Melee DPS gear sharing

[Marc-Vigar]

- PLD/WAR/DRK/GNB all tanks share same gear.

- WHM/SCH/AST all healers share same gear.

- BRD/MCH/DNC all ranged physical DPS share same gear.

- BLM/SMN/RDM/BLU all magical DPS share same gear.

Then we have the idiots club:

- DRG have unique gear.

- MNK and SAM share gear.

- NIN has unique gear.



Why?

When is SE gonna realise this is a mistake and fix it?

[Nerfworthy]

Right? I guess because they have different aesthetic themes but like, DNC has a completely different aesthetic from BRD or MCH and SE didn't give a flying fornication about that. So I don't get why it even matters anymore beyond tradition.

[SpeckledBurd]

The only reason this might even come close to having to exist is the aforementioned gear aesthetic argument, but in the grand scheme of things that really doesn't hold true either. Just look at the most recent gear from Eden's first tier.

Striking and Healing gear shares a model, Maiming and Ranged Share a model, and Scouting and casting share a model. Outside of the AF stuff, it really doesn't seem like the sets actually stick to the aesthetics of the jobs at all, but I think they'd end up being a lot more cohesive if Striking shared gear. There's more thematically in common with the melee roles than there is between any of the melee roles and say, the casters.

Or they could just completely free up the way glamour works and let you glamour anything into anything else regardless of role.

[Raldo]

It is this very imbalance that made me so surprised that DNC gear wasn't attached to NIN gear.

Also, to riff off the post above me, they throw the aesthetics out the window enough that I'm also surprised that they haven't merged Maiming/Striking into a single gearset by now. They used to be more different from each other, one had more MDEF / less PDEF and the other with more PDEF / less MDEF, but then they made the MDEF the same, but DRG got to keep its boosted PDEF for some reason. The distinction between Scouting and Aiming makes even less sense, since the MDEF/PDEF values are the same.

I wouldn't mind if one day they were just like... okay guys... there's just 5 gearsets now instead of 7. DEX DPS, STR DPS, INT DPS, tanks, and healers.

[Xyr]

Also, anyone feel like Monk/Nin/Sam all should be dex?

[SpeckledBurd]

Samurai does strike me as being more dextrous than it is a job of brute force, and honestly it fits more with Ninja's aesthetic than it does with Monk's because they're both Japanese inspired while Monk is more broadly eastern.

Monk could go either way. It could be a dexterity job because it requires the kind of dexterity you'd expect of any martial arts, but lorewise Chakras also give Monks super strength.

[Raldo]

They could call everyone's main stat "Power", and just have everyone use the same main damage-stat, for all I care. The distinction between STR, DEX, INT, and MND is entirely cosmetic at this point. No one can equip or meld any other main stat anymore.

Admittedly, this might make all accessories lv60 and under a little weird, since any job could use any other job's accessories, but that's a concession I'm willing to make.

[Rongway]

It is this very imbalance that made me so surprised that DNC gear wasn't attached to NIN gear.

This, though. I mean I wasn't surprised, as I expected them to put DNC in ranger gear because they are a ranger role, buti I held off on buying gear until the media tour confirmation because I thought they could still put DNC in NIN gear.

Since main stats are an illusion anyway, we should just collapse all the main stats into Power. Put Power and Vitality on gear, then assign each gearset to jobs based on aesthetics rather than pigeonholing everyone into role gear.

Edit: Ah it seems you were thinking the same thing I was at the time I was writing this.

[Elizar_Naki]

Addressing various people's points without quotes because I'm too lazy to try and multi-quote right now:
-shared gear has always been about conserving storage space and fitting the gear into a theme based on the content while matching the general aesthetics of the ROLE using it, not matching the specific aesthetics of each JOB using it. Though I'd agree that some of their choices for Eden designs are beyond weird.
-DRG has separate sets from everyone else because its defense ratings are different from the other strength-based jobs, so as the game stands now they can't share gear with anyone else.
-NIN was given its own gear sets when it was released (with the exception of sharing pre-2.4 gear with MNK) because they didn't want it to look like BRD, even though most of its non-AF sets are recolors of either striking or aiming sets anyway. Since then, they seem to have abandoned this idea in favor of making SAM and DNC share gear with jobs that share their base role/main stat but not their aesthetics--even GNB is debatably too different from the aesthetics of its fellow tanks to share gear, and yet it does.
-@Xyr and SpeckledBurd: changing a job's main stat, especially after this long, would likely be more work than the devs want to put in, and it's debatable whether it would even make sense. I could potentially see SAM or MNK using either str or dex based on their animations, but iirc a katana is generally more of a power weapon than a speed weapon irl (I could be wrong about this, I'm no weaponmaster). MNK in other systems, especially DnD 5e, is shown to be more of a dex-based archetype, but in this game it's built on PGL, which is generally more of a brawler than a fancy martial artist, so str makes more sense there too.
-@SpeckledBurd: the idea of being able to freely glamour anything to anyone has been batted around before, and I'd be onboard if they did (possible exception of AF sets), but the devs seem oddly reluctant to make changes to existing glamour rules and are really weird about what they WILL change. I still can't put my character in Uraeus body armor (something that looks like it'd actually be somewhat functional in combat) because she lacks a Y chromosome, nor can she wear starting gear from other races...but they took time out to make the Gold Saucer Bunny gear unisex because fanservice is more important, I guess.
-@Raldo and Rongway: SWTOR literally did exactly what you suggested a while back, replacing all 4 main stats with a "Mastery" stat and changing armor set weights going forward (and some older ones) from "light, medium, or heavy" to "adaptive" so that anyone could use them. I wouldn't mind if SE did something similar here, and the removal of main stat materia seems like a step in that direction, but I choose not to get my hopes up just in case.

Personally, I'd be more onboard with the idea of expanding armory storage and abandoning the idea of shared gear altogether, at least going forward (since changing years' worth of pre-existing sets would be a massive undertaking). Aesthetics aside, you still have materia melds to consider, and not every job that uses a particular gear set is gonna share melding priorities with others in the same set (example: BLM could make better use out of having tons of SpS than RDM could due to differences in how they both recover MP). If someone happens to enjoy and regularly play multiple jobs in the same role/gear that have different melding priorities, they'd have to either a) choose which job to meld optimally and which one(s) to gimp by default, or b) constantly re-meld their gear whenever they change jobs within that gear set, which would be costly to the point of prohibitive for the average player, especially with that 40% retrieval rate in play. Alternatively, find a way to attach materia melds to gear sets so we can make multiple melds to the same piece of gear, but that also feels like it'd be a lot of work.