Armoury Chest

[Bowen]

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?

If it's not intended to be used as a strategy, it shouldn't be allowed. People will use it regardless of the intention.
I'd rather keep twitchy gear swapping out of the game (none of this 10 pieces of gear for every spell and ability swapped in for 0.5 seconds every time you use those abilities crap)

This. A thousand times this.

The battle system may not have been designed to offer gearswapping as an advantage, but you know what some players are like and doing things that 'weren't designed to happen' (Exploits, bugs etc).

There are some that will use this regardless of how the system was designed. Let's just make it so you can't change while in battle and everything's gravy D:. Even if they set it to 'no gearswapping unless passive' I would be happy... ><

Edit: a 3 second stun/penalty effect would be cool too e_e haha if someone tried to swap while they had enmity or if the party was in battle. It'd allow for people to re-equip items if there are bosses that unequip things, but it'd stop people from abusing it to min/max stuff on a whim like it was in XI

Anything that can be used to give an advantage, no matter how tiny it may seem, will be used as such. Just because the mechanic isn't being designed to provide such a thing, if it can be achieved it will be abused. There are countless examples in other games, including XI and XIV 1.0, in which such things have been known to happen and are encourage where there has been a failure to resolve the issue.

It's always worth considering the effect of the potential to exploit a given mechanic. There are cases where being able to change or re-equip gear mid battle is useful/necessary, but there should be some balance to it somewhere along the way. As said in the above post, a penalty of some kind is a potential solution, similar to how swapping gear in Ballista (FFXI) would do.

I enjoy having to think about what kind of gear set is best utilised for a given situation as opposed to "I'll use Set A for this, and swap to Set B for this." I had 6 years of gear swaps in XI, I would like to see less of it being used as a strategy in ARR and I'm sure there are plenty others who feel the same.

Well, I'm glad we're all on the same page, at least. I'd really rather they'd lock out the ability to do so completely instead of it even being possible. If they insist on allowing it, however, I at least hope there will be some sort of restriction that will make it inviable.