Armoury Chest

[Mjollnir]

While you can change equipment during battle, the development team confirmed that the battle system wasn't designed to offer that as an advantage. The purpose of the Armoury Chest and gear sets are simply to facilitate changing gear and additional inventory for gear and were not created to be used as a strategy during battle.

? I'm not sure I'm following. Just because the battle system wasn't designed with the strategy of changing equipment in mind, doesn't mean that people won't do it in order to maximise their efficiency. In fact, if the battle system hasn't taken this functionality into account, then surely there will be some strong imbalances in certain battles.

With the experience of FFXI, we can see that per-action gear-swapping became the most effective way of play. One thing I liked about XIV was that you couldn't do this; I think because it meant there was no impetus to have a third-party app loaded up (against the ToS^^) and have either learned to script efficiently, or copied someone else's work, enabling a significant portion of the game's action to essentially play itself.

Is this the way XIV is heading too? Because if in-combat gear-swaps are present, whether they are taken into account by the development team or not, they will surely dominate the way that the combat portion of the game is played.

Of course, my concern here might be unwarranted. I understand the combat system is still undergoing substantial overhauls. Perhaps the development team have come up with something which means that gear-swapping actually has no effect at all on combat...

Of course, surely it'd just be simpler to lock out gear-swaps while a character has enmity?

[HiirNoivl]

Well, when I think about gear swapping in 1.0 (Hang tight, smoke is coming out of my ears) this happened because the gear boosted a specific ability with it's stats.

Example: I can have a high stat piece of gear for BRD DPS... however, if I'm going to sing a song, I would swap to AF gear to sing because the AF gear boosted that song.

ARR stats need to be modified so that there's not a conflict between a character's stats and abilities. So in this world, the stat for BRD DPS would be the same as its songs, removing the need for Gear swapping.