Thief>Ninja/Dancer Class/Job

[Kitru]

I'm pretty damn sure Thief in Tactics is FAR different from Ninja, when it comes to weapons and playstyle.

Did you actually *play* Tactics at all? No one in their right mind would actually have Ninja focus on ranged attacking via throwing. Ninja and Thief were the super fast, kinda squishy attackers (when Thief wasn't trying to yank a rare weapon/armor off of a target so that your team could use it). Ninja was an *upgraded* Thief, for combat purposes. Even when it used incredibly weak weapons, Ninja provided dual wield, which turned them into melee damage *superstars*. As such, even though they were using the exact same gear as a Thief, they'd be better. You'd be an idiot to rely upon or even focus upon using a Ninja as a ranged attacker. Throw was really just there as a throwaway (pun intended) that would allow them to have some kind of ranged functionality, even if it came at an incredibly high cost.

Also Zidane hardly plays like a Ninja.

Zidane doesn't play like a Thief either, with the exception of Steal. He's got stats that are more easily likened to a Warrior than a Thief and, when he's not using Steal, he's throwing out craptons of damage with standard attacks.

Also please post a video or an instance where I can see a Ninja stabbing something. Please, I'm curious to see that "stabbing" gameplay they are oh so based around. I see them "slash" with swords, not stab, they don't use Daggers.

You're getting *really* literal. "Stab" is, for all intents and purposes, the exact same as "attack". It's an affectation of mine where I describe any melee attack (and even some magical attacks) as "stabbing". Hell, most of the daggers actually show them as slashing instead of stabbing. Getting hung up on the verb I described for how ninjas attack is just getting semantically obtuse given that the point I was making when I was talking about stabbing was that Ninjas deal a *vast* majority of their damage through melee attacks using light weapons, just like Thieves. The fact that I chose to say "stab" instead of "cut", "slash", or "attack" has any bearing upon what we're discussing.

Here, i'll post one first, we can switch off

Congratulations, you can cherry pick data. Good job.

Just to show you how ludicrous your semantic anal-retentiveness is here is a video of thieves in Tactics slashing, here is a video that shows Zidane slashing with his daggers, as opposed to stabbing with them. Can we move on from this because, seriously, it's just a pointless deviation from the discussion.

Now, if you want to talk about the length of a slashing weapon in an artistic setting and how that affects its categorization as a sword or dagger, check out this...



Zidane's "daggers" are half as tall as he is.



Those FFT Thieves are using "daggers" that are more than one-third of their total height.



Oh, hey, it's another one of Zidane using a "dagger" that's easily long enough to be a sword.

Now, on to Ninja.



That's Shadow, and he's got a dagger at his hip and in hand, not a sword, and it's a tiny one at that.

The entire point of all of this is that it doesn't matter what length of bladed-implement artists arbitrarily elect to show a class/character using. They're not going to pick the one that actually corresponds to the weapon in game; they're going to go with whatever they think looks good. The FFT ninjas are going to be drawn with katanas even if the ninja blades that are in game are only slightly longer than daggers, which are themselves grossly oversized because the aesthetics of game combat emphasize exaggeration and flamboyance, neither of which are really possible with small weapons.

"Ninjas are characterized by wearing cowls that cover their mouths and head, and lightweight armor. Their weapons include ninja blades, katana, and throwing weapons. "

I still don't see these daggers that they are supposedly meant to use.

So you just didn't pay any attention at all to the list where I went over every game's relative implementations of the weapon categories. A summary isn't going to trump actually going through and looking at everything.

They can sometimes use Daggers, but guess what their most effective weapons are? Swords.

They can *always* use Daggers, and a katana and a ninja blade are neither the same thing nor are ninja blades swords. If you actually look at how the ninja blades operate and are wielded, they're beefed up daggers (in games where daggers use speed as part of the damage calculation so do ninja blades, but katana and other swords do not). The only difference between "ninja blade" and "dagger" is that the former is just an upgraded category of the latter, much like "katana" compares to "sword" or the higher level magics (Fire III, Meteo, Ultima) compare to the lower level ones (Fire) in a vast majority of the games.

I'm trying to make this work and keep them both in the game, while your trying to write off Thief entirely.

You're trying to do whatever you can to Ninja to prevent the exclusion of Thief as a job. I'm simply admitting that whatever you could do to Ninja to make it operate in a drastically different fashion from Thief would render Ninja into something unlike what people expect and, therefore, think that Thief should be implemented in game as a *class*, rather than a job.

I have not, nor have I ever, said that Thief should never be in game. The only way that you could interpret me as saying that is if you read "class" as "not implemented", which, as I've said before, means that we don't have Archers, apparently.

[Exstal]

In theory, Thief and Ninja could be different classes but in majority of the games Thief's only useful attribute is Steal. As it has pretty much always been a weak Ninja.

On a personal level, if they nerfed Ninja to make Thief less weak, I'd be pissed.

[Aethaeryn]

On a personal level, if they nerfed Ninja to make Thief less weak, I'd be pissed.

Hi, Exstal! I miss your random Japanese on LFG on Aion.

But anyway, I agree. I don't see a way they could have both jobs in the game without turning ninja into something unrecognizable just like it was on FFXI. Evasion tank with that jank elemental wheel... no, thanks.

Classes are considered "useless" because the jobs that augment them make running as the class pointless. A Gladiator will never be as good a tank as a Paladin, nor will a Conjurer ever be able to match the power of a White Mage. You're never going to invite a Lancer or Arcanist into your coil run, because Dragoons and Summoners are just flat-out better. I don't want to be forced into playing a Ninja if I ever want to do anything serious. I want to play a Thief.

I get your concern with that, but jobs do little more than add 5 new skills, boost your stats a bit, and severely limit your ability to cross-class. A bard is still primarily an archer with a few buffs tacked on. Dragoon is still a lancer but with some jumps thrown in. Ninja would still be a thief, but with a few ninja abilities added into the mix for flavor.

The only reason I'd really dislike having THF become dancer/ninja is because I would love to have an AF set for it like in FFXI. Anyway, we'll just have to wait and see what SE actually has in store for us with future classes and jobs.

[Exstal]

Hi, Exstal! I miss your random Japanese on LFG on Aion.

It used to work on /3 because people on Aion would lose their minds. Doesn't work here though..people are somehow more tame (maybe because Japanese is an officially recognized language).

[Aethaeryn]

It used to work on /3 because people on Aion would lose their minds. Doesn't work here though..people are somehow more tame (maybe because Japanese is an officially recognized language).

I usually replied in Japanese. :P (Wintermoon/Selenay/Lukien/Akinori... you probably don't remember me lol filthy carebear casual etc.)

[Exstal]

I usually replied in Japanese. :P (Wintermoon/Selenay/Lukien/Akinori... you probably don't remember me lol filthy carebear casual etc.)

When I hit Great General, I was a filthy carebear casual..but when push came to shove, Assassin melts all (Except for Zikel's Shield).

Regardless, my point was that it's still the same class, but becomes further specialized when you equip your soul crystal. I get that it ruins your immersion, and I'm sure you wouldn't be alone in feeling that way. I also really love your ideas for your post for a Performer class and THF/DNC. But what about ninja? Maybe they'll just never add it, but if they do add thief with similar bells and whistles to what you have in mind, what could they do with ninja without completely butchering its essence the way FFXI did? Before FFXI, thief mostly just came with the ability to use Steal/Mug. What could you do to set apart the abilities of both THF and NIN to make them both viable and not a rehash of the same mechanics? I don't think anyone wants more positional crap for future jobs the way DRG and MNK are already set up because they're unbelievably frustrating on a large number of encounters.

If melee doesn't have a positional requirement, you can expect all current melee to give up what they have and switch to that. Screw being on flank or behind for half your attacks. Attack from front! I'd much rather they butchered Thief (since all they have going for them was steal anyway) and make Ninja good (since it is historically better than Thief).

[Nahara]

I get your concern with that, but jobs do little more than add 5 new skills, boost your stats a bit, and severely limit your ability to cross-class.

The new abilities and the bonus stats heavily outweigh the loss of some cross-class abilities. The bonus MND provided by the WHM soul crystal, Divine Seal, Regen, and Benediction (plus all the WHM exclusive gear) provide a huge jump in power over the base Conjurer that no amount of cross-class abilities can match.

So yeah, you could say that a NIN is still a THF but with a few new tricks, but I don't want to be a NIN. I don't want to be forced to be a NIN in order to do serious content. I want to be a THF. I want to have a THF soul crystal, and THF relic weapons and artifact armor.

[Aethaeryn]

The new abilities and the bonus stats heavily outweigh the loss of some cross-class abilities.

So yeah, you could say that a NIN is still a THF but with a few new tricks, but I don't want to be a NIN. I don't want to be forced to be a NIN in order to do serious content. I want to be a THF. I want to have a THF soul crystal, and THF relic weapons and artifact armor.

They definitely didn't always heavily outweigh the use of cross-class abilities. BLM, for example, has some super situational job skills that don't even really define the job at all. Flare is great for aoe, freeze is crap, convert's cooldown is too high and unnecessary for anything other than double flare, manawall has almost no situational use outside of dungeon grinding (tonberry in WP?), and don't even get me started on apocatastasis. Part of the nerf on summoners was made because ACN was ridiculously strong with allagan book and NOT using summoner's soul crystal. MRD can put out consistently much better dps than WAR. The gap is smaller since 2.1 nerfed bfb and internal release for cross-classing, but it still exists.

Regardless, my point was that it's still the same class, but becomes further specialized when you equip your soul crystal. I get that it ruins your immersion, and I'm sure you wouldn't be alone in feeling that way. I also really love your ideas for your post for a Performer class and THF/DNC. But what about ninja? Maybe they'll just never add it, but if they do add thief with similar bells and whistles to what you have in mind, what could they do with ninja without completely butchering its essence the way FFXI did? Before FFXI, thief mostly just came with the ability to use Steal/Mug. What could you do to set apart the abilities of both THF and NIN to make them both viable and not a rehash of the same mechanics? I don't think anyone wants more positional crap for future jobs the way DRG and MNK are already set up because they're unbelievably frustrating on a large number of encounters.

[Nahara]

...

I'd like to think what'd really set NIN apart from THF is Ninjutsu, the NIN's exclusive "magic" school. I mentioned previously that one angle you could take it was a kind of "Batman's Utility Belt", using ninja tools (thematically) to get the edge over their opponents, like smoke bombs or poisons, or maybe also having the ninja's elemental wheel from XI (which I thought was a fun mechanic). I don't even pretend to be a good game designer, so I don't know if I could come up with something even remotely close to a balanced class based on it, but the actual XIV devs are people that are paid to do these kinds of things and could do it in a way that's true to the flavor of the NIN without being "just a better THF".

[XanderOlivieri]

From the point of Class into class in final fantasy history, the most iconic thing I can think of regarding a thief is that they almost always are the prerequisite to become a Ninja. In the Tactics games you needed thief to become a Ninja, and in 1 and 3 the Ninja always seems to be compared to the thief since they share similar stat priorities. The ninja is usually refereed to as the advancement of the Thief and the thief is usually an under powered Ninja.

Their most iconic battle prowess, while usually its their signature abilities...which could pose little to no advantage on FF14, their most redeeming battle capacity is in their stats. Both are the two fastest characters and both have high evasion rates.

I don't really see Thief being a Job. Though there seems to be a hive mind mentality that the Classes are completely useless once you get a Job, a Job itself is nothing without the original base class it expanded on. I can see Thief becoming the base class and still holding its normal status without the need to short change its possible job the Ninja. Ninja won't be much without the Thief Class there as its base.