I’ll start off with the tanks.

PLD: Support tank using white magic. I feel like it really hit the nail on the head in stormblood. It was really a shame when they nerfed cover because it is PLDs iconic ability and it really felt like it in that expansion rather than the gimmick bolt on it is in every other expansion used for basically nothing but cheese strats. Clemency also felt a lot more useful, it has been nerfed so many times and they added healing on to so many other aspects of the job that it has really dropped in effectiveness, don’t get me wrong it’s still a great heal but it’s definitely not what it used to be.

WAR: There are so many potential identities for WAR. The middle ground tank between offence and defence, the counter tank, the high aggro tank with high HP and self healing but little mitigation. It has been so many things just in the FF series, let alone if you include other games. Right now it feels like it’s trying to be all of them and it’s making WAR far too powerful.

DRK: It’s hard to assign DRK an identity because its primary identity in the series is a DPS. It sacrifices HP to deal increased damage and that does not translate well to a tank. It has however had some tanky elements to it in previous games that they could have adopted for a tank DRK (and they basically used none of them). In FFX-2 and FFXI it had access to dark magic which gave it access to things like drain to recover HP, aspir to recover MP, drain-VIT to steal an enemies defence and raise its own, drain-STR to lower an enemies damage dealt and raise its own, dread spikes to absorb health whenever an enemy struck them and bio, a DoT that also lowered the enemies attack power, aswell as abilities like blood weapon to steal HP on hit. But the identity they seem to be going for with DRK is some kind of magic tank that uses MP to create barriers… so basically rune knight.

GNB: Once again it’s hard to give this an identity as it’s based on one character in one game in the series who had no actual set role. But given the lighter armour design compared to the other tanks and the idea of having increased striking power with the weapon based on good timing on a trigger pull, i’d say a parry tank fits it the best, perhaps having shorter duration cooldowns with decaying effects so you need to time their use as close to when you need them as possible. Right now it feels like it has absolutely no identity and is just somewhere between DRK and PLD.