Quote Originally Posted by Betelgeuzah View Post
Changing gear made XI's end game work.

Which is why even more important question is what their plans are for the gear progression. Situational upgrades won't work because, well, there are only a fraction of situations as opposed to XI. And if there's no situational upgrades, they'll be forced to make equipment obsolete often. Otherwise we have no reason to go after the new equipment, if it doesn't benefit us.

Gear swaps are a brilliant concept and there's no good argument against it. The small flaws in XI's system are easily fixed.

If they don't do something revolutionary (which isn't Yoshida's style) they will need to choose one or the other. And at this point the community is pointing them towards WoW, as opposed to XI with clear improvements (that is ultimately a better system, when executed correctly. Which isn't hard.)
different stats on different gear for different situations, swap your gear outside of battle, choose your gear based on the event you are goin into and what role you are playing.

Just because you cant be everything at once doesnt mean there isnt useful different gears.
for example
pug weapons with piercing dmg, pug weapons with blunt.
pug weapons with a focus on ATT and crit rate for bigger damage
pug weapons with a focus on parry and ACC for tanking
Evasion earrings gear if you expect to tank low ACC mobs
Defensive gear if you expect to tank high ACC mobs
Haste and speed gear if you want to be able to apply buffs/debuffs and set up BRs all at the same time

The point of different gear in FFXI wasnt to be a god all the time, it was to pick the gear that appropriately fit your skills and role, and made you better at the style of play you chose. The fact that people could use it all basically ruined those strategic choices.

imagine 1 rdm chose to be a stamina type with really high mp regen
another rdm chose to be a melee type with melee gear aCC attack and use enspells
another rdm chose to be a light BLM with back up cures

one monk chose to be a tank, and thus was full of ACC and counter gear, HP boosting gear and haste
another was all spike damage and went ACC ATTACK and STR and VIT for WS with a theif sub used kick attacks and kick damage boots.

people just did it all in one fight, your supposed to choose before you go into battle.

It the equivalent of swapping skills in battle out of your bar right now during a fight, without even having to put away your weapon, its just a work around to cheat the system. Oh im sure its cool, and makes having situational abilities more usefull, but that because you are cheating the system whereby you were actually supposed to choose your gear and skills BEFORE you went into battle.