Updating the Mini-Menu: Gear Swap and Action Swap Shortcuts

[Ravidrath]

So with the introduction of Chocobos, I've effectively discovered the mini-menu.

It's pretty handy, and lets me get to things pretty quickly. However, two of the five items on it are effectively useless because it takes more effort to access them on the mini-menu than it does through other means.

I am playing with a controller, so my perception of this might be a little skewed - if you use a mouse and click on these buttons often, please let me know.

Active/Passive Mode
It's easier and faster 100% of the time to engage Active/Passive mode from the press of a single key/button press.

Main Menu
Moving around a smaller menu to summon another, larger menu is... silly. Especially when that is more effort than summoning it otherwise.

So what would be good here? Functionality like the Chocobo, consumable items and emotes seem perfect for it.

What I'd really like to see is a "Gear Swap" button and an "Action Swap" button. Even with macros, I feel like I spend far too much time adjusting gear, not to mention setting up macros is a pain considering how often you change gear and actions.

Gear Swap Button
After setting up your Gear in the current menu, you could open up the Gear option in the Mini-menu - there would be a space to save a snapshot of your current gear loadout to a slot, and confirming it would give you the option to name that set, and an icon of the class you're changing to appears there, as well, if there is a weapon change involved.

From that point on, selecting that name would swap your entire gear to the one you saved there. Running around the field and see a tree you want to savage? Boom - you're a Botanist. Headed into town for a hot date? Spladow - you're in your full Grand Company regalia.

The reason this is better than Macros is because you can do an entire gear swap with one item, rather than needing to set up multiple slots per job change, and it saves the data out for you so it's easy to adjust in the future without worrying about item names, slot names, typos, etc. Text is a terrible and error-prone way to do most anything, and these are pretty binary actions we're talking about here.

In addition to saving you a lot of time, as a result, Macros can be refocused on performing common actions rather than swapping gear.

Action Swap Button
The Action Swap button would work similarly, but save action sets based on the class/job you currently are.

So, for example, if I'm playing on CNJ, I might have Solo, Party and White Mage action builds, and they would only be accessible while I am on CNJ. If I switched to GLA, my CNJ Action Sets wouldn't appear, but only my GLA sets.

[Teakwood]

This would be very cool, and fairly intuitive! I know they're planning some kind of "saved actions per job" palette of some variety, Yoshida's mentioned it more than once, but I know I'd prefer to have multiple action palettes saved per job, and multiple gear palettes saved in general. The Armory system was sold on the strength of switching from job to job on the fly in the field without screwing about with actions and gear and so on; this would go a long way towards fulfilling that design premise.

[Rentahamster]

Yeah, gear profiles and skill profiles/bookmarks or whatever you want to call it have been on my wish list since beta.

[Jinko]

Agree with this suggestion, I've made several threads about both idea's, thankfully the skill sets have been somewhat alleviated with the latest patch but like above it would be nice to have a UI so that we could set up several different skill sets per class.

One of my biggest issues I have had for a long time was how slow the current macro system is for change gear, I do remember Yoshi-p saying he had plans to make it faster and also make a separate function just for switching gear, so with any luck we will hear something about this.

Could be worth asking this question in the next Q&A live letter.