Red Mage as possible new tank class

[Ruminate]

Not really. If they're a melee support DPS job, which I would expect, the black magic and melee would be the effects of the attacks and the support functionality would be the equivalent of the white magic. They will, in all likelihood, be something like a melee Bard: TP DPS with 2-3 job abilities that allow them to provide some support and a few attacks that consume MP.

It's important to remember that FFXIV doesn't use the standard mechanical definitions of the classes (Red Mage always had a fuzzy mechanical definition anyways, since it was just "white + black magic" rather than anything truly unique). PLD, mechanically, was always a very durable melee/white magic class, but our PLD doesn't have any non-token white magic capabilities. The *theme* is present, but the previous mechanical construct isn't. Hell, Black Mages used to be the owners of most of the spells that SUM uses but those previous constructs were abandoned to give Summoners *something*.

The *theme* of Red Mage has always been a melee/magic hybrid. It was slightly more durable than the standard mage without ever really being as durable as a "true" melee, not to mention that it pretty much always lacked the strong support capabilities of a white mage and never had appreciable avoidance capabilities (that was always ninja/thief/monk). Honestly, for an avoidance/light armored tank, it would be a lot more likely to see Ninja than Red Mage. It's interesting to think up ways for Red Mage to be a tank class, but it's a stretch to make it a tank rather than the more easily approachable DPS/support construct.

The only "Knight"(localized as Paladin) in non-remake, non-MMO FF games that had white magic was in FF4. In every other FF, "Knights" were frontline fighters with high damage. Infact, "Knights" were the class upgrade to Warriors in the original FF1.

The RDM was a frontline fighter that could cast black and white magic. If the class was a frontline fighter in the previous FF, then they were durable. The fact that they could cast Cure, Regen, Slow, Stop, Protect, Shell, etc. actually gave them an edge in survivability over other frontline fighters.