Roles for Samurai, Red Mage, Dancer

[MomomiMomi]

All right, a question with some bite. Backstabs are generally not an honorable means to attack. But we are talking about combat in an RPG, you know where mechanics, gameplay fun, that sort of thing exists. Had this been in part of the storyline itself, like how NINs talked about honor (I think... it's been a while), the combat mechanics do not define the roles "honor". Such non-combat related things in a game do not matter to the philosophy or morals, only the actual story does.

First of all, the Ninja honor system is completely different. It's based on success/failure of the task at hand.

And I absolutely disagree that job image does not tie in to combat mechanics. You can see this in almost every job. Their roles, positions, abilities. These are all based on the image of the job. In this case, fighting honorably is part of that image. It's even more prominent in other games. So to say that it doesn't have an impact because this is a game is overlooking a lot of RPG history.

Why do you suppose they gave Samurai in XI a trait that boosts its attack when fighting face to face to an enemy? Here's my take on it: Job Image. Also, the trait was picked and used by pretty much every SAM, at least when it was current.

The XI SAM being a tank thing is actually not true, or at least not confirmed as far as I know. The devs did a lot of questionable things with the jobs there. I mean, THF had Perfect Dodge, which sounds like a GREAT tank 2hr... but THF clearly weren't designed for that at the beginning. The only one that was confirmed unintended was NIN being a tank, but originally released intending to be DPS. SAM in that game was following a lot of the conventions that the FF series gave it from before, as a heavy armor using powerhouse with attacks that debuff (though XI's version didn't really have much of that).

It was just as much, or even better, of a tank than WAR was. Guess what? When the game released, WAR was the only job that even came close to qualifying as a tank. For a very long time, there was no other true tank in the game other than Paladin, and that didn't even come until later. But there were definitely other jobs that were intended to do some tanking. SAM was one of those. WAR was another.