Quote Originally Posted by Calypsx View Post
That's all the input I can really give on the topic, it all boils down to opinions at this point.
The only argument that I ever see for THF to be a job instead of a class is the same one you've given here: because people are emotionally attached to the idea of THF being on the same level as all of the other jobs. In practical terms, when you examine the capabilities of a THF in the FF series and its relationship to NIN, if you look at it without being constrained by said emotional attachment (which basically makes any examination pointless because you've already made your decision regardless of what you find), THF doesn't work as a combat job in ARR.

The only reason that THF qualified as a job on par with the others in previous FF games was because "Steal", while being a non-useful combat mechanic (as in, it doesn't actually help you win a fight), provided an explicit indirect advantage in drastically increasing your resources and oftentimes providing you with gear before you would otherwise have access to it. Unless you implement THF as a DoL job wherein it's all about stealing stuff from enemies (since DoL jobs are explicitly designed to actually provide you with additional resources), it's actually a stretch to include THF as a class without adding a bunch of things that have historically been unrelated to THF. Everything else that THF provided has been out-of-combat functionality which, for a combat class, is out of place in an MMO.

Conversely, NIN has *regularly* been combat class that stands on its own (via Throw and the Ninja magic) while virtually always operating as either a direct or indirect upgrade to THF. The direct upgrades are comparatively rare, moreso because of good design than mechanical requirement (in a single player game, you don't want to have one class render another redundant by providing the same capabilities only better; you want there to always be a reason to use an "inferior" class as opposed to just using the uber-classes for everything, generally by affording some degree of utility or secondary benefit). The indirect upgrades are multitudinous: in any game where upper level jobs have prerequisites, Ninja requires Thief (either as the only requirement or as the *main* requirement), and then is provided with stats that are a direct upgrade from what Thief gets. As such, if you were going to go straight for Ninja without bothering with any other jobs along the way and only getting the minimum required, Ninja would only have Thief abilities to utilize, which means that it's an indirect upgrade: it's got better stats, is required to have a goodly portion of Thief but not much of anything else (if at all), and uses most of the same gear.

THF>NIN is, honestly, using a more justifiable version of the logic applied to the design of ARC>BRD. Archer/ranger (which are basically the same class; there are no games that have both Ranger *and* Archer and their trademark capabilities are basically the same/interchangeable; FFTA2 *could* make a case for it with Hunter, but Hunter is a *direct* upgrade of Archer since it gets access to better weapons and a largely similar suite of abilities that are simply more potent) has always been a job on par with THF. While archer turning into bard requires a certain amount of mental acrobatics (strumming a harp is *kind* of like drawing a bowstring...), thief into ninja has historical precedence as well as a much more cohesive logic behind it since they both use much the same fundamental combat archetype.