How fitting

[Shurrikhan]

I don't think that it matters which tank is the 'lifesteal tank'. What matters is that each job provides a distinct gameplay experience without giving any one job a significant advantage over the alternatives.

I think if the dev team were creating FFXIV as a new MMORPG now, with our current job selection, DRK would probably be the most sensible choice for a lifesteal/HP manipulation tank. But it makes much less sense now to revise both DRK and WAR to get there, than it does to simply push WAR further along in that same direction. It's not that big a deal.

Fully agreed. Granted, I do think there's space for them both to have lifesteal, in very different ways, but if we hadn't already had so much of WAR most filling that position, I wouldn't much care.

I do want to see the tank jobs commit more clearly to a central theme or mechanic. If you're going to have a dedicated lifesteal tank, build the entire job around it.

This is where I disagree, though. Lifesteal just isn't, itself, a sufficient theme by which to center a job.

Take your earlier spitball concept for Warrior whereby overhealing would increase maximum HP. Now, atop that, Warrior has previously had skills with potency that varies based on current HP, thus benefiting from maximum HP increases. Between those three factors we're finally getting somewhere that capitalizes on a theme. Lifesteal was the first valve we had to turn in getting there, but it's not as if we couldn't go other directions, nor that the job identity could, at a playflow or decision-making level, be summed up by just "lifesteal". It doesn't necessitate exclusive ownership over "lifesteal", but it's also the foundation for something potentially brilliant.

Consider a similar spitball concept for DRK that makes use of another traditional theme by which output increases as your %HP lowers (variously called Blood for Blood or Eye for an Eye). Sure enough, a natural fit for that would be HP-sacrificing skills, the most long-standing theme/mechanic among DRK iterations. But, if we didn't want DRK to then become painfully healer-dependent, above and beyond other tanks, just to engage with it kit, we'd probably want some sparse but powerful usage of life-steal (a la DA-AD or DA-SE, but probably with a higher baseline and not so often overwhelmed by competing with "pure offense" choices). That would again be dependent on some amount of lifesteal, but it'd be an altogether different theme.

Sometimes the minutia can be more effective than the basic type for establishing theme. Imagine if Shelltron (or whatever similarly often-used and bankable ability that might replace it) would auto-block until having absorbed X damage. That constraint would encourage CD-stacking atop Shelltron. Then, look at skills like Spirit Within, which similarly reward keeping yourself at high HP. Between them, you've got the beginnings of a theme whereby PLD wants to be steadfast at all times, as not to let the floodgates open and inevitably topple. That'd be why it has the only invuln that immunes all damage. That'd be partly why it has "emergency", throughput-sacrificing utility skills like Clemency; though it has faintly above-average strength when keeping itself ever strong during its thematic ability cycles, it's weaker in turn otherwise, and thus an "emergency" for them can start sooner than for most tanks. And all that, in turn, makes it a tank that particularly excels at (i.e., wants to be) swapping between being a strong shield, in itself, and cooperative vanguard -- very deliberate compared to the typical tank. To me, that's far more thematic than just "its eHP increase comes from RNG mitigation (Block)" or "it's the tank that has barriers", even if those give a more immediately recognizable point of departure.