[ Dev's ] Gear Swaps Can I have It?

[Physic]

/clap /clap/clap

very well said. i'm mostly worried about the content being pointless as new comes out, the dungeons we doing now will become pointless i bet, some max caps will run them to get maybe a gear for there lowbie classes if they finally fix the game and having decent gear matters by then.

without gear swaps this game will become like warhammer or wow clones, where u'r always replacing your set of gear instead of keeping most of it. and i don't think materia will fix this but we'll see how it is implemented. but still really wish devs would consider adding gear swaps again.

gear swaps is not what made gear not get outdated, it was the fact that cap didnt increase for years. While in a few select pieces gear swap kept old gear alive, just as often it was replaced by something better once cap raised. for example dune boots.

It was a bad system. being able to change your gear on the fly, interesting, but foolish. gear basically became an extended skill list.
swap in haste+30 and cast = skill that decreses recast time
swap in 100+ strength = skill that increases your strength for the next WS
Swap in mp regen gear = skill that increases your mp regen for a time

while adding skills that people obtain through gear, was entertaining, the execution of that mechanic was horrible. what i get from you is you like getting more gear to add skills to your class, thats good but gear swap was not the best execution of that by far.

it was also imbalanced, with gear swaps, you take gear and systems that were supposed to give you a different focus, and playstyle with advantages and disadvantages, and make it into by an large only advantages, while it is cool to have gear that gives you lower recast, it was balanced by the fact that you might be giving up weapon skill damage. It was in fact broken at a basic level, people basically figured out how to cheat the system for great results. Add to that, in order to fully utilize this power, you were required to use a 3rd party app that broke the rules, and could create long macros, and thus had very little limit to the possibilities of gear swapping. (at least without windower, you were somewhat limited by needing to dedicate 2-3 macro slots, and 2-3 presses before you did a WS)

If they wanted to create a mechanic that gave some of the advantages of gear swap, without the foolishness, it would probably have to be a system that allowed you to combine the effects of gear, then turn it into a skill that alters your traits for a short time, IE you take the soul of the armor set, turn it into a short term buff. and then give people like 3 or so of these skills.
but i doubt that would ever happen, its execution would bear to close a similarity to materia, and would be fairly complex to implement.
gear swapping itself would be unbalanced, and instead of tailoring content to people who have one specialization or the other, would require the content be scaled to someone who has use of all the maximum specifications, and if you do that, the normal player would basically be unable to complete most battles.

its broken on a lot of level, say goodbye to your old broken ness.

basically it was an exploit that they didnt fix because it became such a big part of the game.