FFXI's gear swap was like having extra skills.

as a DNC in FFXI I had to carry alot of stuff (I know RDM had to carry a lot more) I gear swapped for 99% (real numbers here btw) of all my battle actions, my DRG was almost as bad, because I had to try my best to optimize when I played DRG.

I am starting to forget... but I want to say that my DNC had 2 body peices, 3 gloves, 3 leggings, 2 feet, 6 rings, 4 earrings, 2 ranged items, 3 belts, and 3 helm items......... and I would mix/match all these according to what skill I was about to use, or if I was just going to TP... oh thats right I had a full TP/haste set too for DNC ;p

I really hated it, and am glad it is not in FFXIV, the materia system is a much better idea.

Proper use of equipment IMO is "choose the gear most suited for the content and role you're doing", instead of 'just go with whatever and fire up a macro if the enemy is using a physical attack or a spell, or I'm using cure, or (...)'.

This means you still can have multiple gear sets to min-max to your heart's content for what you plan to do, but you have to actually think a bit and strike a healthy balance between over specializing for one single thing.

I've seen some people calling those who don't want in-battle gear change "lazy", but the real lazy people IMO are the ones who would rather not choose gear effectively and instead carry up craploads of armors so they can change to whatever they need at some exact moment and switch back, instead of actually weighing up what they will need during the entire battle and gear up accordingly.

In other words, I'd rather have a game that makes us think this:

"Hey, this boss has a silencing breath. Should I equip a silence immunity ring instead of an attack ring, or should I try to use the attack ring and do my best to avoid the move?"

instead of

"Hey, this boss has a silencing breath. Let me equip my attack ring and then I just fire up my silence ring macro if he readies it and I won't be able to avoid. MAD SKILLZ".

Jesus, this is a problem that was solved by the MMO industry long ago. You shouldn't look to a stupid idea like swapping gear to add some intricacy to the gameplay. If a boss is using silencing breath in what universe does switching gear do anything for you? WoW solved this long ago by setting up mechanics, I.E. Casters don't be in melee range. Or abilities like Tremor Totem to mitigate fear. Anything but taking off your equipment and re-equiping something else. God if that's the best the devs can do this game is going to be simple dumb.

P.S. Before all your haters start shouting go back to WoW. They did a lot right, and a lot wrong and if your too arrogant to look to them for how things work then hate on haters.

<<Thanks for the Offer, But I'll have to Pass>>

I had 5 complete sets of gear I carried at all times for NIN. then throw on top of that Tool for Casting Ninjitsu. And situational weapons,Food,Pop items. I would have like 10-12 open slots on me while playing Nin. This would be a horrible system in this game. I really wish they would have blocked it from happening in that game. For the last 3 years they have been trying to make gear sets were people would wear the whole set. Adding set bonuses didn't do it. If they blocked gear swaps, or TP erase it like changing weapons it would have corrected this problem.

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Originally Posted by Montijin

- clutters the inventory with unnecessary items
Which is something I addressed in my post you quoted by adding additional storage or inventory.

Other mmos have started to implement inventory macros where you enter your storage container and click an inventory pre-set of gear that automatically swaps them for you. This eliminates spending forever getting a different set classes gear out.


- constantly changing gear looks silly even if it didn't blink your character
Which is why I suggested that you should be able to lock a certain gear style in place.


- having to macro all your abilities is unnecessary

Again, this is something that is fixed with pre-set binds that are linked to abilities; similar to what spellcast did.

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Extra space doesn't change the fact that you're hauling around a crap ton of unnecessary stuff that shouldn't have to be there. There comes a point where piling on extra layers for the heck of it makes things worse. Next we'll be able to bind specific materia to our actions and then mini materia into our materia. Where do you draw the line? I think FFXIV has a sufficient number of gear slots as it is and sidegrades are still possible even if you may not want to have separate gear for each and every action.

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Anyone who seriously says the materia system in place is a legit 'endgame' gear system is delusional or trolling. The only thing the current system encourages is farming gil or buying it so you can keep crunching away at low percentages for gear.

It is without a doubt the worse system I've ever seen. SE might as well sell us gear at this point, because all you're going to end up doing to get gear is crafting hours and hours a day.

There is no cool instance/NM fight to get the best gear for your favorite job. The closest thing to a fight you can get into for your gear is grinding the same damn mob in the strongholds for materia over and over and over.

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I still completely agree with you on this, however. Right now the only things standing between you and best possible gear are 1) gil and 2) availability of top tier materia (extremely rare due to there being fiftyeleven grades of each type). Both of these are simply a function of time and luck. Skill doesn't really factor into it much at all.

Fighting ifrit "Ok let me strip completly naked and change every piece of gear I have to WS" after WS "ok let me just get these clothes off the ground and swap back for TP", it doesnt work well for the immersion crowd, and the constant blinking every 30s can be a nightmare for healers, especially when a DD is low on HP, blinks, healer looses the target, DD dies and blames the healer for not healing.

Gear swaps in battle are annoying, there are many other ways to do this, like abilites to enhance stats, or spells.

Oh and lets not forget not having enough macro lines for it all.

/equip head
/equip body
/equip hands
/equip legs
/equip feet
/equip neck
/equip LI ring (dont know the exact command)
/equip RI ring
/equp L wrist
/equip R wrist
/ equip other left ring
/equip other right ring
/equip underhirt
/equip panties
/ac ferocity
/ac raging strike
/ac other DD buff
/ac chaos thrust

Count em 18 lines just for 1 WS, thats over 18 secs to do 1 WS (auto /wait 1 and any lag)

Now lets take ifrit, your half way through stripping completly and he uses eruption right on you, you are then stuck in an animation lock for 9 secs (under the current servers)

And that is if we could use more than 10 lines in macros, this would need 2 macros, and 2 more to switch back to the haste/acc set, which adds atleast 1 sec.

And before you say this is OTT, look back at FFXI and you will see "to be a good player" we needed to change every piece of gear, I for one had to use 3 macros to WS (wasnt using scripts) to swap gear for my WS's and back to my melee set, I could WS every 30s and died many times because of my endless blinking.

Gear swaps in battle are a pain and should never be seen again.

The problem is not gear swapping or the lack thereof. The problem the game has at this stage is that there is no way to optimize your game-play.

This is in part due to the fact that the attributes are poorly designed and unlike FFXI's system of minimal gains (+2 STR meant a lot) this game does not offer you any noticeable gains by optimizing.

In FFXI + 1 meant something because it made a difference even with only a gain of a few Attributes +1. Getting this last piece of gear for you max damage STR/Attack set was an achievement you never forget. It is a high you cherish for a long time.

FFXIV has nothing like that at all. Gear is all messed up and the materia system is a money sink. They need to do something to make the game worthwhile playing.

NM drops too easy, Ifrit is just a matter of time until you get all the weapons, it does not take that long. It's all rather boring to be honest.

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Originally Posted by Frein

Oh, please. I bet most of us who feel very strongly against implementing mid-battle gear swaps carried tons of macro gear in FFXI. Heck, I went out of my way to farm rather expensive DD gear for leveling PLD so I could not only macro it for WS but also just wear it while tanking if the healer was having trouble spending his MP. So, it has nothing to do with laziness.

Then you play the lack of reasoning card, which is pretty hilarious considering we've posted several extremely good reasons for not allowing it. Let's look at the pros and cons, shall we?

Pros:
- allows for a potentially wider range of sidegrades to be desirable

Cons:
- clutters the inventory with unnecessary items
- is conceptually ridiculous
- constantly changing gear looks silly even if it didn't blink your character
- having to macro all your abilities is unnecessary
- lets you have your cake and eat it too, which turns choices into no-brainers

The choice seems pretty easy, no?


This I've ranted about several times, though. The materia system is actually very poorly implemented due to it being a complete crap shoot where money eventually trumps over all else even though money is mostly just a function of time spent in the game (or real money spent at the RMT shop) while player skill only gets you useless U/U junk.

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this is pretty much my main concern about all of this...if you make crafted gear with materia > dropped gear/dropped mats to make specific gear...then what is the point of content? to challenge yourself? if thats the case you kill it once and then what? kill it a 100 more times for the sake of it...or for lack of anything else to do?

i spent a couple weeks double socketing gear and was horribly tedious and boring...not to mention the fact that all it is is gathering a bunch of the materia you want and 10 or so of the items you want to socket to and then attempting to double socket till you get it...wow...what a sense of accomplishment. and what are you even doing that for? so you can kill ifrit to obtain a weapon with stats that ultimately don't really matter?

it comes down to if you want skill to be more important and you want content to last you need an incentive to keep completely the content...offering items as a reward that are crappier than something someone could sit in town and make isn't a very good solution.


say what you want about xi's system, but it provided with a driving force to continue completing content and making that old gear still relevant. what is going to happen with xiv? release content...complete in 5 days; wait for next content?

annnnnd back to skyrim.

tl;dr ..to bad read and stop posting the same argument. i'ma keep posting this same thread over and over since everyone keeps arguing the same arguments that are pointless to argue.

this thread reminds of the one made a year ago about this, same arguments and same process of everyone probably not even reading any posts in it and just raging with a NOOO for reasons that make no sense since none of them problems need to be added to the system. it seems like everyone is avoiding reasonable and sensible arguments and just raging with what was wrong with the old system. and on top it is more for opposite reasons like to lazy to collect more gear. cause even without this system u should be technically gearing up other pieces that might help even if there isn't gear swaps. this actually is less work in the long run in my opinion.

fact, gear swapping in it's simplest form does only 2 things, 1. gives you much more gear to collect 2. allows you to strengthen your spells for the few times they are actually needed.

none of the arguments need to be in place for this system to work, it doesn't even need to be gear swaps. i added this a few pages ago as well and it seems everyone steam rolled passed it. but we have a materia system for gear, a simple materia system for spells and moves that work like key items would fix every argument.

1. no macros to make, just click once to trigger it on for the move after you collected the piece from where ever it came from ..nm/dungeon what have you.

2. no blinking since it's not gear, this removes the "immersion" argument as well as the blinking problem even though even if it was on gear ...the system in 2012 doesn't need to blink.

3. space? it's a key item like materia that works like materia ..only difference maybe is u have option to turn it on or off, and maybe turn on a stronger one or something. what have you. also mannequins are on way, also they can have options to save all the sets. also space wasn't really ever an issue even in ffxi, i had 8classes all geared and never ran into this problem with space.

don't think i see any other arguments other then too much work to gather all this gear? well that i can only say is don't, u don't' need to do the materia system now and u don't need to for spells, it just makes it more efficient and gives players with time to ..to enjoy it. from more nm's to kill to doing dungeons more often. don't ruin a good system out of your own laziness and worry of what others will say think or react to it. this was a great system in ffxi and would be even greater in a mmo in 2012. take diablo3 not really a mmo but every one of there moves and spells can have other strengths added to it too. it works in this day in age the same as it did back then.

i read it...i'm not entirely sure what you are talking about...my issue isn't with either end...its how do you implement content that lasts. if you go with what the devs have said (crafted & materia gear > dropped gear) what is the point of the dropped gear? and in turn what is the point of the content? to challenge players? so we figure out how to beat new content in 5 days...whats the point of continuing to beat it? i think you either have to make dropped gear > crafted or have a quick turnover on implementing new content.

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Originally Posted by Razor

Started with S and ended with T my friend. Regardless, at the end of the day Materia is merely a system that allow people to dedicate time and energy (gil) into being better than everyone else. Having the ability to do mid-fight gear changing is not all that much different. You can settle for 1 materia/gear instead of striving for multiple and that is OK. Likewise you can settle for having only 1 gearset and in most situations that will be perfectly OK too. Some of us, however, do actually enjoy ways to maximize our capabilities in game.

What is "tedious work setting up macros" to you is "striving to be the best" for us. Its kind of synonymous with the word "overachieving" and last time I checked that was rarely a bad thing. Speaking of which I feel like that is most people's gripe with gear swapping. You don't have to make multiple gear slots, just like you don't have to slot multiple materia. But some people's motivation is to prevent the people who will make multiple gear sets from doing so because then the parser would begin to frown upon them. And everyone likes to be a winner easily, yes?

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Why must you segregate US from YALL? If I'm not mistaken, we are all playing the same game. And the majority obviously doesn't like this.

And DON'T make me bring in what I don't want to. It's starts with an I and ends with an N...

You are breaking my

[SIZE="7"]IMMERSION[/SIZE]

It breaks the game theme for me >_>

This was already discussed back in June with a response from Bayohne. The majority in the community said no to gear swaps (thank goodness) and it was confirmed we would not have gear swapping in FFXIV.

Gear Swaps Can I have It Thread

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Originally Posted by Bayohne

Spoke with Battle Master Matsui to get the lowdown on the whole gear swapping question that's got you all buzzin'. In regards to swapping gear while in battle, since changing certain gear while in battle will change your class in FFXIV, we're not planning to make it possible to swap gear in battle. This direction will not change in the future.

We are focusing instead on making adjustments with the battle-related fixes to ensure that you can battle to your utmost ability without having to rely on changing gear multiple times mid-fight.

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Gear swapping in xi was a massive snowball that square kept putting snow in front of. Hyper specialized gear that was useful for one and one thing only. lead gear swapping, leads to more specialized gear, more swapping, then there is a egg and a chicken mixed up some where in there. things get so out of hand that third party tools were created to allow for hyper complex and then automated gear swaps.

It's a rabbit hole that i would really rather not go down again.

Never done that in xi. You have ton of skills on 2 real jobs anyway. Never needed more.

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Originally Posted by Rydin

this......

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Originally Posted by Rydin

and this...

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Originally Posted by Rydin

and even this....

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are all the exact same thing

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Originally Posted by Rydin

are all the exact same thing

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Did you just necro this? HAHA. Win.

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Originally Posted by Scarface

Did you just necro this? HAHA. Win.

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I think a lot of people are just tired of weighing in on this... so since all the pros and cons were already laid out in this thread... we can save ourselves a lot of time

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Originally Posted by Rydin

I think a lot of people are just tired of weighing in on this... so since all the pros and cons were already laid out in this thread... we can save ourselves a lot of time

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Linking threads to past discussions won't do anything, everyone wants to give their own opinion on the matter.

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Originally Posted by Asmeret

Linking threads to past discussions won't do anything, everyone wants to give their own opinion on the matter.

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I know... but Japanese players tend to just keep 1 thread that encompasses all posts on a single topic..
its easy for the MODs to relay info the devs because its all right there....

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Originally Posted by Razor

While I do wholeheartedly miss gear swaps (the concept behind being able to maximize every single number was truly the core of FFXI, it was a very statistical game almost like back in pencil and paper days) but materia already destroyed that aspect of FFXIV. Materia and its requirements along with the already very large stat pools makes any kind of statistical rational on XIV pretty marginal.

Stats in XIV are more of "well all this mess tacts onto some other formula to get a big jumble of mess" as opposed to XI where 1 STR could be concretely related to your weapon skill damage, your min/max, etc. Not that stacking stats on XIV doesn't matter, but with materia being so strong (being able to put anything from STR+1 to STR+50 on a single item) the difference between having STR+12 or STR+15 doesn't really matter anymore. One of the driving factors in XI was numbers, small finite numbers. Your base STR was going to be 72, adding even 1 point of STR would give <this much> increase. Gear swaps just don't really have a place in a game where you can overload whatever you want in piles and piles of <stat>.

In otherwords, do you really need to swap to WS gear that gives an extra 30 STR when your STR and Attack are already 300 and 700 respectively and those numbers just get watered down in some vague calculation? Kinda makes me sad to lose that impact of 1 or 2 points in any given stat but if it makes a player's skill more important than their gear well then I guess it's alright. The lazy people get their way lol.

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^ The Truth.

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Originally Posted by PrettyPrincess

blinking several times in a battle ruins my immersion

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+1

/10character

I kind of miss it, but my inventory is already clogged with gear for every class

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Originally Posted by Dreadnought

i never understood why we blink in the first place. its so ugly to me. why cant their be a small effect where your gear phases in and out but leaves you visible?
i hate to say it but this technology exists in every other MMO.

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I think this needs to be re-emphasized, just because of all the truth jammed in there. Devs, please take note :D

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Originally Posted by Rydin

are all the exact same thing

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Dude why go and revive this old thread when there is already a new one and a very useless one as 99% are against it and S-E said clearly it will not happen nor will they change their minds.

Originally Posted by Dreadnought http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/i...post-right.png i never understood why we blink in the first place. its so ugly to me. why cant their be a small effect where your gear phases in and out but leaves you visible?
i hate to say it but this technology exists in every other MMO.

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Originally Posted by Sav

I think this needs to be re-emphasized, just because of all the truth jammed in there. Devs, please take note :D

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My friend at work is from the Exodus guild in XI and he says there was a hack to prevent blinking.

now people only change gear to mailbox dance
http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lz...y79jo1_400.gif

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Originally Posted by Onidemon

Dude why go and revive this old thread when there is already a new one and a very useless one as 99% are against it and S-E said clearly it will not happen nor will they change their minds.

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Kind of backfired... but the point was to show there are already too many threads about this

The blinking seriously needs to end

go back and play FF XI please those who agree with changing gears for ws or in battle

I said it before and i'll say it again. Because there is enough time to take off a pair of pants and shirt in a real fight, right? DUMB!!!

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Originally Posted by Nakiamiie

I've been wondering the same thing, maybe 2.0 will solve this minor issue? :D

Also, no thanks for gear swap for the same reasons described above.

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I don't think 2.0 will solve the issue.

The reason we blink when we change gear has to do with loading the new .dat file's model and texture into the memory and rendering it fully. I can't say 100% but I have seen many games pretty much instantly load 3d models into game space but take a bit to fully render the texture from extremely low-res to high resolution. Personally I'd rather my gear instantly change but have the texture suck and then sharpen, rather than just disappearing completely.

I don't really know why SE has coded their engines this way since other games do it differently... but an instant model load may very well cause slowdown to the engine and not be possible, sadly.

I play XI and XIV, so saying "go back to XI if you like it" umm im there and here to, cant play multiple games?

Why don't you learn to stop being a crappy and lazy player?

I miss gear swapping, it made the battle so much more fast paced and more sophisticated, more challenging.

actually, gear swapping make the game more slow since every new encounter need to be balanced for multiple switching in mind.
not speaking of animation lock and blinking character, and we all know how people is angry about animation lock.
also, enough with necroposts

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Originally Posted by viion

I play XI and XIV, so saying "go back to XI if you like it" umm im there and here to, cant play multiple games?

Why don't you learn to stop being a crappy and lazy player?

I miss gear swapping, it made the battle so much more fast paced and more sophisticated, more challenging.

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Agreed!

Having the option of gear swapping is nice for those who want a more complex battle system. Those who dont want to gear swap wont have too. If it isnt implemented, something to make a more complex battle system is needed in its place.

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Originally Posted by viion

I play XI and XIV, so saying "go back to XI if you like it" umm im there and here to, cant play multiple games?

Why don't you learn to stop being a crappy and lazy player?

I miss gear swapping, it made the battle so much more fast paced and more sophisticated, more challenging.

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So we're crappy and lazy people because we don't want to hit a macro every few seconds to change all the gear we would have to carry? Why don't you learn to adapt to a new game instead of wanting to turn this one into XI-2.

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Originally Posted by viion

I play XI and XIV, so saying "go back to XI if you like it" umm im there and here to, cant play multiple games?

Why don't you learn to stop being a crappy and lazy player?

I miss gear swapping, it made the battle so much more fast paced and more sophisticated, more challenging.

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I feel the opposite. Gear swapping made everything homogeneous and easy because you had the best stat for everything, always.

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Originally Posted by viion

I play XI and XIV, so saying "go back to XI if you like it" umm im there and here to, cant play multiple games?

Why don't you learn to stop being a crappy and lazy player?

I miss gear swapping, it made the battle so much more fast paced and more sophisticated, more challenging.

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IMO gear swapping is fine fo ff11s slow paced battle. FF14 is already fast paced and doesn't need to rely on a faulty mechanics like gear swap to spice it up. By faulty i mean ff11 dev team said that gear swapping was not the intended use of the mechanic.

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Originally Posted by viion

I play XI and XIV, so saying "go back to XI if you like it" umm im there and here to, cant play multiple games?

Why don't you learn to stop being a crappy and lazy player?

I miss gear swapping, it made the battle so much more fast paced and more sophisticated, more challenging.

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Correct, you are playing FFXI and FFXIV. That's two different games btw. I think it's okay if they don't necessarily have the same features, otherwise why play them both simultaneously?

I don't even know why this is being discussed anymore, Bayonne said pretty unequivocally earlier that gear swapping wasn't coming back and most people seem to be in favor of that stance.
I won't bother arguing your point that it made things more 'sophisticated' since that's just opinion, but more fast-paced and challenging? How is it more challenging to make yourself 100% optimized for the fight, unless you mean more challenging for the healers to target you?

I think people in favor of gear swapping like it because of an inherent trait of battles in FFXI - their slow pace. It basically gives you more to do than hit an ability and then wait for TP, pressing more buttons = feeling more like you're actually DOING something. I dunno why something like that is necessary for FFXIV.

I'll just repost this as a reminder that we're all beating a dead horse. We have the answer on this topic:

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Originally Posted by Bayohne

Spoke with Battle Master Matsui to get the lowdown on the whole gear swapping question that's got you all buzzin'. In regards to swapping gear while in battle, since changing certain gear while in battle will change your class in FFXIV, we're not planning to make it possible to swap gear in battle. This direction will not change in the future.

We are focusing instead on making adjustments with the battle-related fixes to ensure that you can battle to your utmost ability without having to rely on changing gear multiple times mid-fight.

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