Quote Originally Posted by Enkidoh View Post
I suspect the original poster's idea actually comes from a misinformed belief that rolling shield use into sword would somehow then increase inventory space, but as others have pointed out, the offhand slot is it's own independent section in the Armoury Chest and it's removal wouldn't freeup space like removing Belts did.
Quote Originally Posted by Sjol View Post
I'm not confused. An unused inventory slot is stuff free space in the DB. The "free space" we see is just an illusion of the UI. If there's a free slot in our inventory, it's not represented in the database as anything. Why would you when you don't have to?
I think you're both mistaken.

If they hypothetically could merge shields into swords and get rid of crafter/gatherers' secondary tools, they could get rid of the offhand slot and redistribute its slots to the other sections of the armoury chest, just like they did with belts. Even now it seems like they should reassign some of those slots, perhaps to the main hand weapons.

But yes, slots are "real" and actually quite restrictive or else we wouldn't have inventory issues. They could just keep expanding forever.

What you're thinking of is specifically the Key Items pouch. Those are illusory slots because the items you have in that space are derived from your active quests rather than ownership of an item in the game. You can't reorganise them or put them in other inventories like a normal item; they only exist in that one space in predetermined order. The UI has three pages just in case some madly determined person goes around collecting sidequests that put multiple key items in the pouch and never hands them in.