How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Armoury System

[Xeia]

Aside from the occasional Samurai whipping out a polearm for a bird party or a kiting Paladin swapping to a DEF staff, there really wasn't all that much reason to swap weapons around without getting yelled at in FFXI. Sure, you could be a Paladin with a great sword... but why? How much did we really take advantage of that freedom compared to how likely are we to take advantage of the cross-class skills sans sub-job system?

This, exactly this. While I understand that people want to be able to choose between a scythe and a greatsword on their Dark Knight, there's still going to be a "best weapon" for the class/job -- and I don't just mean weapon type. I mean that if Ifrit drops a GS and Garuda drops a scythe and the relic is a GS, then you're more than likely going to be using a GS if you've only beat Ifrit, a scythe if you're strong enough to farm Garuda, and a GS again if you've put effort into the relic. The extra "freedom" you get is sort of irrelevant.

In fact, it's so irrelevant that we actually already have it and people continue to complain that we don't. Gladiator can wield longswords or daggers, both mages can go for what XI would have called a club or a staff, all depending on the preference of the player -- and the differences are reflected in the stats, like they are in other games. Daggers do less damage, but hit quicker. Clubs are less powerful but give you the advantage of being able to equip a shield, etc. So there's no reason to assume that when we see Dark Knight we won't see both weapon types implemented, though of course there's no guarantee we will either.

Most other considerations can be filed away as semantics. "Oh, no no. Thieves use daggers. This Dancer is clearly wielding an anlace."

Again, this is a concern I hear voiced a lot, but one we've already seen a solution to -- in precisely the way you described -- regarding the two mages. They both look like they wield staves and clubs to me, but nonono, you see only thaumaturges get staves and those clubs are actually scepters. The conjurers get radicals and wands instead.

Really, the only difference between this and XI's system as far as weapons are concerned is that I can't use the same individual weapon on multiple classes, and with the gear set system taking those extra weapons out of our inventories, I don't see this as a big issue at all.

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Gear sets are also going to remedy what, for me, had been the only thing making classes less useful in 1.0 -- artifact gear. We all know that, after hitting level 50, AF gear is the easiest decent gear to obtain (since you basically get it incidentally on your way to your level 50 skill). So I'd toss my level 45 gear cuz it wasn't as good and I don't have that kind of inventory space, but since the AF was job only that meant my corresponding class was naked until I got around to farming better gear.

But if we're getting a gear set for each class in addition to each job then I'll be fully gearing my classes and using them often for sure. Might even invest in some of the class-specific gear that previously felt like a waste of inventory slots to me. :P

<3 Armory forever.