Can we bring Thief back into the fold?

[Shougun]

As Seraphor said technically Rogue is Thief, and like not 'sort of' but like per the dev team's intentions and in game lore they've said Rogue is Thief.

I can certainly see there might be some gameplay differences from Thief and Ninja if someone wanted to pry them apart, like Bard and Ranger (although I see a far easier and more obvious difference with that example), but that would be on a whole new level of deconstruction and reconstruction lol. Unlike say White Mage leaving their elementals behind as they go into holy magic, which creates a natural hole for another job to fill (not saying it must be filled but without retcons it certainly made a natural space).

With Thief and Ninja they're already bound at the hip so it would take a lot more work to separate out the pieces you need, and quite dangerous to the players who already enjoy that job - so you're definitely asking for a challenge :P.

I never really got into the Thief, or even Ninja to be honest, imagery / vibe so I don't really have any ideas, without putting concerted effort into it, on what would make all that effort worth it... buuuut.. maybe you can. Didn't want to say no, but just say you've got a big mountain to climb and so you'll need equally big or greater reasons why someone should want to climb that lol.

Because they said that the WoL as the Hero and good person can't be any class that had a negative aspect to it (such as stealing when talking about Thief).

And also because there will never again be branching classes, as they are a nightmare to balance. They said so as well.

I still would like to see a source that Yoshida said we can't have Thief due to the WoL's morals or whatever, it seems like a silly statement on multiple levels and one I have a hard time believing (I've seen this reference to his words worded multiple ways already which adds to the doubt lol). For starters we've had major heroes of the FF universe be thieves, then we also have clear hero thieves in media outside of FF (Robinhood...?), and then finally we've many jobs that you could argue are far more gray than being a thief. "can't be a thief but assassins and taking the law into your own hands like batman, that's fine". Whhaattt? For real? lol.

I however do believe what was meant to be passed along, or could have been said, was that they felt making a thieves guild unreasonable due to trying to make it fit with the lore of the npcs of that area (Limsa is trying to be a good girl, adding in a thieves guild is counter to their attempt to tamper down on their negative acts, although they still steal from Garleans) and that they HAD to make a class back then because that's how jobs worked. Yeah, okay - I might see how they thought rogue -> Ninja was cooler than Rogue -> Thief (which is like the same thing lol). Also I can point out how Yoshida likes to do things a little bit different than the standard on occasion, like his Bard idea, so I would say this would be a likely candidate where it'd be a bit where they were trying to get value and small difference (value in that you get both Ninja and Thief in one job, like Ranger and Bard). Because Yoshida has said, and I can source, that Rogue IS Thief, like they made the spells, imagery, and even a lore tidbit that says "rogue is thief".

What I'm saying is if FFXIV was adding Thief for the first time now days and we now skip classes all together I don't think there would be any problem adding Thief, but since we had to follow the class system they wanted to make it fit- and also what they did was do the classic FF Tactics system where Thief goes into Ninja.

Anyway.. just seems like a silly statement to say WoL's morals and even if for whatever reason it was one of Yoshida's quirky moments I feel after our Dark Knight and many dark story moments with some gray-like moral moments that his statement would gain far more nuance than what people are saying right now.

So.. still waiting on that source because it sounds like it could be taken out of context/morphed after too many passes through the monkey chain or not exist at all. And if it does then while Yoshida is never going to respond at least I can then question the logic of the statement directly.