Quote Originally Posted by Ramsey View Post
There's no gear swapping because the detrimental effects of the system far outweigh the benefits. Let's take a look at some of the issues it causes...
  • Inventory management problems, we're already able to swap jobs in the field, what if we have to carry 5 items per slot per job?
  • Accessibility issues, it's a huge learning curve to master the art of gear swapping, and creates unneccesary rifts in the playerbase.
  • Visual issues, there is no acceptable way to deal with gear swapping visually, characters blinking in and out, and canceling animations and spell effects is absolutely unacceptable.
  • Macro storage issues, there have to be significantly more macro slots, and more lines per macro.
  • Playability issues, the game becomes unplayable without macros. Lost your macros? Playing on a new machine? Time to spend 9 years writing macros.

The only benefit is that a wider array of gear is useful at the same time for a single player. This is nice, but it's not worth all of the downsides. Not to mention there are other ways to accomplish situational gear being useful.
In addition there are also these issues created by gear swapping:
  • Gear Swapping breaks immersion (It doesn't matter how much stock you personally put into this, because immersion is broken it's bad design.)
  • It removes any strategy that is required to properly gear up before battle
  • Gear swapping ultimately leads to players being required to have certain items for groups, or else they are considered "gimped" by the community
  • The game becomes more difficult for devs to balance because gear swaps must be considered, leading to longer dev cycles.


So after all these negatives, what are the positives?
  • highly situational gear becomes more useful
  • Higher DPS for players that want to take the time to set up the macros required for efficient gear swapping


Lets keep gear swapping out of this game please