Jumping right to the conclusion, it’s extremely difficult to save hotbar information for individual gear sets in the current system. The reason is that the saved data size would exceed the data cap.
Both gear set information and hotbar information is saved locally on hard drives for PC and PS3/4. When saving information locally, it’s possible to save a larger amount of information than when saving on the server, but for the PS3/4 there are limitations on the size of saved files due to the file backup service and other related aspects.
(The size is very small.)
Due to this, it’s very difficult to increase the amount of data that is saved as we have reserved space ahead of time to account for the additions of things like classes and jobs in the future.
Currently, for each class (and job) the cross hotbar has 128 slots (16x8) and the hotbar has 120 slots (12x10) for a total of 248. This means that between 19 classes and 9 jobs there is a total of roughly 7,000 actions that are saved.
System-wise for gear sets we’ve reserved space for a maximum of 50, but if we were to make it possible to tie hotbars to each of these it would push the local saved data past the cap.
In order to increase the number of saved sets, we would have to eliminate other saved data of the same size.
As a more realistic approach, we could address this with macros, but as players have mentioned there are some pretty high hurdles to overcome when it comes to macros.
One method I’m thinking of is an expansion of the hotbar settings for the character configuration, which would look something like the following.
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Set Selection
[□] Enable auto hotbar switching when drawing/sheathing weapon.
[□] Enable customization for when weapon is sheathed.
[□] Hotbar 1 [□] Hotbar 5
[□] Hotbar 2 [□] Hotbar 6
[□] Hotbar 3 [□] Hotbar 7
[□] Hotbar 4 [□] Hotbar 8
[■] Enable customization for when weapon is drawn.
[■] Hotbar 1 [□] Hotbar 5
[■] Hotbar 2 [□] Hotbar 6
[□] Hotbar 3 [□] Hotbar 7
[□] Hotbar 4 [□] Hotbar 8
[■] PvP: Enable customization for when weapon is drawn ←Add this one.
[□] Hotbar 1 [■] Hotbar 5
[□] Hotbar 2 [■] Hotbar 6
[□] Hotbar 3 [□] Hotbar 7
[□] Hotbar 4 [□] Hotbar 8
* Please note that this is just an idea and has not been confirmed for implementation!
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With the above settings, you’d be able to swap between set 1 and set 2 by pressing the R1 button while in PvE areas, and then swap between set 5 and set 6 with the R1 button when you are in a PvP area.
*As there is only one type of expanded cross hotbar (simultaneously pressing L2 and R2), if we wanted to change the expanded cross hotbar for PvP areas, we would have to add a PvP display set settings for the “Hold” control option as well.
Originally we were somewhat hesitant to address additions such as this because it would make everything quite complex; however, seeing as how there is an increase in the amount of players participating in PvP with the recent patch, we would like to revisit the above for added configuration settings.