The Devs have made mention in passing to the implementation of an Equipment Guide (like the Mount and Minion guides). However, I haven't seen anywhere that they have listed the specifics for how an Equipment Guide would work. Obviously, it can't be the same as the Minion/Mount guides that let you use the Minion/Mount from the guide itself, because equipping an item from the guide has all sorts of issues inherent in it. It would instead be like the Fish Guide where it lists the items you've obtained, but is completely independent of the items themselves.

Lore is nice and all, but that's not at all what I want from this feature. What I want from an Equipment Guide is the ability to cast Glamours straight from the guide itself. That way I don't need to store dozens of equipment items on my retainers just in the off-chance that I want to use one of them for a glamour later on. I want to be able to use any item I've ever gotten as a glamour without having to keep the item itself stored away somewhere.

That said, there needs to be some cost associated with this feature. Otherwise, you could just pass around an item so a bunch of people get it in their Guides for glamour, and that's not good. If you have to obtain the item yourself for them to wind up in the Guide, that wouldn't work for all of the tradable items that could definitely be Guide-able (like the Sea Breeze swimsuit, for example).

So, here's what I propose:
Basics:
  • The Equipment Guide requires a quest to unlock.
  • Once the Equipment Guide has been unlocked, you may scan items into your Equipment Guide through some mechanism.
  • Scanned items are destroyed.
  • Selecting an entry in the Equipment Guide gives lore about the item and/or the mouse-over description of the item.
  • When selecting an entry in the Equipment Guide, you have the option to Project Glamour. This consumes Glamour Prisms as per usual.
  • Items in the Equipment Guide do NOT appear in the standard Cast Glamour interface for simplicity reasons.
  • Like with the Armoire, when an item is added to the Guide, all customizations (glamours, dyes) are removed. This allows the item to be stored as just an Item ID and no other data.

Further suggestions:
  • The Equipment Guide as suggested above could be limited to only certain items. For instance, only Vanity Gear, Seasonal Items, AF, AF2, AF3, and green/blue Dungeon Drops. Or, more simply, non-vanity Crafted equipment items should not be addable to the Guide.
  • Since the Equipment Guide as described would make the Armoire a bit redundant, finishing the quest could place all items from the Armoire into the Equipment Guide. A warning should be issued to the player so they know to take things out of the Armoire before turning in the quest if they want to keep the actual items. All items that could be stored in the Armoire should then be purchasable from the Calamity Salvager if they aren't already.
  • If there is a concern about the amount of additional data that would need to be stored per character, this feature could be optional and, when it's activated, it could consume a number of inventory spaces (or retainer inventory spaces). There would be some complications to this implementation, but my understanding is that items in an Armoire-like format only cost two bytes of data (for the item number). Items in your inventory cost 8-14 bytes of data based on how the data is stored (2 for Item Number, 2 for Glamour Item Number, 1 for Dye, 1-2 for Condition, 1-2 for Spiritbond, 1-5 for Materia Melded). Getting rid of 10 inventory spaces could translate to enough space for 200 Equipment Guide spaces without increasing server load.

Thoughts?