Hey! So I’ve been playing thief as my PvE main for a little over 2 and a half years now, and this is a big worry of mine as well!
There’s not enough information about what raids will require and not require to base a sound judgement on whether thief will or will not have a spot for optimal future raid teams, but it’s not looking good.
With that said, as long as you find a group of friends to do raids with they really won’t mind whatever role or class you choose to fill in the upcoming content. Anet is also not going to make it so that one class will ruin the chances of completing the raid for the whole team, your team just might not be “optimal” by lead raid progression standards.
And finally, from raid experience in FFXIV, playing a class that you can comfortably survive a challenging encounter with goes a long way. A living player in an encounter will always be more useful than a dead one.
Those are my humble thoughts on the matter.
