Legitimate reasons why many of you do NOT like Gear Swapping

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by KyrsIsley

The fact that you can't select a set of gear that will handle a battle with different variables is exactly the beauty of choosing your gear wisely prior to the battle. You need think hard and find what set of gear will suit your playstyle and the encounter the best. Perhaps the fight has a lot of fire damage, but you are confident with your own skill that you can dodge them all, then why not stack up on allowing higher damage output? This way the boss goes down faster and you will ultimately ease some of the burden of the group. Choosing your gear prior to the battle isn't a cop-out to not wanting to carry more gear. It takes real understanding of your own playstyle and how it fits into the group's playstyle and of course how the encounter works. In this case, bringing every set of gears available to encounter every variables in the battle is the easy way out. Sure it takes a lot of effort to gather all that and write up the macros. However, you are just playing reactively, what's the fun in that?

---

Meh... I'll just abuse my BLM/THM and gear swap all day, I'll become full time nuker. At least I won't be gimped during battle.


Anyways this concludes my posts. I really have nothing else to say at this point. Blade and Soul, you're next up in line.

i would welcome gear swapping is all im going to say.

The part where he was saying he rarely changes gear I thought was because he planned to use one set of gear prior to most of his encounters. But I could be misinterpreting him.

This thread has been crazy.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by KyrsIsley

Because using "your" playstyle to say that my statement is completely irrelevant is all that relevant.

As a warrior tank in Aurum Vale, you will want to use cobalt cuirass or sentienel's cuirass for the majority of the run. However, prior to engaging Miser's Mistress, I will make sure I switch to the warrior AF body. As a mage, I make sure I stack up on HP gear during the tunnel, but once I am at Coincounter, I will make sure I switch to dps focused gear. I am not the only person that does this, I've been in enough groups and see other individuals do the same.

Also, I would argue that as a WHM you don't need heal pot. The pure healing output WHM has right now is more than enough to cover most of the situations in any given encounter, unless you have your entire group standing in front of Morbol or standing in the puddle. I would say that HP food is better suited for WHM, so that Blissful Mind (emergency MP recovery) helps you regain more MP, and also increase your survivability during the off chance that things go wrong and you have to take a hit or two. This to me is why I think choosing gear prior to the encounter is so much more fun than simply gear swapping on the fly.

If you need to ask why I do so, then clearly you don't understand the mechanisms of these encounters.



I don't really think he agrees with me, since he always take "heal pot on whm, def on pld, atk on dragoon", and I clearly disagree. :P

---

"heal pot on whm, def on pld, atk were just examples, i think you failed to see my point. i wasnt saying they are what you should use necceseraly.

i know very well that there are different setups for each class but what im saying is that when you have chosen what you think is best there is hardly any point in deviating from it in any one situation, and if there is a point it is so limited it would make close to no difference.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Fiosha_Maureiba

The part where he was saying he rarely changes gear I thought was because he planned to use one set of gear prior to most of his encounters. But I could be misinterpreting him.

This thread has been crazy.

---

This thread has been a gigantic troll, it was all a giant social experiment and you all failed it. I planned this all along, ho ho ho.

(The crafting troll has already come out, just waiting on the op now.)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kiroh

This thread has been a gigantic troll, it was all a giant social experiment and you all failed it. I planned this all along, ho ho ho.

(The crafting troll has already come out, just waiting on the op now.)

---

Soube! How could you do that?! Even after I had your food babies!

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by KyrsIsley

In relation the post, I am not sure why gear swapping is the norm of MMORPG or RPG genre. I've played EQ, GW, FFXI, WoW, LOTRO, Vanguard, RO... the list goes on, some of them I don't even remember. What I do remember though is that choosing your gear wisely prior to the encounter was the norm in the games I've played, FFXI was the only one that really allowed full scale gear swapping and the community built their strategy based on that. So, in this case, I actually don't see gear swapping as the "norm" of MMORPG.

If you are talking about RPG in general, I am not sure which RPG is so hard that the majority of the community take gear swapping in mid battle as the norm. I've played my fair share of RPGs and listing them would just be silly. So I actually don't see your argument of "Gear Swapping is common in RPGs." as a legit reason why gear swapping should be allowed in FFXIV.

As of my personal opinion, I think both "gear swapping" and "choosing your gear before the encounter" takes time and efforts. However, I much prefer the latter. "Gear swapping" to me is like memorizing the text book before going into the exam, does it take a lot of effort? Sure does, and I applaud the people that have the determination to do so. However, "choosing your gear before the encounter" or choosing your gear based on the mechanism of the encounter and balance it with your playstyle takes real understanding of the mechanism. You have to break down the abilities that you may encounter, think about how you would prefer to handle them, then build your gear set around that prior to engaging. Sure, you may have to sacrifice a thing or two along the way and be a little "less perfect" but to me that's where the fun is. You can choose to further strength up your playstyle with the gear or you can choose to patch up your personal weakness with the gear instead, this decision to me is fun.

This of course is how I play and you may feel different and that's fine. Ultimately, whether gear swapping will be implemented or not is up to the devs.



The fact that you can't select a set of gear that will handle a battle with different variables is exactly the beauty of choosing your gear wisely prior to the battle. You need think hard and find what set of gear will suit your playstyle and the encounter the best. Perhaps the fight has a lot of fire damage, but you are confident with your own skill that you can dodge them all, then why not stack up on allowing higher damage output? This way the boss goes down faster and you will ultimately ease some of the burden of the group. If you don't think you can dodge all the extra fire damage, then wear fire resist heavy gear, even though this may reduce your damage output, but being dead means 0 dps, so you go for survivability. Choosing your gear prior to the battle isn't a cop-out to not wanting to carry more gear. It takes real understanding of your own playstyle and how it fits into the group's playstyle and of course how the encounter works. In this case, bringing every set of gears available to encounter every variables in the battle is the easy way out. Sure it takes a lot of effort to gather all that and write up the macros. However, you are just playing reactively, what's the fun in that?

---

Great post, really. I completely agree.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Rogue

"heal pot on whm, def on pld, atk were just examples, i think you failed to see my point. i wasnt saying they are what you should use necceseraly.

i know very well that there are different setups for each class but what im saying is that when you have chosen what you think is best there is hardly any point in deviating from it in any one situation, and if there is a point it is so limited it would make close to no difference.

---

I think this is exactly where I disagree with you. Take the encounter with a lot of fire damage example I used earlier for instance, during progression I may want to stack up on fire resist so that I increase my likelihood to survive longer. This way I get to see more of the encounter and build my experience on it, whether it's learn to dodge the fire damages, or learn to damage the boss more efficiently. However, once I familiarize myself with how the fight works, I can start taking off fire resist gear and start swapping in my dps set, this way I can squeeze the time of encounter, less time spent in the encounter means less chance of making a mistake, thus downing the boss eventually. Sure, you can argue and say there's always the "best" dps set, but that set is always evolving unless the devs decide to not put in anymore dps gear. As a tank, once you learn how to dodge/mitigate some or most of the big damage moves, you can also start wearing some dps/threat focused gear to allow the dps to push harder as well.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by illriginalized

Meh... I'll just abuse my BLM/THM and gear swap all day, I'll become full time nuker. At least I won't be gimped during battle.

---

With the current system, that's hardly an abuse.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Fiosha_Maureiba

Soube! How could you do that?! Even after I had your food babies!

---

Wait...what?

Did I give you some of the food I was making the other day? xD

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by KyrsIsley

I think this is exactly where I disagree with you. Take the encounter with a lot of fire damage example I used earlier for instance, during progression I may want to stack up on fire resist so that I increase my likelihood to survive longer. This way I get to see more of the encounter and build my experience on it, whether it's learn to dodge the fire damages, or learn to damage the boss more efficiently. However, once I familiarize myself with how the fight works, I can start taking off fire resist gear and start swapping in my dps set, this way I can squeeze the time of encounter, less time spent in the encounter means less chance of making a mistake, thus downing the boss eventually. Sure, you can argue and say there's always the "best" dps set, but that set is always evolving unless the devs decide to not put in anymore dps gear. As a tank, once you learn how to dodge/mitigate some or most of the big damage moves, you can also start wearing some dps/threat focused gear to allow the dps to push harder as well.

---

sorry it was a long post so ill focus on the bold part to make my over arching point.

by equiping fire damage gear you will allmost certainly be giving up some other attribute, so heres where my point kicks in, there wasnt any real benefit to changing gear in the first place.

and there is a scenario where -fire damage gear might be viable.. its called ifrit and in fact i used said gear the first couple of times and guess what... i found out that over all it made close to no difference to if i had used my "normal" gear setup. it may have even hindered me.

with gear swapping the effect of different gear is compounded by the fact you dont have to give up a stat you would normally use.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by illriginalized

RPGs ALL have gear swapping.

---

Actually, come to think of it, WoW doesn't have mid-battle gear swapping, last I played. Not that WoW is the be-all-end-all MMO, but it's typically the one people reference first (or second, on these fora).

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Rogue

sorry it was a long post so ill focus on the bold part to make my over arching point.

by equiping fire damage gear you will allmost certainly be giving up some other attribute, so heres where my point kicks in, there wasnt any real benefit to changing gear in the first place.

and there is a scenario where -fire damage gear might be viable.. its called ifrit and in fact i used said gear the first couple of times and guess what... i found out that over all it made close to no difference to if i had used my "normal" gear setup. it may have even hindered me.

with gear swapping the effect of different gear is compounded by the fact you dont have to give up a stat you would normally use.

---

I use fire damage as an hypothetical situation, so I don't mean Ifrit encounter or how the fire resist works in this game, you can simply replace the scenario with Miser's Mistress and initially stacking HP gear or something, the idea is to make sure you survive longer so you have more time to learn it first hand.

If you've lead a raid, the #1 most efficient way to learn an encounter in the very beginning is to increase the survivability of the raid group (assuming no prior knowledge to the encounter). If the group can survive longer, they can familiarize themselves with the encounter. I've been in many groups that try their best to down the boss on first try, but without prior knowledge, downing the boss on first try is pretty much impossible, unless the encounter is trivial. Most established competitive guild/linkshells I've seen or played with will do whatever it takes to learn the fight in and out first before thinking about min/maxing (whether it be gear or class/job stacking) to cater towards the fight, this also falls in line with why I prefer "choosing the gear before I engage". This is why I say, stack fire resist first (increase survivability = increased exposure to the fight = more learning time/experience), then I swap to dps focused gear (min/maxing) to reduce the encounter time (less encounter time = less chance of mistake).

Also, I never disagreed that "with gear swapping the effect of different gear is compounded by the fact you dont have to give up a stat you would normally use." In fact, I completely agree, but I also pointed out that "Choosing your gear prior to the battle isn't a cop-out to not wanting to carry more gear. It takes real understanding of your own playstyle and how it fits into the group's playstyle and of course how the encounter works. In this case, bringing every set of gears available to encounter every variables in the battle is the easy way out. Sure it takes a lot of effort to gather all that and write up the macros. However, you are just playing reactively, what's the fun in that?"

If you look back to my post, I clearly stated "This of course is how I play and you may feel different and that's fine. Ultimately, whether gear swapping will be implemented or not is up to the devs."

While I enjoy having fast reflex and being able to react to skills that the boss throws at me, I also enjoy theorycrafting, to me gear swapping takes away a bit of the enjoyment from the latter. So, I agree to disagree.

I'm not in favor of gear swapping, it does turn the game into a contest over who has the best gear, rather than skill.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Vanguard319

I'm not in favor of gear swapping, it does turn the game into a contest over who has the best gear, rather than skill.

---

but its still a contest over who has the best gear...

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Vanguard319

I'm not in favor of gear swapping, it does turn the game into a contest over who has the best gear, rather than skill.

---

<--hands the kitty a ball of yarn

100% agree with this :D

I usually don't reply to negative postings by quoting or names because i like my posts to stand on their own merits.... However, Illriginalized

Your reply to Kiroh is insulting and does a dis-service to your point. To your question:

You CC the adds and burn the lvl 60 Or you have a secondary tank tank the adds while the group burns the Lv 60. Or you come as a THM and your buddy comes as a BLM. the THM brings secondary healing that can switch between. Using his strength on one part and the versatility on the other.

If you have gears swaping mid fight you: Burn the boss, swap armor burn the adds, swap armor burn the boss again.

Of the above possabilities. I prefer the non gear swap. You should have a weakness. There should be something your missing you would like to have but do not. You team mades are there to fill the voids in your skills, in your protections. To say that you can only have bland fights without gear swapping in my opinion is dishonest to the discussion.

Now before any reply comes forth with "but the adds are too strong" lets not digress into arguments over theoretical instances that would likely not happen. If the "adds are too strong" then the instance is not correctly balanced for the current system. That does not mean the armor system itself is faulty.

The value i see and enjoy in Choosing an armor set and not being able to change it mid fight is, commitment.

I have done my best, i have researched, perhaps attempted and for the entirety of the upcomming fight. i belive ARMOR X, gives me the best chance and advantage for the longest amount of time during the fight. For the other times, when it is les of an advantage i will rely on my skill and team mates to contribute to the win.

Much of that can be lost if i only need to swap 5 items a few times. Now i am optimal for the entire duration for the fight.

In my opinion a battle should be filled with peaks and valleys. For a time your Lord of the battle, and at other times your trying to survive. Locking in an armor choice i belive helps.

I would also worry that if swapping armor was the standard. you would see a very fine line as far as tuning fights. It would be assumed that you will be wearing the best at all times. Which generally means enemies will have to be tuned for overall HP and not have specific weaknesses (perhaps in certain phases) that could be exploited. because they will ALWAYS be exploited.

Then people will complain for more armors with more HP bonuses so they can make that thinly tuned line mean nothing.
and in my opinion, suck the amount of possibilities, peaks of greatness, valleys of survival and joy doing well even if your not optimal 100% of the time for every phase, every moment every add and boss. What happened to being victorious despite the weaknesses? I find fun in that too.

My opinion: Commit to your choice. do your best and win despite the weakness inherent in your armor. And then do it better then anyone else.

TL;dr There isn't one. i would hope if this discussion means much to you, you would be willing to read everything even if it is an apposing opinion.

Edit: I'll catch up on the posts. when i started writing this it was earlier in the day at work, and i got busy. and replied at Page 2. Seems alot of action has happened here snice then. :)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kiroh

This thread has been a gigantic troll, it was all a giant social experiment and you all failed it. I planned this all along, ho ho ho.

(The crafting troll has already come out, just waiting on the op now.)

---

Actually if anyone wants to know, I wasn't attempting to troll. A lot of points were made and I took them down. That way I can come up with a theory on how to work around them.

I like gear swapping and hopefully there will be a way to bring it to FFXIV.

Some people's concerns FOR gear swapping are easily answered by: "Change Gears Between Battles". Going to fight magic heavy mobs? Swap to magic defense gear, eat food. Next wave is a huge mob of mobs. Expecting to get hit? Swap to defense gear. Next mob is very evasive? Swap to accuracy gear and food.

Others really do want serious, midbattle gearswapping. While casting, put on maximum elemental damage gear + fast cast. While having enmity, swap to damage reduction gear. While curing, maximise cure potency. While idling around between spells, swap to maximum regen/refresh gear.

That's the situation right now for the guys who do want gearswapping.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by illriginalized

common essential of majority RPGs

---

You've said this a couple times since I started reading in the thread, and I have to ask...which MMO's have gear swapping and are there enough of them to claim the practice is a "common, essential majortiy"?

(I ask this on the assumption "Gear Swapping" means changing gear mid-battle to boost the output of certain spells and abilities. Not simply changing gear between battles.)

As for the rest of the pages and pages of the topic:

Elitism is just an attitude. It's a potentially good player with a bad attitude.

It's kinda like "Newb" and a "Noob". One is a legitimate beginner whom is learning the basics or advanced mechanics of the game while a 'Noob' is someone who simply doesn't grasp those same concepts.

Here, we have "Elite" players which are good players who appreciate efficiency, but ultimately use their skill without flaunting it and can work in just about any given situation. "Elitists" are players who may or may not be good players who demand efficiency and ultimately only care about the highest numbers and fastest runs.

FFXI (I know, a swear word around here) had gear swapping, and while I did it, I didn't enjoy the mechanic. That's my simple argument. I don't play games to beat other people (or these type of cooperative games at least) or things like that. I play the game to enjoy myself. With gear swapping the dynamic felt more like a judgement contest where people will boot players from a party for not having a certain piece (I've seen it more than just a few times), or just rag on them until they get fed up a leave. Instead we should be figuring out how to work together and defeat the enemy in our path.

Another part of games to me is immersion. The more I can let myself fall into the game and be swept up by its story, aesthetics, world, and system the better of a game it is. Gear swapping doesn't affect the story or world at all, but the aesthetics and the system are destroyed by it to me. The blinking is an obvious aesthetic fail, but I think any other ways of doing it would be too. A flash and new armor? A fade effect? No, this pulls me out of the world, pulls me out of the battle, and once gear swapping is allowed it will occur for nearly every action (more on that in a second). The system is hurt by a lot of the little visual cues we get. In a battle a lot of things can be going on and it was not a rare occurrence for (example) the visual effect of my weapon skill not to show because it was busy blinking and changing gear. Now I'm the type of person that I want to make sure, so now I'm looking through the log to make sure my skill went off and I didn't get a "Target out of range" message and all my TP was spent (again FFXI rules) or something.

And to get back to my point about gear swapping for every action. This battles in FFXIV are much faster paced compared to FFXI. Someone on the forums even has the "If you're playing PLD right it should feel like this" with an animation of psychotically fast button pushing sig. Could you imagine gear swapping for each of those actions? Now imagine the whole party doing it. With the faster paced battles of FFXIV (a good thing in my opinion) it would look like the monster so seizing and dying instead being attacked because the characters would never be visible!

I'm pretty much against it for a couple of reasons that were already posted.

A. Limited Inventory- Some jobs were just plagued and overburdened with "situational" gear in FFXI. You cannot imagine the woes "good" RDM's dealt with lugging around Nuking, Healing, Buffing, -M/PDT, and Haste/Fastcast sets, and if they were really dedicated a TP and WS setup on top of that. Even with the Gobbie bag, Mog Sack, and Satchel I was still hurting for slots in the long run. With the Armory system allowing instant job change anywhere, your already expected to carry at least a few sets of gear with you for other jobs, do you really want to compound on that when the inventory spaces go back to 100.

B. Gearing Headaches- Kind of hand in hand with Inventory issues, but most situations the best gear for any situation required considerable time and effort to obtain. Now that's not saying people shouldn't try to get better gear to increase performance, but having to spend literally weeks on end just to swap in one piece of gear that you'll use maybe 5% of the fight shouldn't be the main focus when it comes to specing yourself.

C. Hinders Performance- Currently the slow interface would actually be counter-productive to use gear swapping. It takes like 10 seconds just to swap accessories when I change jobs, I can only imagine that lower end graphics cards would probably take longer. By the time you actually could change your gear to WS you, probably could have regained the TP back to WS again before you were even able to swap back to TP gear. That could only hurt jobs like WHM if there ever came the need to swap to and from cure gear when time is of the essence.

Besides as Dark said most everyone knows how a mob is going to behave so it's not like you can't plan ahead for inconstantcies. In the end, I'd much rather not have this game turn into a huge case of number crunching like FFXI turned out to be, it sucked alot of fun out from the game for the sake of "efficiency" and "optimization" which should never be the main focus of any game.

My name is Technyze and I approved this message.

Gear Swapping should not be implemented because it is poor game design, plain and simple.

Being able to swap gear mid-battle with unlimited frequency does not create interesting decisions. In fact, there are no choices to be made. Its automation. Simply having the option available demands that you switch to the optimal set of gear for each situation. This does not add any meaningful challenge to the game, and any player who does not gear swap becomes an inefficient gimp.

Gear choices should be about risk and reward. If I want to maximize DPS, I should go into a fight wearing the appropriate set of gear, understanding that I am making a tradeoff on survivability or utility. Assuming the content is well-designed, decisions like these are interesting because I must consider the party setup, the content to be challenged, any additional variables (time limits, emergency situations, etc) when choosing what gear I should wear.

Implementing mid-battle gear swaps with tradeoffs is understandable. I believe that earlier Final Fantasy games and other JRPGs allowed you to swap gear mid-battle with the penalty of losing a turn. Even games with "real-time" combat such as FFXII and Dragon Age allow you to swap gear in battle, but the player incurs the expense of navigating through menus every time, thus negating the frequency at which the player can gearswap.

Perhaps if players were to incur an X-second duration where no actions (including auto-attack) could be taken after gearswapping, where X is dependent on the number/type of pieces swapped, then players could at least be presented with the decision to sacrifice utility and offense in the short term to correct an earlier decision that affected them in the long term. For example, if a player were to walk into a battle unaware that the enemy made excessive use of Fire-based attacks, they would have the option to equip fire-resistant gear and have the incentive to leave it on for the duration of the fight.

Still, I believe that less is more. Without mid-battle gear swapping, there would be no need for making pages of gearswap macros. The less macros the player has to make, the better, and this should generally be the case if the user-interface is properly redesigned for 2.0.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Fiosha_Maureiba

Gear swapping.

Strategic vs. Tactical: In my opinion, the class, our cross class abilities, the equipment we wear, the food we eat, the potions we bring to battle before the battle starts is on the strategic level. It's what we take into the battle. Our positioning, what abilities we use and when, how we react to the enemy, and in accordance to our team mates, those are the tactics. Switching classes, abilities, and equipment in the middle of combat would bring the strategic level into the tactical level.

---

This is how I feel. The limitation of one set of gear for an encounter makes for interesting choices. Combat is no less dynamic because you can't swap gear in the middle of a battle.

I had similar feelings about the old Armory system before the class overhaul. Allowing every class the ability to "swap to Gladiator" for Sentinel before Hellfire takes away from the challenge of the Ifrit fight. Working as a party to overcome the limitations of individual classes is much more satisfying.

Quote:

---

Toward stopping gear swapping: Once a party member obtains enmity of any enemy, they are locked into their equipment until combat is resolved. And even a step further, once you enter an instance, you're locked into that class/job combo until you exit the instance.

---

I am also in favor of no class/job swapping inside of an instance. Make your choice outside, then play to your strengths in each encounter inside. I think it's great to see WHMs nuking down Whiskerwall at the start of Moogle fight.

Quote:

---

How much is built into the game already? If it was intended to play a larger role in the game, SE should have just incorporated it into core of the system. We would have a monk beginning his combo with his fists, chain into a Dragon Uppercut, whoop out his staff and conjure a full thunder combo with the impact of lightning propelling him further in the air, when at last his Thundaja was on cooldown, he would twirl in the sky with the storm on his back, channeling heaven's wrath into his mighty polearm before plummeting downward toward his foes in a single swift destructive motion, ending with a seismic shock that knocks the subligar off every spectator.

---

Awesome! My opinion is changed.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by KyrsIsley

The fact that you can't select a set of gear that will handle a battle with different variables is exactly the beauty of choosing your gear wisely prior to the battle. You need think hard and find what set of gear will suit your playstyle and the encounter the best. Perhaps the fight has a lot of fire damage, but you are confident with your own skill that you can dodge them all, then why not stack up on allowing higher damage output? This way the boss goes down faster and you will ultimately ease some of the burden of the group. If you don't think you can dodge all the extra fire damage, then wear fire resist heavy gear, even though this may reduce your damage output, but being dead means 0 dps, so you go for survivability. Choosing your gear prior to the battle isn't a cop-out to not wanting to carry more gear. It takes real understanding of your own playstyle and how it fits into the group's playstyle and of course how the encounter works. In this case, bringing every set of gears available to encounter every variables in the battle is the easy way out. Sure it takes a lot of effort to gather all that and write up the macros. However, you are just playing reactively, what's the fun in that?

---

Another great post.

In FFXI, you had to travel back to the Mog House to switch your job. Gear swapping allowed you to adjust your role in the party. It was useful there, even though it was bad game design.

In XIV, you have Job swapping on the fly. You can fulfill any role needed at any given time provided you're not engaging the enemy. With that in place, and considering the pace of battle in FFXIV is way faster than what XI was, gear swapping would be a cumbersome load of micro-managing your macros for those short 1 minute battles. Why even bother?

The game's easy enough as it is at the moment anyway. Or so all these endgamers keep screaming.

My view on gear swapping is that it's unnecessary.

Some people say that gear swapping adds another dynamic to the game by forcing players to carry gear sets for specific abilities in order to maximise their potential. This is true, however the same can be said by forcing players to carry a single set for their character. It takes just as much knowledge and understanding of mechanics and stats to choose the right set to maximise dps. The downside to multiple gear sets, as was always the case in FFXI, is that your inventory space suffers. You also have to gather much more gear for a single class.

It doesn't promote elitism, the only thing that does at the moment is BG with their constant trash talking self promotion sweeps in these forums.

Gear swapping or no gear swapping makes no big difference, I'd just prefer not to have it.

I think simply because its a pain in the ass to carry around that much gear, and because I see it as more of a headache than benificial, it adds complexity where it isn't needed. Simpler is often better.

http://i2.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/...23/untitle.JPG

I've been skimming this a bit, so maybe this has been discussed in more detail than i noticed, but just in case...

I think the biggest problem with this suggestion (and a vast majority of them, to be honest) is that you are offering a solution to a problem, yet you aren't fully explaining the problem. You at latching on to a concept from another game that you enjoyed and want to see it ported over. This is fine and all, we all want the fun stuff, but does it actually fit this game? And what gap is it filling?

The problem is, most people don't actually know what they want. They can see something and know that it isn't right, but they don't know why. So they try to fill that gap themselves and offer a solution ("Give me gear swapping!"). What is infinitely more useful, however, is identifying the problem and letting the creative people who are intimate with the product to find a fitting way to solve it.

Again, just from skimming, I think these are some of the problems you are trying to patch:
- There aren't enough gear choices.
- There is no sense of gain in power by acquiring new gear.
- Because the stats on gear have such limited gains, I don't feel superior for having the BIS gear over others who do not (there is little competitive value in gaining gear).

Start with the problems before offering solutions.

its unnecessary, it clogs up your inventory and storage as hell and its cumbersome to use (switching back and forth after every damn WS in XI always sucked)

This has nothing to do with swapping jobs on the fly during battle. Only gears for stats.

I don't even see a reason to use haste gear if they brought haste into this game.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Cendres

It's a hassle plain and simple. Why add something that would be cumbersome, why not ask for a feature that would have the same benefits without the annoyance of swapping out gear? It's just one more button to push, step to go over that doesn't need to be around and should not be encouraged from a development point of view. Please think of something more creative and/or seamless.

This is not my style of play as I'm very casual so excuse the ignorance but should not the materia system help with this?

---

People are not asking for gear swapping to be forced upon them, they simply ask to have the option to do it while in active. If you don't want that hassle then fine don't gear swap but for those who don't mind doing it, shouldn't we have that option?

I don't really care about this thread enough to leave a legitimate comment, so I'll just put this here.
http://imgur.com/gallery/MAYZI

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Noblewar

People are not asking for gear swapping to be forced upon them, they simply ask to have the option to do it while in active. If you don't want that hassle then fine don't gear swap but for those who don't mind doing it, shouldn't we have that option?

---

no because it becomes expected, people in game start going o you don't gear swap you don't deserve to be in this party, i've noticed he doesn't gear swap 20 times in a fight i'm kicking him.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by ThePatriarch

What is the point of playing games? To win.

---

I play games to have fun, thank you very much~

As in for Gear Swapping... that's retarded. Change armor during the fight, what the hell are we, freaking Inspector Gadgets? Nope! You have an armor, and you keep it until you finish the fight!

Eitherway, a system to change armors outside combat is fine.

Personally, I enjoyed maxing my abilities in XI with different gear sets. As a mage, it was nice to change to enfeebling gear for enfeebles, healing gear for heals. I enjoyed being as effective as possible and collecting different gear pieces for different abilities. It made building a job gear a long term (or never-ending) project.

The best thing about gear swaps is longevity of certain gear pieces, as Rogue wrote earlier in this thread:

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Rogue

without gear swapping ALOT of the equipment in this game is useless, and everytime new content is released more and more equipment will become useless.. and because of this people will allways just do the content that drops the best equipment and nothing else.

with gear swaps people will do content that drops gear that would otherwise be outclassed and would only be usefull in a gear swap.

---

This is what I'm worried about: without gear swaps certain pieces (AF for example) will become useless after some time and replaced with something else. I'm afraid that having only certain kind of gear sets for different kind of battles (instead of having them for different abilities) will reduce the amount of gear we're using and make older gear redundant.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Rogue

like others have stated the materia system should be able to provide somekind of solution.

---

Maybe. I hope it will be expanded and enhanced though. Customizing and updating gear could be more versatile: we could meld different pieces together to enhance the effect of certain job abilities, for example.

At the moment people are already using gear swap macros, especially mages. It's a mechanic already in game, despite of if SE or players want it to be there or not. If it's something SE wants to get rid off, they should make changes to current mechanics (I think someone already suggested it in this thread, but one solution could be making it impossible for you to change gear when you have enmity). The current situation is kind of unfair for melees, since it's so much easier for mages to improve their performance with gear swaps.

Personally, I'd rather see more limits to changing jobs than changing gear, so that you couldn't change your job/class inside a dungeon, for example.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by ThePatriarch

Bolded your last couple sentences there.

I guess that puts me in the status of Douchebaggery then. My kind is a dying breed it seems. I like playing games for the competition aspect. The fight to stay at the top, and work at bettering myself and those in my company.

It's so very discourage watching the MMO industry turning into an amusement park for casual players who just want to hang out online with minimal to no competition between players.

---

Ever thought of playing games to have fun ?

My breed of people must be extinct lol.

All i want out of an MMO a game is to have fun, RELAX (caps because that bits really important) and enjoy the fantasy world of MMORPGs.

What I dont want

A second job
Being told I am "i am not good enough"
that I HAVE to be online at certain times of day or I will be kicked for inactivity

Maybe its just me, but using derogatory arguments and being a "Cyber Bully" is very closely linked to competitiveness and "elitist" attitudes.

My opinion is you should strive to better yourself for yourself and your own feeling of achievement - a true elitist NOT shout from the roof tops about how amazing you are - fake elitist

I don't know where i am going with this but I just felt like wasting 10 mins at work :)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Lux_Rayna

1) It looks ugly. Charactesr disappear every time they swap gear, I dont not want to blink in and out of reality the entire time I'm fighting. Not visually attractive.

2) Its overburdensome on inventory. We are getting a reduced amount of inventory spaces too, I can't have most of it taken up with gear. Sounds like a nightmare.

3) Its a balancing nightmare. As a dev, if you have gear swapping, how are you going to balance the content? Around a set of gear? Around Gear Swapping? Deciding a difficulty curve is pretty much a dice roll.

4) It alienates casual players, which eats away at a lot of profits. Once you have gear swapping, gear swapping becomes law. No gear swap no group. Oh you dont have 3 different sets as a tank? Too bad gtfo. Does the casual person have time to amass 3 sets of gear, all melded and ready to go? No. Do casuals mean more money? Yes. Therefore it is a bad idea to alienate casuals.

5) A game that is gear dependent is a bad game imo. If everything is dependent on gear (as in all problems are fixed with a gear swap), then it removes whatever challenge the game might have had if you could only use one set of gear. Unless they, of course, raise the difficulty curve...but in that case gear swapping woudl become a necessity, and casuals would be alienated. That is bad.


There are plenty of reasons for not employing gear swapping. It is a potential party nightmare..where everyone is required to have 6 sets of gear and multiple class/jobs maxed before they are even allowed to participate in group content. That kinda atmosphere is destructive to a game's health and longevity, turning away everyone but the hardcore few. The hardcore few cannot keep a game afloat, nor can they keep SE's investors happy.

---

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by rekijitsu

It also adds uninteresting choices.

Oh do I have to choose between making my Burst damage higher with WSes or my DPS higher? My heals or damaging spells higher? Oh I guess I don't.

---

Pretty much what those two said.

Because it's a completely unneccessary and rediculous mechanic.

I feel the basis of an MMO is specialization. Its why a BLM does things differently than a PLD. Should a WHM be a tank? No- its not supposed to be optimal at healing not tanking.

Most of the jobs have stances that switch them between different forms. These are whats supposed to be your slight changes from one form of optimal to another. These all have certain cooldowns/requirements that set paces from what you can do.

You are not supposed to be optimal for every situation from second to second. If you build full defense you should not be able to go 1 second- full offense- 1 second full defense again.

Also what does it really add to gameplay? You hit a macro- like your probably do now. You arent more skilled for it. You hit the same button for X. It just has a few more lines before it now. If its for the gear you worked hard to show everyone on the internet- that can be accomplished with preplanning like now.


For those wanting to keep armor for long periods a couple of things.
1. If its just emotional reasons please think of materia as the way to hold on to your armor. If i was a little more crazy I could make a family tree of my armor.

2. To hope you can keep it forever if gear swaps exist is a bit of a false presumption. The nature of an MMO means you will most likely change it every other update. What I would say is leveling needs to be a bit slower so you feel a need to get that armor rather than in the time i take to deal with it would be less than just pushing through (though often this is the case anyway even in longer run games).

3. Some people would count switching in new armor as a plus. I didnt particularly like using pretty much the same shoes 1-70 in ffxi. Variety can be a nice thing too.