Quote Originally Posted by Duelle View Post
I think it was mentioned in one of the interviews with Famitsu, where Yoshida talked about the fact the game lacked a dagger/rogue-type class.
There's a difference between "we're missing a dagger/rogue-type class" and "THF will be its own job instead of class". The THF>NIN model that we THF-as-class people follow still fulfills the archetype of the "dagger-wielding/rogue-type" just as well as the ROG>THF model so you can't really draw any conclusions concerning Yoshi's position on the job/class dichotomy from that statement.

I doubt the devs would lock themselves into implementing jobs and classes to maintain perfect parity, as that would severely limit their options.
It's less about perfect parity and more about realizing that "crapton of DPS jobs and very few tanks/healers" is a really bad way to set up class selection for roles. I firmly believe that one of the major reasons that tanks and healers are so rare in *every* game is because the options are so slim compared to DPS; ARR is one of the few games that has maintained anything *approaching* a more equal distribution of tank/heal options compared to DPS options because they don't use talent trees, which basically end up creating a ~8 DPS options for every one tank or healer option because of the supposition that a class should only have 1 tank or heal tree (the only other major MMO that I can recall off of the top of my head that maintained a similar level of tank/healer-to-damage ratios was City of Heroes/Villains, which had something like a 2:2:1 ratio of damage-support-tank, though it got really funky given certain powerset choices; interestingly enough, the breadth of support and survivability options actually ended up causing the game to have a ratio that actually favored support/tank players rather than DPS but that was both due to the fact that it wasn't a traditional trinity MMO and also had *horribly* overpowered support sets).

There's a certain cultural disinclination towards tanking/healing and inclination towards DPS, but the fact that there are so many *more* options to DPS just serves to make tanking/healing less appealing and DPS more appealing (since you're much more likely to find a playstyle matching your preference in a given role when there are 5 distinct playstyles to choose from as opposed to just 2).