Down with Gear Swapping!

[Naax]

I ride the fence on this one. I don't really like gear swapping, but I use in on my blm for swapping staves. That's about the only thing I swap around. I don't like it because it takes some of the realism away from the game. I know "realism" and "Game" don't really belong in the same sentence, but I feel the same as some of the others. When was the last time you watched a boxing match where one person changed his shorts out because he wanted to hit his opponent while wearing his lucky shorts, then switch back. I got over the healing problem, but my biggest hurtle was trying to time good blm nukes for magic bursts. The gear swapping that some players do is so obscene that not only do they blink out of existance for a couple seconds, but so does the animation and sound of their actions. If the effects could be seperated from blinking out while ppl gear swap I wouldn't care how much ppl swap around. I guess i'm closer to a "Role-Play" style of player with my opinions on gear swap, But I don't bash one way or the other, I just play my style and adapt to the party situations as needed.

[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.