Firestreak said:
Kisada wasn't that you who tanked for my WHM's party for a while as WAR after our NIN DCed in Boyahda Tree? I remember after that whole thing I'd been saying that WARs can make a very decent tank if they know what they're doing.
sorry lol that wasn't me
With one set of shadows, no shield on and defender down, A war will not out tank a pld or a nin often after 40, and never after 50. A war CANNOT deal top tier dmg AND tank at the same time. A war has half the ninjitsu skill of a nin the same level, and only one set of shadows. Unless you focus on def, your going to loose your shadows and not be able to get them back up. I know this, because i see it everytime i party with a war. The shadows go down, and they don't come back up. Unless a war is focused on def, they're not gonna be able to take a hit like a pld, and if they are focused on def, they're not doing half the damage they should be.
With elegy (especially carnage elegy) and slow both on, a war won't have any problems tanking anything, even with one set of shadows. In this instance, a war doesn't need to be focused on defense to tank, they just need to put shadows up and deal as much damage as possible. They may not evade as much as a nin, and the may take a few hits, but in the end a war/nin in a proper party is just more efficient. They can deal more damage than both jobs, hold more hate than both jobs, and save almost as much MP as a ninja can. Ninjutsu skill is irrelevant when it comes to elegy.
A war can tank in later levels at the cost of their dmg, but they can't blink as well as a nin, and they can't take hits like a pld. A war without def tanking is a dead war, a war with def is a war with half the dmg dealing capacity they should have.
Actually, a war can tank a wide variety of things in later levels
because of their damage. My ls fights fafnir occasionally, and my personal preference is to use war/nin and nin/war tanks. With brd songs and haste, they speed the fight up significantly through meleeing, and can also maintain a high threshold on hate. Our fastest fight had two war/nins and a nin tanking, and the blms couldn't do very much to match our wars' damage. I understand you're probably referring to party situations only, but this is just moreso to say that at the end of the monster spectrum (let alone exp), wars don't always need to sacrifice damage to tank things.
Also, obviously there isn't any job that can blink like a nin (4 shadows on ni), or take hits like a pld(excluding a few specific instances) but in later levels you don't always fight things that require evasion or defense. In fact, a lot of the time you get to fight things that chew up your shadows no matter how much evasion you have, or knock you down a few hundred HP no matter how much defense you are stacking (or both). When neither are necessities to fight, most of the time it's just better to elegy/slow a monster, and have someone blink all the hits off. Evasion and defense are normally thrown out the window in these circumstances.
I would be more inclined to say that your average party is good enough to at least slow a monster. If they can at least do that, a late level warrior will have perhaps less flexibility than a nin, but they can definitely outdamage both nin and pld, as well as take less damage than a pld.
. With one nin exception and ya know who you are 
