FFXI's gear swap was like having extra skills.

[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.

[Xionraserei]

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.

^ The Truth.