Crazy Idea: Blue Mage Shield-Based Tank?

[MoMcThinky]

had this crazy idea for reworking Blue Mage into something ppl might enjoy while also creating a fresh take on the idea of a tank.

the actual health bar would remain the size of a standard dps/mage, but you'd have insane self-shielding options that could give you multiple times your own health in shielding. the catch would be that your best dps would expend shields as a resource.

from a lore perspective it wouldn't be that hard of a retcon. take the greedy showman/borderline fraud that is the blue mage teacher and let him be sort of incompetent. reveal that the reason blue mages of old even experimented with being hit by beast magic in the first place was because of their specialty in shields. perhaps they would attune one health-bar's worth of shields to the attack that hits it and then were capable of consuming that shield in order to reproduce the very attack levied against them. keep the showmanship stuff but let that be the tank stance.

from a balance perspective, the biggest issue is that this would create the ultimate green tank and would almost, if not entirely, invalidate any healer's contributions. maybe make the tank stance cause party member's to take more damage from being distracted so the healer's have more to do? probably a bad idea but it's the first band aid I came up with.

[Ransu]

Turning blue mage into a core job would entirely defeat the point of a blue mage, which is learning enemy skills. They're not going to change that and it will always be a limited job.

[MoMcThinky]

so at the time of posting i was unaware of the history of blue mage. My only experience with FF is 14 and watching a let's play of 7 remake. I still think the idea of a tank via damage nullification rather than health would be a really cool idea but it seems blue mage is not a candidate for that role.