Quote Originally Posted by Iscah View Post
IIRC it did require constant manual updates, but... well, I've already forgotten exactly how it behaved, but either it told you immediately or it just quietly failed and you'd realise it by seeing your portrait had reset once you were in the duty.
The beta system was not tied to gearset. It compared the portrait's gear directly to your equipped gear, so it'd tell you immediately if a portrait wasn't usable as Instant Portrait; you didn't have to go through the trouble of opening the character menu, gearset menu, and portrait menu at the same time, and make sure they all connected together properly.

There even was a nice button labelled "Reflect Current gear", though I don't remember whether it was available at all time, or if it was greyed out when no mismatch was detected.