Ninja vs. Dragoon

[Zophar]

Either type would have made sense

Except that piercing, again, makes considerably much, much, much more sense, for so very many, reasons, which I don't feel like repeating.

(a cannonball works on the same principle as a black powder musket bullet, and I don't think anyone would call a cannonball a piercing weapon).

While technically, you're not completely wrong, no person would ever consider a musket ball a blunt weapon. A round ball, though it may be, it's ultimate effect is to pierce it's target. You get shot by a musket bullet, or get shot by a modern day bullet, and the results are the same. It's piercing. If you were talking about rubber bullets, or beanbag rounds, or potatoes, THOSE would qualify as blunt rounds, as their entire purpose is to hit and disable an opponent with non lethal, blunt force.

[Alahra]

While technically, you're not completely wrong, no person would ever consider a musket ball a blunt weapon.

As I've mentioned, it's not a completely crazy idea. People *have* considered them blunt weapons; there are pen and paper RPGs that have classified musket rounds as blunt weapons (Pathfinder is the most recent that I'm aware of--they are dual-typed there as both bludgeoning and piercing). The best way I can think to explain it is this: if you take an arrow without the bow and want to hurt someone with it, you still pierce skin with it. If you do the same with a black powder bullet, the best thing you can do is put it in a sling or something (like you would a rock or sling bullet) and launch it that way. But it's not going to pierce skin in the same way at that point. It's going to bludgeon it. That's why you see them as a split damage type in games like Pathfinder and why it's at least conceivable that they might have been blunt in here to promote a certain sort of class synergy.

And, you seem to be confusing "blunt" with non-lethal, which isn't always the case. Monk attacks, though classified as blunt, are certainly not non-lethal (nor are the attacks of like a warhammer, which we don't really have an analog for in FFXIV presently).

And, just to clarify again: I don't think it *should* be blunt. I don't really care either way. I just think it's conceivable they could have gone either way with it, since gameplay/balance concerns will occasionally trump concerns of lore/flavor/realism.