Why not Thief?

[Hiruke]

Personally, I'm glad that the base class for Ninja is called Rogue and not Thief. This is (almost) the best case scenario.

Why?

Because I would prefer something that is a traditional job in Final Fantasy series not be considered "just a class". That said, it falls a bit short of what I wanted. I was hoping we would get a Rogue base class, that branched off into the Thief job as well as the Ninja job. Some people might say "Well, in FF1 THF turned into NIN!" and yeah that's true, but FF1 also had "Red Wizards", etc. Also, since then, THF has turned into an iconic job all its own in the FF series.

I would still like it if the dev team would consider adding the actual Thief job in a later update. These could be Rogues who "went back to their roots" to become actual Thiefs (Thieves!) again. There are definitely a lot of hardcore THF fans, and I doubt they will be satisfied with NIN. Especially since there is no reason to ever play a class (outside of the once in a while a Warrior goes Marauder instead because dps). Someone who wanted to play THF wouldn't be able to just play Rogue in any actual content. You need to be on a job role for pretty much everything. The advantages in nearly all situations are overwhelming.

So, please consider (at a later time) adding THF to go along with NIN, side by side, as the 2 jobs that branch out of Rogue. I think THF could have a different enough play style to merit it, since they wouldn't use ninjutsu.

[Amnesia]

I thought the Rogues were basically ex-thieves. So it seems strange to think that the THF job would be an "advanced" Rogue. If anything, seems like it would be going backwards for them...

[Exstal]

Because Naoki said so.

Source : http://www.ffxiv-eorzea.com/en/news/...apan-expo-2014

Naoki Yoshida was at French Japan Expo early July and gave several interviews.
Here is the one of the Secrets of Eorzea website :

2.3 / 2.4 content:

Secrets of Eorzea : Many players were very disappointed to see the name “Rogue” and not “Thief” in the E3 announcement. Respecting the lore of the game was understood but is it really the end of our hopes to see the “Thief” one day in FFXIV: ARR? Maybe, like the black mage who had a bad reputation in the history of FFXIV, the Thief might become the second job of the Rogue class?

Naoki Yoshida : It was a really, really tough decision for us as well because we are long time Final Fantasy fans. There was a heated debate internally as well to make this decision. But Final Fantasy is full of classic fans like myself, but we need to think about those new to the series as well, so it needs to make sense. In Final Fantasy XIV, every class has a guild, and just because we want to have that traditional role, we want it to make sense with the in-game lore. Especially when we want the game to run for ten years or longer, we need to make sure the relationship between the classes and jobs make sense.


We didn’t want to break the lore by naming classes based on our personal feelings, we wanted it to make sense with the story. So if you see Rogue in game, just in your mind, replace it with Thief. The class and the job and the way it works is really close to Thief, so just think of it as that. Thief won’t be coming as a name. In the story, it will be explained that these Rogues were at one time called Thieves. So it is definitely clear that Rogue equals Thief in the game.