Thread: 4.3 Glamour feedback

The changes to the glamour dresser in 4.3 have helped move the glamour system towards being something pleasing and intuitive to use, but I think there's still a lot of room of improvement. Here's some of the future changes and improvements I'd like to see to the dresser and glamour system in general.

1. Add an option to suppress glamour notifications in the chat log.
This one should really be a priority, because right now, every time you apply a glamour plate, your chat log is spammed with 10-13 lines of glamours being applied. It's super annoying and super unnecessary. It's particularly bad now that glamour plates can be linked to gear sets, because now the chat spam occurs EVERY time you switch to that set, even if the gear is already glamoured that way!

2. Allow glamour plates to be applied anywhere.
Only being able to apply glamour plates in major cities and hubs is still a bit lame. It's true you don't need to venture out into the zones all that often these days, but it's still just a niggling limitation that shouldn't be there in an ideal system.

3. Allow glamour plates to be edited in more locations.
Personally I'd like it if plates could be edited anywhere except instanced duties, but I'll settle for a glamour dresser furnishing that can be used in player housing.

4. Allow items outside the glamour dresser to be referenced in plates somehow.
One of the more annoying limitations of glamour plates is that they can only use gear that's in the dresser or the armoire. If you are still using gear, you can't include it in a glamour plate. This is a problem, because if you want to use the base appearance of a piece of gear on one job, but apply a glamour to that same piece on another job, you have two choices: manually dispel the glamour each time you switch jobs, or get a duplicate of that piece so you can use one and store the other in the dresser so you can make a second plate.

Additionally, there may be cases where you want to use a piece of gear on one job, but glamour that piece's appearance on a different job. For example, one might want to use the Ironworks fending set on their level 50 Warrior, but glamour its appearance on their level 70 Paladin's gear.

The mass-dispel feature added in 4.3 relieves this issue a little bit, but not enough. To fully solve it, there should be a way to include items outside the dresser in a plate, or otherwise allow an item to be both in the dresser and inventory. Some potential solutions for this are:
A) Allow gear slots in plates to be set as "dispel glamour", so that whenever that glamour plate is applied, any item equipped to a slot set as "dispel glamour" has its pre-existing glamour (if any) dispelled. This is not an ideal solution because it doesn't allow for circumstances where you want to use a gear piece on one job, but glamour its appearance on a different job.

B) Remove the ability to take items out of the glamour dresser. Instead, whenever anything is added to the dresser, it does not add the actual item but instead just a copy/projection. That way the original item remains in your inventory and can be used normally, and the copy inside the dresser can be used in plates. The copy of the item in the dresser stays there even if the original item is lost (vendored, discarded, etc). The ability to take things out of the dresser is removed to prevent item duplication, and naturally any items which are projected into the dresser become bound to the player so that you couldn't just buy expensive gear, put a projected copy in the dresser, then resell it.

C) Allow items in the inventory and armour chest to be referenced in plates. This means that when creating a plate, you can simply include any items in your inventory or armoury chest in the plate. The plate functions normally as long as the character still owns the item. Because this gets around the need to add items to the dresser, there would be a cost of 1 glamour prism for each plate item that is outside the dresser every time the plate is edited.

D) Make plates separate from normal glamours, and allow plates to be "turned on/off" freely. Right now applying a plate simply overwrites any existing glamours or appearances of a gear piece. With this change, a plate glamour would be considered separate to a normal glamour, and would not overwrite the original appearance or glamours, instead being overlaid on top. When the plate is "turned off", the underlying appearances of the gear (including any normal glamours) would show instead.

5. Increase the number of glamour plates.
10 really isn't enough. There should be at least 26 so there's one for every class and job in the game, but ideally there should be enough plates that you could only reach the limit by intentionally trying to. 50 would be good, and 100 would be sufficient.

6. Increase the number of dresser slots
200 is a reasonable amount only if you have specific outfits in mind. If you want to make efficient use of your limited space, you have to first come up with an outfit, go and collect the pieces for it, and then add those pieces to the dresser and make a plate. If you just add anything you think looks good, anything which you might want to use in the future, you'll quickly run out of room because there are thousands of nice gear pieces in the game. Because of this, you end up having to throw out gear if you don't have anything in mind for it, even if you think it looks good. This is frustrating because some gear is really hard to get again if you later decide you do have an idea for it.

I would really like to be able to use the glamour dresser as a "catalog", where I could just put in any gear I think looks nice, and then come back to it later and come up with outfits based on all the pieces I've collected. But to do this you'd want to have a lot more appearances than what you can currently store.

Ideally the glamour dresser space would simply be unlimited, and you wouldn't actually even have to add items to it, it would just automatically log the appearance of any gear you picked up like the transmog system does in WoW now. But I realize this is probably out of reach for the XIV team currently, so I can only request that they increase the space as much as possible.

7. Extend the new squadron glamour UI to retainers and glamour plate editing.
When I tried the new squadron glamour system I thought "why doesn't it work this way for retainers and the player?" The new squad glamour system is great, you can view and select gear pieces from your inventory, glamour dresser and armoire in a way that's way simpler and more intuitive than editing glamour plates, plus you get a nice big full-screen look at the changes instead of the little "try on" window which is cumbersome and feels small even at 200% size. Add in some features to raise/lower visors, sheathe/unsheathe weapons and hide/show hats and you'd have a system that's way better than the current way you edit glamour plates, and a thousand times better than the way you have to change retainer glamours.

8. Make normal dyes unlimited and free.
This is kind of just a personal "wishlist" type change rather than a direct improvement, but I find the current dye system tedious. You basically have two choices: either decide what dyes you want in advance and go out of your way to buy or craft those dyes in the exact amounts, OR you have to just carry around all kinds of dyes just in case you want to use one, which takes up valuable inventory space.

Both of these options are annoying, and regular, non-rare dyes are neither expensive nor hard to craft, so I don't see why we can't just get rid of them and make everyone's lives much easier. Remove regular dyes as items (the special rare dyes such as metallics and pastels should remain limited items), and instead give free, permanent access to all of those colours just by opening the "dye" interface. No more wasting time with junkmongers, market boards, or pigments, no more inventory space clogged up by pots of dye.

An alternative to this would be to have dyes separate from the inventory like currencies.