Quote Originally Posted by NoctisUmbra View Post
Gear swaps are a sad excuse for a way to extend the use of gear. They can get much more creative than having people carry 2x the gear and repeatedly change pants during a battle. If we're gonna play a game with so much focus on lore and live events- one that fancies immersing you in an apocalyptic event, I'd rather not have the BRDs in 2.0 sing about how a few brave adventurers overcame it by swapping their drawers mid-battle.

I understand some of you may feel nostalgic with it having existed in XI, or apparently any other MMo you've played in the past, but it is still lazy design.

I suggest they get creative with their gear, giving them more unique and versatile stats/effects. Releasing multiple sets with greatly varying difficulty in obtaining the clearly better ones. There is nothing wrong with a heirarchy in gear rendering lower ones obsolete, so long as it is balanced with the difficulty and/or rarity of the gear so that players desire one piece until they get the next, so on and so forth.
I agree with this... there are more creative and innovative ways to keep all gear relevant...
Materia is on the right road... unfortunately materia doesn't play well with unique/untradeable

Why they would make 2 competing gear systems is beyond me... and with each patch, it is unclear which one is considered superior

1 Make attaching materia work like repairs.... i.e. in your bazaar
2 More rare materia
3 more diverse materia
4 U/U materia
5 U/U gear becoming Gear specific materia
6 materia that can change the look and/or name of a piece of gear
7 Materia that requires rare and hard to get catalysts (Some of the catalysts could even be those "I get this all the time" dungeon chest drops)

If all that was done... gear swap wouldn't even be in anyone's mind