Equipment swaps and blinking

[Yrusama]

Clearly the OP didn't play FFXIV 1.0. The characters blinked for each and every piece of gear changed in the macro.

/equip "Head" "Healer's Crown" *blink*
/equip "Body" "Healer's Robe" *blink*
/equip "Hands" "Healer's Halfgloves" *lag from previous blinks, so macro line fails. macro should be used a second time*
/equip "Legs" "Healer's Culottes" *blink*
/equip "Feet" "Healer's Boots" *previous blink is extended to include boots change*

In XIV 1.0, if you changed gear, you were animation locked during the blink. If you blinked in rapid succession (like the above example), you were essentially stuck struggling to move until the macro finished or was canceled. There was also a stat penalty for changing gear mid-battle.

Fortunately if you blinked in XIV 1.0, targeting would not drop (yay for healers), although people tended to stay in one gear set for the duration of a fight because of the animation locks. The rapid blinking also resulted in any characters targeting you to nod, their head's focus alternating between your normal height and (while you were invisible) the floor where you stood. I once had 3 Lalafell nodding creepily in unison while I changed gear.

Note that in XIV: ARR gear changing will happen quickly, arguably faster than XI's, with no noticeable blink. It's been shown in the alpha videos. If XI can achieve this speed of gear change, it would be perfect, as mid-battle gear changes are far more important here than there.

[Merton9999]

I'd be happy if SE removed blinking. I've used stpt and stal since their introduction, so within my party and alliance the target blinking hasn't been an issue since then. But it does bother me that I can't use the same set of macros to cure and buff people in campaign and besieged. There are a few miscellaneous circumstances outside the target loss problem, such as when a blink also removes an SC animation.

I do get it, it's to keep on chasing that extra little bit of damage and bragging about how 'good' a player you are.

I did tests on gear swapping and it isn't as great as people make it sound, and the calculations are all garbage.

I really hope you're only claiming that your apochryphal tests showed no benefit in swapping in mods for WSs, and only for the merit ones at that. That's still untrue, but if you're saying that all gear swapping isn't as great as people make it sound and that it's for an "extra little bit" of damage, that's just horrendously wrong.

I don't even have to be a member of the spreadsheet parser mafia to know that, as a mage, simply macroing in one gear swap between cures and nukes will make a 24% difference to my cures and a 35% difference to my nukes. And that's just one piece. Those aren't little bits.

BTW I had proof that the earth is flat, but I lost it.

[Alhanelem]

As much as I greatly prefer building a good all-around gear set personally, if you are willing to build sets of gear for every slot and situation, you will perform better. That's not really something that can be disputed. You can argue that the difference isn't as big as it is made out to be, but that's just an opinion. I am in no way a min-maxer, but if someone wants to do that, power to them. It does help, to argue that it doesn't is just silly.

I may be electing not to pursue the absolute maximum perfection, but I also recognize that people who make the effort to do so will be rewarded by parsing better than i do.

BTW I had proof that the earth is flat, but I lost it.

[Mirage]

Hey can someone do some tests to prove that swapping to -pdt sets doesn't actually make you survive longer? It would free up so much inventory space for me.

[Arcon]

<stal> and <stpt> don't do it for me. They're horrible workarounds for something that should have never been an issue in the first place. As was mentioned, they don't help with outside alliance targeting. They also don't help with losing target on auto-following. They also don't help with unlocking off a target because you blinked while you used some JAs during the fight.

Blinking isn't even the real problem, characters can blink all they want. Why SE decided to mess with the target on blinking, that is the real problem. And I don't even know why. FFXI already allows targeting characters whose models aren't loaded, such as when you zone in and target someone before they appear on your screen. So why does target have to be lost when characters blink? I can't think of any sane reason for why that could be the case.

[Jaall]

At the time, Ninja was the only job in which I could reliably make the test on. That's because I lacked mind gear for Blue Mage, and still do. So I used Blade: Shun naked, single handed, dual wielding, TP gear, AF3, dexterity gear, and agility gear against a wide range of normal monsters all over the game. Hundreds of monsters taken each day, under different circumstances.

Am I the only one thinking you used NIN to test this? And with Blade:Shun... Quite arguably the worst merit WS available alongside mage ws's. I have never seen a decent number from it so if what you're saying is true and the difference equated to 500 damage then that's god-like for such a ws, meaning gear would make a huge difference. If you had said Masa Sam using Tachi: Shoha, or any DRK using Resolution then maybe I would have understood 500 damage to be insignificant.

I do agree they should stop blinking, would make the game so much easier for mages and even for dd's who want to stay locked on to a mob, but for the sake of getting better damage, which is definitely needed in this game to be seen as anything other than a "waste of space", it is very much worth the blink.

[Mifaco]

>dev team can't program out blinking
>several third party tools exist that can do it

[Zhronne]

Doubt they can get rid of it. Imho it's a way of programming things, they just don't care about it, because even in old FFXIV there were loading times when you swapped gear.


Anyway, in-combat gear swap in FFXI is something that I have always been torn about.
On one hand I love it. I love the fact of having situational gear to swap to boost this and that, also because this enforces and makes it possible to have a different itemization paradigm for developers to follow when they create items. Lots of sidegrades etc, compared to constant upgrades coming in tiers like in other games.
On the other hand I hate it. FFXI inventory sucks balls, no space, and way too many fucking situational gear that give you a minimal increase and have to be used inside particularly complicated macros (if you don't have stuff like spellcast).

So yeah, I wish FFXI could have been something in between the current situation and the opposite one (no gear swap at all).
Really hope SoA will give us at least another satchel-like thing, I won't be able to survive long The idea that soon there's gonna be a new bonanza kinda kills me

[zataz]

i've worked hard on getting all the gear i have and i like to macro in my stuff for my rdm solo and just because u don't like blinking u want to take away something i enjoy using.

[Byrth]

Ffxi lives and dies on its gear swapping. That is how SE was able to introduce minor upgrades for years. Another 1% cure potency, another 1% Fast cast. This is what gets us to do new content and keeps us doing the old content that has not been outdated yet. If there was only one armor set and SE released straight upgrades of it, only monks would care about Nidhogg at this point. I would not care about Skadi legs +1, etc.

This reduces costs for SE because it decreases power creep and generally keeps old events at a constant difficulty level. Ignoring changed to game mechanics and nerfs to the event, I do not expect Legion will get easier due to increases in player strength. This is because a samurai in a year will not be much better geared than one now.

Also, that mysterious thing you guys are talking about does just eliminate blinking. It does not "delay it." This is entirely within SE's capabilities and they choose not to do it for reasons that are wholey unclear to me.