Warrior Tank?

[Crayfish]

I tanked as war from 15 to 64 then after 66 mob stats change and it getting to a point I sponge too much to rather be efficiently but once I hit 71 I tanked again as a cake.

Normal gears unmerited and standard play. XP PT only.

[Furionstormrage]

Anyone have any information about IRON tanking?
I did a little searching but came up dry, and I'm not familiar with it.

[Tordall]

IRON tank groups consisted of Pld/war, 2-3 war/whms, Ghorn bard, rdm. The basic strategy was that the pld & wars were blood tanking and getting hate back through cure & curaga spam. Many of the IRON members said that the Ghorn wasn't required.

It's effective, and somewhat more practical now that corsair exists so you could get enough refresh via cor + bard + rdm, rather than requiring a relic.

Honestly, there's a reason that groups outside of IRON never adopted it. It requires your HNM wars to gear very differently than they usually do, and you almost never need to use that strategy. The addition of HNMs that can one-shot people without shadows up also made the IRON war/whm stategy risky at best.

E.g. either have pld/nin, nin/drk, rdm/nin, or whatever/nin tanks blink tank if you don't want to give the mob TP, or 3 DD/nins can both tank and do damage while zerging it down.

[burytheweak]

I would like to make this clear, the Thread Subject asks: "Can warrior be considered a tank job?". For argument sake we must assume this means at any given moment, or on average, can warrior be considered a tank job? Thus, we must take FFXI on as a whole, not just limiting the argument to Wyrms, Kirin, AV, or Pandemonium Warden.

So can, on average, a warrior be considered a tank job?

No. I think just because a Warrior has the ability to tank, doesn't mean it necessarily should tank. You could easily have any job "tank" and have "oh-shit-moments" gear, but that doesn't mean you should tank on any job. Warriors cannot tank anywhere near the tanking "bar" that has been set by NIN and PLD. We can see this through their inability, on average, to reduce the amount of damage inflicted through either Evasion, VIT/HP, or Utsusemi. A MNK has greater VIT/HP, and a THF has greater Evasion, so . . . pick your poison?

It is from my experience that Warriors never have sufficient gear and a sufficient desire to tank at the efficiencies that NIN & PLD can. And thus, these Warriors who would-be tanks drain your mage's MP almost endlessly (I.E. being an inefficient tank). Sure a WAR with all sorts of tanking gear, merits, and skill would be a sufficient fill-in for a NIN or PLD, but so would a MNK, SAM, or any job with insane gear, merits, and skill because most other jobs excel in tanking areas(VIT, HP, etc.) too.

My point is that warrior tanks are like being the smartest retard in the class. Warrior can tank better than every job other than NIN & PLD, but they come in a far third place. Thus warriors, in my opinion, cannot tank because they only tank better than any job that shouldn't tank to begin with.

[Aksannyi]

Harder to hold hate, but yes, WAR can tank. I tanked several levels on my WAR with my static before we broke, and it was both challenging and fun.

[Amele]

IRON tank groups consisted of Pld/war, 2-3 war/whms, Ghorn bard, rdm. The basic strategy was that the pld & wars were blood tanking and getting hate back through cure & curaga spam. Many of the IRON members said that the Ghorn wasn't required.

It's effective, and somewhat more practical now that corsair exists so you could get enough refresh via cor + bard + rdm, rather than requiring a relic.

Honestly, there's a reason that groups outside of IRON never adopted it. It requires your HNM wars to gear very differently than they usually do, and you almost never need to use that strategy. The addition of HNMs that can one-shot people without shadows up also made the IRON war/whm stategy risky at best.

E.g. either have pld/nin, nin/drk, rdm/nin, or whatever/nin tanks blink tank if you don't want to give the mob TP, or 3 DD/nins can both tank and do damage while zerging it down.

IRON war tanking got the most publicity around the time that people were doing fire resist builds for tiamat.. it's alot easier to build a fire resist set on war (sup suzu sune-ate) than it is on other 'tank' jobs, and that made war/whm a strong air tank for wyrms (ice is a similar story, just a different piece, etc)

but honestly, if the goal is a curaga capable air tank with good resists, whitemage would be able to do it just fine (either whm/war or whm/nin) - barspells are good hate tools, so is Curaga III, and properly merited/equipped a whitemage is cutting damage on themselves to 44% before resists are even considered, and will have 292 fire resist in the right gear + barfire + carol.

this isn't to say that I think whitemage is a viable tank, just that air tanking wyrms is a different paradigm than tanking say, khimaera. IRON solved it in an interesting way; but the lessons IRON learned here would be difficult to apply in other situations.