I agree with OP. They seriously need to streamline gear. All of this situational and marginal gear needs to be reevaluated end of story. -_________-; And it needed to be altered so that it doesn't reek of stupid like 9 years ago ffs.
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I agree with OP. They seriously need to streamline gear. All of this situational and marginal gear needs to be reevaluated end of story. -_________-; And it needed to be altered so that it doesn't reek of stupid like 9 years ago ffs.
...wait. People are complaining about situational gear? We even have one person saying it was stupid all along?! What's this I don't even--
On topic, agreed. I'm glad to see people are recognizing that situational gear and swaps that come with it are the main culprit behind inventory bloat. Now whether SE will do something about it...
You know, they could easily do a "gear infusion" type of thing where you combine those "situational" accessories and transfer the stats to one another, say one main ring to keep while the other 2-3 are destroyed but the stats are added to the main one. This way you can create 2-3 optimal situational gears and give some usage on those craptastic void watch loot, people will fuse the stats and there will be a high demands for it. Is it possible? YES!! they did this already, look at FX13-2, same principle, and they already have the augmented gear thing, but it's so overly complicated process...
Sounds like Synergy gear if it wasn't complete ass.
BRB gearing up my vs. birds set for yall.
I think styling a new system as an extention of the evolith system would be a fairly solid starting point, at least thematically.
Create a new NPC that can reduce a selection of equipment - the "excessively situational" - into evolith. Unlike standard evolith, these new stones cannot be placed onto gear using Synergy and they retain the "magical resonance" of the slot of the equipment they were refined from. Then introduce a new item called an "evolith pouch" that acts almost like a Moblin Maze tabula - evolith can be transferred into the item and show up as part of a new interface, which destroys the evolith item and frees inventory space.
From this point, a new command "/evoequip" can be used to "equip" any item in the Evolith Pouch, using the name of the original item. Whilst "equipped", some magical technobabble causes the stats on the evolith to replace those of the item equipped in the evolith's "resonant slot" - it would be a gear swap in effect, but without the actual gear itself. Whether SE actually causes a graphical gearswap to occur is up to them, I suppose. A subsequent "/evoequip" or "/equip" to the same slot would remove the evolith's effects, just as a standard gear swap.
For the sake of completeness I suppose all existing evolith could be given a "slot value" and be treated in the same way - MP+2 evoliths being incredibly valuable, as they are. Perhaps make the same NPC "reintegrate" any specified evolith into gear by trading a craftable, generic level 1 "Blank [gear item]" and specifying the evolith to "reintegrate", yielding the same item originally refined into evolith.
The only problem would be where to draw the line - just accessories? Just tradable gear with an "Enhances XX" effect? All gear? It could get kind of silly if every piece of gear could be "evolithified".
This topic brings me back to the old "shit is situational" debates when someone listed a piece of gear and if it was worth the effort to macro in. Granted these still exist to some extent, but before the windower macros came around this was something people looked at: Is the piece really that optimal given the burden of swapping into it when using x spell/ws/ja?
Now you have players who can fully utilize the equipment (on pc anyway) and the players who can't (console players) only agreeing on one point: All the situational gear requires too much inventory to be exceptionally useful. Personally, I would have liked to see something along the lines of a customizable option that allows you to add specific stats onto the equipment. The option would be in the form of a key item, so it doesn't take up space, and requires that in order to set it you have to be at a specific NPC. A sort of Socket system similar to what I've seen on other MMO that allows you to find the specific item/KI then take it to an NPC and have it infused with a known set stat increase.
Evolith/Synergy alterations made a step in this direction, and to a lesser extent ToM...but at the same time it wasn't exactly what I would call a worth while time sink given the requirements and possibility to not get exactly what you want. I can already see possible flaws or pre-existing arguments against the proposition, but given the heavy gear dependancy of FFXI as it currently stands, not to mention the various acceptable role functions of several jobs, it is hard to think up a system that would really work better without making others obsolete....unless they totally revamp Evolith/synergy augment systems.