Legitimate reasons why many of you do NOT like Gear Swapping

[illriginalized]

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.

[aikawananase]

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

[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.

[Rogue]

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.

[Kiroh]

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.)

[Fiosha_Maureiba]

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!

[Inaaca]

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.

[KyrsIsley]

"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.

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.

[Kiroh]

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

[Rogue]

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.