards MMOs eventually set up.

Except that again, other frontline characters weren't able to do any "tanking", and DRK Cecil had comparatively low stats, making this job clearly not a "high def, high HP" job...on top of slowly killing himself. But again, I don't say that this concept couldn't be used for a tank, just that, before XIV, no DRK had actually real tank attributes/mechanics compared to other jobs from the same game.

Most MMOs copied those features, so even in games like FFXI, where they wanted all melee to take turns tanking

They didn't. FFXI was very restricting in the tank department when it launched. Only a PLD/WAR could tank properly since PLD was the only one that could survive at high level, and WAR was mandatory for Provoke. in Zilart, they tried to make SAM the next tank but they didn't realized how broken they made Utsusemi, so NIN took the role. Only years later, you ended with almost all melee that could tank, because 1) Damage enmity was absurd and 2) healers were overpowered. Fun fact, when they crippled enmity from damage, it almost killed every tank except PLD/WAR. (Yet again, it might have changed since, it's been years since I didn't play XI)

[MaraD_]

They didn't. FFXI was very restricting in the tank department when it launched. Only a PLD/WAR could tank properly since PLD was the only one that could survive at high level, and WAR was mandatory for Provoke. in Zilart, they tried to make SAM the next tank but they didn't realized how broken they made Utsusemi, so NIN took the role. Only years later, you ended with almost all melee that could tank, because 1) Damage enmity was absurd and 2) healers were overpowered. Fun fact, when they crippled enmity from damage, it almost killed every tank except PLD/WAR. (Yet again, it might have changed since, it's been years since I didn't play XI)

It wasnt restricted, the problem was they restructured threat, due to how the japanese players were abusing the system before the game came to the west.
The original plan was mobs would bounce around between melee, since cures generated 0 threat originally. (so only melee could generate threat, with BLM not generating much at the time.) Melee lost threat every time they were hit, so any melee being hit for too much, would cause the mob to switch to the next highest dmging DPS.
Magical WSs were very strong, and Banish was extremely powerful as well.
groups went full WHM PTs, and this led to the complete ruin of magical WSs (which have been jokes for years) massive threat increase on cures (PLD was considered rather useless, since unlike the other melee, couldnt generate any threat, wasting all that defense) and i believe most debuffs and spells gained significant threat.
Provoke before this change was more of an emergency CD, since its a seperate pool of threat that decayed way faster, it was meant as temporary relief, in case things didnt go well between the melee. It wasnt meant to be the sole means of controlling all threat always.

THAT is when the game became too much like a typical MMO, and PLDs were the desired tank.
WARs tanking with provoke became a desire, only because cure bombing peopel generated too much threat, and WHMs massive jump into being weaker required tanks to save them. (along with people deciding to fight IT mobs rather than chain T mobs (which were better exp/hour than IT mobs if chained right)

NIN was mostly meant for the utsu to slap onto melee as a SJ, and bounce mobs around again. NINs being able to tank was again, like edge, meant to make them be able to take hits as a melee.
(Which THF struggled with, w/o dedicating too much evasion to, lowering dmg too much.)
The only way THF could have generated threat back then, was after all the melee got hit, and lost threat from the damage they took, putting THF last in line of the melee.
The JP players did use /NIN to do just this, but NIN was so over tuned, it was able to do it solo originally.
Eventually it was lowered to the point of being "good enough", but the idea of having to bounce a mob between them was still similar enough to what SE was originally planning melee to do. (to mimic old school FFs)

But unlike other MMOs, instead of overly balancing jobs, they let the players create the play styles, rather than forcing them. The only time they change stuff, was to nerf exploits, or ways in which players gained more than the devs intended. (like the penta nerf, due to MNKs using high delay 1 dmg weapons for infinite TP.)

When the game came to the US, a lot of the NA players were behind on what was the normal for the JP players, and had a VERY different culture/play style.
A lot of overlap eventually happened once players of both sides intermixed, and took good ideas from eachother of course.