Everyone says customability to a job by being able to pick your own gear and that will never be true for this fact:

Eventually players will find the best gear that will give you the most attack or acc or ws damage combination etc and everyone will flock to getting those pieces of gear because it is what is best and then there will be the players that want to do their own thing but when it is time to get into a high end game shell they will want what is best and you still face the issue of im still going after the same gear as everybody else. There was a point earlier in the thread about how i used to get booted from parties because i didn't want to gear swap but the tank that did got picked up even with the formula now which obviously doesn't work or we wouldn't be talking about this if you have a Paladin or or whatever the job is called that has all HQ gear and that little bit of defense difference it will become the norm then you will have the player that wants to do his own thing and when it comes time to doing high end game in a shell that strives to be the best or has other players doing what it takes to be the best you still will face the problem of being considered gimp.

Another point is if im a mage and i go in with a Magic accuracy build to land key enfeebles on high end mobs when it comes time to nuke and do something else in battle it was nice being able to gear swap on rdm and do a little damage on magic bursts time to time it added another feature to battle. Gear swapping allowed for your job to be unique and do everything it has the potential to do with this system and the attribute trash that we were left with upon release limits us to one or the other. I don't understand how we call ffxi was terrible design when were presented with the crap we have now obviously this doesn't work or we wouldn't be playing for free right now or have a thread for this. You say lets have gear that benefits everything i can't imagine the stats gear would have to have to be able to max out fast cast, magic acc, magic attack, cure potency, mp regeneration

What we have now is pathetic to everyone but DOH and DOL jobs