Will the incoming thief job be a DPS or tank?

[EdwinLi]

Yup I finished the story on the 1st day. I mean at some point I'm sure they would at it. But Musketeer will be before any other DPS. And then SE will have to add a Class that isn't a DPS for balance. So I guess it would be ok to speculate what THF would be, But I only see it as a DPS.

While 1st expansion will obviously have more than 1 new class (maybe 2 or 3 new classes each having 2 different Jobs to choose from to play as with all or most of the current class's 2nd Jobs finally released as well) it is still possible for for a double class release being both Musketeer and Scout are released at the sametime with both having 2 Jobs paths since it is easier to introduce a new class with 2 Jobs. So Musketeer can have 2 Job roles/paths and Scout has 2 Job roles/paths when they're released.

There are many possibilites what they can or may do when releasing a new class and it doesn't always have to bound to only 1 new class per class release.

[Lamentations]

Given alot of the replies here, why do people want another Limsa Lominsan tank? It already has marauder/Warrior, why another? At present only Gridania lacks a tank (hopefully they make a tank Job for lancer), and Limsa Lominsa lacks a dedicated melee DD (again, like lancer/Dragoon and pugilist/Monk). Is a melee DD really so disgusting a proposition for a city of thieves and pirates?

While it would be nice to see Gridania get it's own tank class, I wonder why 14 needs another tank class at all.

It is probably the hardest job class to get right balance wise, and we do not need a tank class that is a ragefest as being oped, then a ragefest when it gets nerfed.

[Zourin]

PUG's used to be the evasion tankers, and we see what happened there when they gutted evasion stats out of lighter gear from back in 1.0.

THF's are probably going be a quirky, drop-happy, melee version of the bard. I doubt they'll be particularly debilitating, as this dev team strays from DPS models like a stuffed bear strays from its pedestal. "Oh sure you can debuff it.. but only for 10 seconds every five minutes, and it only applies to certain fights when we allow it, and it'll only cause a 1% change in efficacy. Have fun with the third party DPS parsers we technically don't allow!"

[LineageRazor]

Ah, the tumultuous conflict of evasion tanking vs blood tanking in FFXI...

I remember in FFXI, WAR, MNK, and SAM were all intended to be servicable tanks - WAR with Provoke, defensive buff options, and job traits, MNK with its high HP, and SAM later got a boost to Third Eye that allowed them to use it to evade multiple hits. MNK and WAR VERY quickly fell by the wayside due both to the fact that players prefered to use them to DD and also even when trying to tank they just didn't have enough damage mitigation to tank the kinds of things a PLD could. SAM's limelight as a Third Eye tank was even more brief, due to the RNG chance that Third Eye would wear off, leaving them completely vulnerable until it could be recast.

This meant that NIN and PLD were the only viable tank options, and for the vast bulk of things in the game, NIN was hands-down the most powerful. It was VERY rare in FFXI that people would fight groups of mobs, and one-on-one NIN boasted close-to-perfect damage mitigation. For a long, long time, NIN was king of tanking, with PLDs stepping in only in rare cases when multiple mobs needed to be tanked at once. SE was not happy about this, as tanking is pretty much all PLD could DO, and PLD players were getting disgruntled.

Then came Abyssea, and tanking in general got thrown out the window with all the crazy buffs. This got players in the habit of going balls-to-the-wall DD no matter what, taking huge damage that their HP could tolerate while healers crapped out ridiculous cures without ever running out of mp. It was a dark time. (Albeit kinda fun and cathartic.) NINs and PLDs both became relics, and the NIN subjob, once nearly a requirement for DDs, disappeared. Voidwatch, added later, was even worse, supplying players with frequently-regenerating consumables that flat-out rendered them undamagable by most attacks.

Post Abyssea and Voidwatch, SE realized that if they wanted tanks back in the game, they were going to need to add stuff that NEEDED to be tanked. Cue new bosses with ludicrous aoes that scattered NIN shadows and dealt horrendous damage to the hate target if unmitigated. Combined with much easier access to elite PLD gear, tanking came back, and NIN stayed dead in the water because anything worth tanking didn't care one whit about shadows.

If evasion tanking is ever going to be introduced in FFXIV, there's a delicate balance that will need to be struck. Too many enemies in this game rely on the damage mitigation of the target - Titan's Mountain Buster being a good example. That attack is built to be a tank-killer, and a tank with insufficient damage mitigation will be killed in one hit. An evasion tank who takes normal damage when hit but makes up for it by evading most attacks, is going to have to rely on pure chance to avoid dying to Mountain Buster.

This is not to say that it's an impossible balance to strike. There's any number of ways a THF or NIN could perform as a tank if SE wanted to design them that way. One example would be a full-time buff like Shield Oath or Defiance, one that reduces the damage of any attack that would deal more than 80% of the player's max hp worth of damage by half, or something similar. This would allow the player to evasion tank normal attacks, while still surviving any tank-killer attacks that they fail to evade.

Evasion tanking is possible without ruining balance! Just don't count on it to ease DD Duty Finder times.

[Bigpurpleharness]

I see this in every thread on the subject and, while not wanting to quash any dreams, there's really no precedent for Thief (Job). You can't even use XI as a precedent for it as thief (class) was one of the 6 starting jobs. That is it's available right off the bat. In no game that I've played was thief an unlocked class, more it was a class used to unlock other classes. If past games are any clue, as they have been thus far, it's thief/Ninja and maybe a second Job that's not been hinted yet. Why make thief instead of Thief? Well, it's pretty simple. What would you call the class? Pickpocket? Blackjack (historically speaking blackjacks weren't a hand in a card game)? Cutpurse? But those are all just other ways to say thief (100g says the French name will be cutpurse anyway). Not saying I'm right, but if the name of the class winds up thief, don't be too shocked.

Warrior? White Mage? Monk?

[KyroeFelix]

Ah, the tumultuous conflict of evasion tanking vs blood tanking in FFXI...

SAM's limelight as a Third Eye tank was even more brief, due to the RNG chance that Third Eye would wear off, leaving them completely vulnerable until it could be recast.

Lol I remember Third Eye tanking...oh gawd....horrible until they gave us Seigan and even then it wasn't that great. RNG on the number of times you could avoid/counter something until the effect just decided to wear off...good good times...

[Arkghyom]

All of them!

[Airget]

I could see them splitting THF into Assassin DD and Ninja Tank, evasion tank was fun but of course in a game like this a high ability to dodge would be rather unbalanced, the design of the class would have to be fit into a playstyle which adds a level of skill to dodging at key moments to reduce damage rather than the Warrior method of high HP and PLD's dmg mitigation.

Here's a quick thought that comes to mind, back in 1.0 Marauder's Foresight use to increase parry rate but now it just increases def. With that in mind it's possible they could implement a form of tank that focuses on parry rate and perhaps a stack based "parry rate" increase for each attack evaded that last for 10 seconds. Then on top of that you add in abilities that help to improve evasion rate to keep that stacked parry rate increase up all while dealing dmg and holding hate.

Honestly the pieces are there to make an evasion tank, just replace evading and reducing all dmg to high parrying rates with dmg mitigation abilities that work through reducing a target ability to hit while increasing your attack speed and parry rate.