Quote Originally Posted by Nahara View Post
I object to the idea of Thief being a class and not a job with it's own soul crystal.
And I object to the idea that THF has enough to differentiate itself from NIN to justify it being a job instead of a class. The entire THF schtick has always been "Steal", which, in a single player game like the FF games have historically been, was enough to make it on par with the other jobs. Of course, in those games where THF and NIN are discrete jobs, NIN is pretty much always, in some way, shape, or form, the upgraded THF (NIN has the same general stat allocation, only with better stats; NIN, in those games where classes actually do the upgrade thing, THF *always* leads into NIN). In an MMO, however, "Steal" isn't really an appreciable shtick that you could build a job upon, especially since the job abilities are meant to be secret techniques. "Steal" isn't really a secret technique; Ninja magic, on the other hand, *is*.

The classes that we've currently got are iconic enough that they need to be jobs instead of classes *and* they need to exist to provide appreciable options to cover multiple themes. BLM and WHM make sense as jobs instead of classes because jobs are the "end point" and, historically, there hasn't really been an upgrade from BLM or WHM that doesn't turn it into something with a completely different spell list (Black Wizard/White Wizard were pretty much just WHM/BLM with better stats but, even so, pretty much the same name). WAR exists as a job separate from PLD because there needs to be multiple tank classes, one of which *doesn't* have the religious overtones like the PLD and that uses a completely different weapon/combat style: WAR is the pure martial tank while PLD is the divine tank (that and the two exist as discreet archetypes within MMOs for much the same reason).

THF is iconic but it's always been something that often just gets folded up into the NIN. NIN is *just* as iconic. The difference between the two is that NIN pretty much *always* THF+, and it's consistent across most of the games. It's because of *this* that I did THF>NIN.