Down with Gear Swapping!

[Dale]

Most people would say stpt and stal were SE's "doing something about it".

I actually can understand why people don't want to use stal, but you can still work around it. Stop using <t> macros, even with <st> macros (which I use, gogo healing magic skillups on undead) or <stpc> macros (IE haste or protect outside of alliance) if you really get stuck, you target yourself and use the blue arrow to hit the blinker. With any sort of reasonable reaction time, you can catch them np.

You are missing the point. It is having to use macros at all. If you are playing with someone who spams gear changes every few seconds it makes any manual action a pain in the ____ to do. That's just not acceptable, and any game-play element that compromises the entire default system of using spells and abilities needs to be adjusted.

But yes, adding <stal> was doing something i suppose, but wasn't enough IMHO, and I would ask for a more comprehensive appraoch to fixing it, not some half-___ work around.

There is also the issue of that annoying yellow spam that floods your battle log as well, which is equally an issue for me - though no one ever seems to mention that, which makes me suspect the motives of thsoe who are disagreeing with me and who keep praising the integrity of a flawed system. Let's be careful we don't argue just for the sake of argument and admit when there is a design flaw that needs to be fixed. Else what is the point of these forums.

[Merton9999]

I know this is going to sound deranged, but I actually like gear swapping, especially the macro creation portion. Designing that perfect set of macros to get the most out of my spells and abilities is one of the complexities I like most about the game. Of course I realize I'm not going to convince anyone else to enjoy this, but I certainly don't see the system as flawed because someone doesn't want to make use of the tool that fixes the problem.

I can't think of any spell or ability I use that does not include a gear swap, so the idea of casting from the menu doesn't even register. Maybe Composure? I'd have to check. Even without gear swaps, I'd still make a macro to make use of other commands. For me any cycle spell benefits from a /recast line before the <stpt>. I can rest the blue cursor on my next target and count down the seconds revealed with /recast. I also like /echo to put messages in only my log for some actions. The introduction of multiple macro books and the /macro commands made flipping between my complex macro setup easy.

Another thing I love about gear swapping: prevention of job animations. This helps a lot when kiting on SCH. I can use blinking gear in the JA macro to prevent the JA animation from stopping my run.

Incidentally, I do like <stpt> better for party-only spells. It prevents the blue arrow from going up to the alliance when using a controller to target, so I can get to anyone in the party with three presses or less.

Gear swaps causing yellow text in the chat log - personally this never even occurred to me as an issue. Even with all the chat filters available there are still so many things I don't need to read that I just got used to looking for the right things a long time ago. My favorite are AOE bard songs....

[Harukusan]

Is this thread a joke rant? If not, then I ask this one simple question:

Are you retarded?

[Maquis]

Gear Swapping shouldn't be allowed in the game.

Please SE add a penalty for Gear Swapping(Like in Brenner and Ballista), do you really think an NM is going to sit and watch you get undressed, then re-dress in front of them just so you can cast Ni 3 seconds faster?

I would like to point out that if you question the feasibility of someone changing clothes in 2 seconds in a game where you can teleport, warp, summon avatars and more magical things, you probably need someone to tell you that it is called Final Fantasy and not Final Reality.

Apart from that, I think SE added this feature to allow them to create situational gear. Opening up a rewarding system that allows for a wider spread of content.

If you would remove or penalise gear swapping, a large portion of the current available gear would be unwanted and the content players would have to go through to obtain those pieces might not be played as much.

From SE's perspective it would be much wiser to provide bonusses to gear swapping, since it rewards people to obtain situational pieces. Giving people incentive to get all those situational pieces out there and keeping them playing and enjoying FFXI for a longer period of time.


tl;dr: Gear swapping supports situational gear rewards.

[Harukusan]

Gear swapping is the foundation of achieving optimal performance. End of story. The OP should fit in quite well in the following thread: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/th...790-Full-Perle
They seem to have a similar mind set.