What could DRK have learned from FFXI?

[Cabalabob]

Heavy armour does not make a job a tank. DRKs throughout the series wore heavy armour to compensate for the fact they were consuming their own hp to deal more damage. There was nothing tanky about them. Sure they could tank by giving up their identity as a DRK (e.g. NOT consuming their own hp), but at that point you might as well be using a knight/paladin (something even Cecil realised).

The point here is that unlike most DRKs throughout the series, FFXI DRK didn’t just not use its skills to tank, it had skills that actually let it tank as mentioned in the OP. Yet none of these skills made it into FFXIV.

In other words, the only iteration of DRK in ff history that had tank-like skills was not drawn from for a tank iteration of DRK.

You can say “oh well ffxiv is doing its own thing”. But you could give a job a club, cloth armour and time magic and call it dragoon. But that would be dragoon in name alone since it doesn’t bring anything that identifies it as a dragoon.

The main problem is that several DRK related skills in FFXI had already been given to other jobs before DRK even existed.
Reflect damage back ? Vengeance
Absorb damage as HP ? Bloodbath
Putting you at risk to do more damage ? Blood for Blood
etc...

That's probably why it's hard to keep the iconic identity of DRK.

Counter attacks I’d say belong more on WAR. The reducing defense and consuming own HP however I think they avoided that because a tank that consumes its own hp would be a healers nightmare.

That left drain tanking as the only thing that could really fit as a “DRK theme” but like you said when DRK released WAR also had a monopoly on that with skills like bloodbath, storm’s path and inner beast. And this left DRK in kind of an identity crisis because it didn’t want to copy WAR.

Fast forward to today and how ironic. WAR has lost a lot of its drain identity to be more of a dps tank. And DRK is now, go figure... copying WAR.