Don't try to tank. Throw away your shield, grab a warhammer and smash bone. Both melees and ranged builds will do an excellent job if they're focusing on physical damage. (Without min-maxing your lone wolf archer will eventually one-shot boss foes. Archers are strong, lone wolf makes everything super overpowered at some point.) Whether ranged or point-blank, magic characters won't lead to such good results.
Warfare works on physical damage from many sources: Ranged and melee physical weapons, magic. It does, afaik, not work on physical damage from teleport, telekinesis and summonings, though. But that's not physical damage you deal "directly".
