Equipment swaps and blinking

[Alhanelem]

stal doesn't work outside of your alliance,

rare exception to the rule, and more and more content these days is not allowing outside help, making it less of a valid point.

[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.

[Mifaco]

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

[Rustic]

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

This. It's astonishing to see that third-party programs like Windower can come up with ways to remove blinking entirely via Blinkmenot, yet the actual program cannot.

FFXI, by it's nature of having so many sidegrades has made gearswapping mid-combat virtually required for optimum play- because they allowed it in the first place, it's no longer an "option" to do otherwise at higher levels.

[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.