Legitimate reasons why many of you do NOT like Gear Swapping

[SwordCoheir]

I'm pretty much against it for a couple of reasons that were already posted.

A. Limited Inventory- Some jobs were just plagued and overburdened with "situational" gear in FFXI. You cannot imagine the woes "good" RDM's dealt with lugging around Nuking, Healing, Buffing, -M/PDT, and Haste/Fastcast sets, and if they were really dedicated a TP and WS setup on top of that. Even with the Gobbie bag, Mog Sack, and Satchel I was still hurting for slots in the long run. With the Armory system allowing instant job change anywhere, your already expected to carry at least a few sets of gear with you for other jobs, do you really want to compound on that when the inventory spaces go back to 100.

B. Gearing Headaches- Kind of hand in hand with Inventory issues, but most situations the best gear for any situation required considerable time and effort to obtain. Now that's not saying people shouldn't try to get better gear to increase performance, but having to spend literally weeks on end just to swap in one piece of gear that you'll use maybe 5% of the fight shouldn't be the main focus when it comes to specing yourself.

C. Hinders Performance- Currently the slow interface would actually be counter-productive to use gear swapping. It takes like 10 seconds just to swap accessories when I change jobs, I can only imagine that lower end graphics cards would probably take longer. By the time you actually could change your gear to WS you, probably could have regained the TP back to WS again before you were even able to swap back to TP gear. That could only hurt jobs like WHM if there ever came the need to swap to and from cure gear when time is of the essence.

Besides as Dark said most everyone knows how a mob is going to behave so it's not like you can't plan ahead for inconstantcies. In the end, I'd much rather not have this game turn into a huge case of number crunching like FFXI turned out to be, it sucked alot of fun out from the game for the sake of "efficiency" and "optimization" which should never be the main focus of any game.

[Technyze]

My name is Technyze and I approved this message.

[Meta]

Gear Swapping should not be implemented because it is poor game design, plain and simple.

Being able to swap gear mid-battle with unlimited frequency does not create interesting decisions. In fact, there are no choices to be made. Its automation. Simply having the option available demands that you switch to the optimal set of gear for each situation. This does not add any meaningful challenge to the game, and any player who does not gear swap becomes an inefficient gimp.

Gear choices should be about risk and reward. If I want to maximize DPS, I should go into a fight wearing the appropriate set of gear, understanding that I am making a tradeoff on survivability or utility. Assuming the content is well-designed, decisions like these are interesting because I must consider the party setup, the content to be challenged, any additional variables (time limits, emergency situations, etc) when choosing what gear I should wear.

Implementing mid-battle gear swaps with tradeoffs is understandable. I believe that earlier Final Fantasy games and other JRPGs allowed you to swap gear mid-battle with the penalty of losing a turn. Even games with "real-time" combat such as FFXII and Dragon Age allow you to swap gear in battle, but the player incurs the expense of navigating through menus every time, thus negating the frequency at which the player can gearswap.

Perhaps if players were to incur an X-second duration where no actions (including auto-attack) could be taken after gearswapping, where X is dependent on the number/type of pieces swapped, then players could at least be presented with the decision to sacrifice utility and offense in the short term to correct an earlier decision that affected them in the long term. For example, if a player were to walk into a battle unaware that the enemy made excessive use of Fire-based attacks, they would have the option to equip fire-resistant gear and have the incentive to leave it on for the duration of the fight.

Still, I believe that less is more. Without mid-battle gear swapping, there would be no need for making pages of gearswap macros. The less macros the player has to make, the better, and this should generally be the case if the user-interface is properly redesigned for 2.0.

[HoolieWho]

Gear swapping.

Strategic vs. Tactical: In my opinion, the class, our cross class abilities, the equipment we wear, the food we eat, the potions we bring to battle before the battle starts is on the strategic level. It's what we take into the battle. Our positioning, what abilities we use and when, how we react to the enemy, and in accordance to our team mates, those are the tactics. Switching classes, abilities, and equipment in the middle of combat would bring the strategic level into the tactical level.

This is how I feel. The limitation of one set of gear for an encounter makes for interesting choices. Combat is no less dynamic because you can't swap gear in the middle of a battle.

I had similar feelings about the old Armory system before the class overhaul. Allowing every class the ability to "swap to Gladiator" for Sentinel before Hellfire takes away from the challenge of the Ifrit fight. Working as a party to overcome the limitations of individual classes is much more satisfying.

Toward stopping gear swapping: Once a party member obtains enmity of any enemy, they are locked into their equipment until combat is resolved. And even a step further, once you enter an instance, you're locked into that class/job combo until you exit the instance.

I am also in favor of no class/job swapping inside of an instance. Make your choice outside, then play to your strengths in each encounter inside. I think it's great to see WHMs nuking down Whiskerwall at the start of Moogle fight.

How much is built into the game already? If it was intended to play a larger role in the game, SE should have just incorporated it into core of the system. We would have a monk beginning his combo with his fists, chain into a Dragon Uppercut, whoop out his staff and conjure a full thunder combo with the impact of lightning propelling him further in the air, when at last his Thundaja was on cooldown, he would twirl in the sky with the storm on his back, channeling heaven's wrath into his mighty polearm before plummeting downward toward his foes in a single swift destructive motion, ending with a seismic shock that knocks the subligar off every spectator.

Awesome! My opinion is changed.

The fact that you can't select a set of gear that will handle a battle with different variables is exactly the beauty of choosing your gear wisely prior to the battle. You need think hard and find what set of gear will suit your playstyle and the encounter the best. Perhaps the fight has a lot of fire damage, but you are confident with your own skill that you can dodge them all, then why not stack up on allowing higher damage output? This way the boss goes down faster and you will ultimately ease some of the burden of the group. If you don't think you can dodge all the extra fire damage, then wear fire resist heavy gear, even though this may reduce your damage output, but being dead means 0 dps, so you go for survivability. Choosing your gear prior to the battle isn't a cop-out to not wanting to carry more gear. It takes real understanding of your own playstyle and how it fits into the group's playstyle and of course how the encounter works. In this case, bringing every set of gears available to encounter every variables in the battle is the easy way out. Sure it takes a lot of effort to gather all that and write up the macros. However, you are just playing reactively, what's the fun in that?

Another great post.

[Denmo]

In FFXI, you had to travel back to the Mog House to switch your job. Gear swapping allowed you to adjust your role in the party. It was useful there, even though it was bad game design.

In XIV, you have Job swapping on the fly. You can fulfill any role needed at any given time provided you're not engaging the enemy. With that in place, and considering the pace of battle in FFXIV is way faster than what XI was, gear swapping would be a cumbersome load of micro-managing your macros for those short 1 minute battles. Why even bother?

The game's easy enough as it is at the moment anyway. Or so all these endgamers keep screaming.

[Buddhsie]

My view on gear swapping is that it's unnecessary.

Some people say that gear swapping adds another dynamic to the game by forcing players to carry gear sets for specific abilities in order to maximise their potential. This is true, however the same can be said by forcing players to carry a single set for their character. It takes just as much knowledge and understanding of mechanics and stats to choose the right set to maximise dps. The downside to multiple gear sets, as was always the case in FFXI, is that your inventory space suffers. You also have to gather much more gear for a single class.

It doesn't promote elitism, the only thing that does at the moment is BG with their constant trash talking self promotion sweeps in these forums.

Gear swapping or no gear swapping makes no big difference, I'd just prefer not to have it.

[Eruantien]

I think simply because its a pain in the ass to carry around that much gear, and because I see it as more of a headache than benificial, it adds complexity where it isn't needed. Simpler is often better.

[Aion]

[Alderton]

I've been skimming this a bit, so maybe this has been discussed in more detail than i noticed, but just in case...

I think the biggest problem with this suggestion (and a vast majority of them, to be honest) is that you are offering a solution to a problem, yet you aren't fully explaining the problem. You at latching on to a concept from another game that you enjoyed and want to see it ported over. This is fine and all, we all want the fun stuff, but does it actually fit this game? And what gap is it filling?

The problem is, most people don't actually know what they want. They can see something and know that it isn't right, but they don't know why. So they try to fill that gap themselves and offer a solution ("Give me gear swapping!"). What is infinitely more useful, however, is identifying the problem and letting the creative people who are intimate with the product to find a fitting way to solve it.

Again, just from skimming, I think these are some of the problems you are trying to patch:
- There aren't enough gear choices.
- There is no sense of gain in power by acquiring new gear.
- Because the stats on gear have such limited gains, I don't feel superior for having the BIS gear over others who do not (there is little competitive value in gaining gear).

Start with the problems before offering solutions.

[Yumi_Hibiki]

its unnecessary, it clogs up your inventory and storage as hell and its cumbersome to use (switching back and forth after every damn WS in XI always sucked)