The Glory (and Menace) of Armories

I want back and watched FNL again. These are Jens' exact words: 'Armories create a template of your character'.

Using that terminology, I'd say that DPS->Tank in combat could be very likely.

So yeah, probably won't be switching stance when you switch character templates(Since as far as I know stance is a toggle function of the game interface rather than something chosen as part of your character template during the customization of your character and your inventory.)

Well, clearly in this post Mepps talks about being able to SWAP ROLES with the armories. It appears without armories you cannot change role while in combat, but it appears WITH armories you will be able to.

Mepps said: ↑

“To echo what others have said, Armories are about so much more than just swapping between damage and your power's role. That is a part of the package, for sure, but it is primarily about specing, customizing, and optimizing your preferred setup for any and every situation, and then being able to conveniently switch back and forth between them.

You can have a different setup for role and damage, for PvE and PvP, for group size (solos, duos, alerts, raids), for different group combinations (one tank vs. two tanks, healers vs. no healers), or even for specific content - here's my Paradox setup vs. my Nexus setup vs. my FOS setup - and they can all be different. You can even have a different setup for when you are grouping with specific friends, and you can work together to build setups that complement each other and work best together as a team.

The possibilities are nearly endless, and Armories will be a powerful tool in the hands of creative players. Imagining they are just limited to role swapping is selling the feature short.”

Hopefully the armories will go on the test server very soon, so I can find out whether they will have some practical use for me. It all depends on whether I can use the same armor in different armories. I only have one set of armor for each character. If I switch to no armor, then it's only good for a secret ID look. If I can keep my armor, then I can make very good use of different power and skill builds.

I believe it is based upon the armor that you have on when you take the 'snapshot'. So you will just be basically creating copies of whatever you're wearing, including any style changes, SPs, power points, loadout. So you put on your Controller (or whatever role) gear, respec your SPs and powers, adjust your styles... and take a snapshot. Then take off your Controller gear, put on your DPS gear, respec your SPs and powers, adjust your styles, take another snapshot. Now you have two armories you can switch between. Or keep going with the DPS gear... change your styles again, take another snapshot.. there is your third armory.

I am betting that whatever armor you used for your armory must be kept in inventory, which would make sense... this also would mean if you upgrade your armor, you'll also have to equip EVERY armory suit, replace the armory pieces with the new, and resave.

Hmmm. That could get pretty awkward and confusing for people who have a number of armories and several different sets of armor, considering armor pieces can get replaced pretty frequently.

Even in my case, just replacing an armor piece would mean doing a respec to take that snapshot for each extra armory. That might not be worth the effort. Unless the armor selection and the powers and skills could be saved separately. Edit: Well, maybe not. I'll have to give this some more thought.

I'm not really sure how you're coming to your conclusion.

My conclusions are based on what has been said about how it will work, in this and other threads. Yes, it could get confusing, but you can only have FOUR armories active at any one time; hence the ability to access them from the D-pad = four directions.

I don't see why you would have to respec just to replace an armor piece... once you switch to the armory suit, it automatically loads your saved SPs, powers, and loadout for that suit. So all would be involved would be equipping the new armor piece and saving- but yes, you'd have to do this for each and every armory suit that you wish to have the new gear.

Yes, that occurred to me shortly after I wrote that post. Thanks for elaborating.

I think we are overthinking the mechanics a bit. The armoury won't be smart enough to recognise role, pvp or pave stance etc.

Thinking simplistically I believe it will work like this
You put on a gear set, place powers and sp then choose "save to armoury slot1. Whatever stance you are in at the time is what the armoury captures.

This means you can have dps and role set or 2 dps load outs or 2 role load outs or 2 pvp load outs. Heck even 4 of one if you wish.

In combat you will switch to exactly how you were when you saved the armoury.

I'm all for it. I don't think it will "break" anything. In pave it gives more options and hopefully leads to more roles being available to fill raid spots rather than now which is mostly dps.

It will hopefully also lead to more people pvping. For people new to it it allows them to want to earn gear and for those vets it gives you new options as well as new challenges to learn to overcome.

You're assuming that stance is part of our "Character template" though, I think its just an extension of the interface though... And besides what if I decide that I want want "Gear/loadout/specs A" while staying in DPS stance, but was in Troll stance when I created/saved it? Will they just let us swap stance in combat without using an armory swap now? What about Inventory space? Will the gear we had on when we activated our armory swap be dumped into our inventory? What if we don't have room for it because of picking up loot? Do armories act as extra inventory space?

Another question now is, are armories gonna create a new level of elitism in the game?
Instead of needing for 1 role, people are gonna require players to be able to swap two 100 cr roles on the fly.
I'm 100 cr on both roles, but I can see this as being a potential issue to people who just have 1 set of gear.

I can tell you that role bonuses carry over. When i am doing duo's i will switch to troll between fights, throw PoT, and switch back to DPS before we fight again. The PoT is only 101 but it still ticks like if i were in troll stance and that little extra power is nice to have. I'm sure my duo partner appreciates it too.

Edit: Had a thought about this that i need to try on my fire character. In tank stance use a power, switch to DPS and see if i still have the HP buff. Once servers are back up i will report my results.

Edit2: As expected, i retained the 60% HP buff in DPS stance. Granted 12 seconds of more HP doesn't mean much, but if we can change on the fly and frequently enough, i can see this being a tactic for fire users in some way. I bet the 80% healing received buff sticks too.

You know what they say about to assume something. It makes an as of you and me.

You understand the reasoning that I have. It opens up the gameplay for the devs to make. Right now it seems that all we get is content designed around burn, but a lot of that was due to limitations we had with the tech we had. (Two tanks anyone?) So it was designed with that in mind. Now that we have a lot of new tech to work with, (mainframe, armories, single target aggro, etc) we can have more things developed around this gameplay. It might break old content, sure, but old content has already been overgeared by a lot of the community and future content is free reign. Plus, as people are gearing up, they wont understand the benefits that we all know now of different mechanics that were already implimented, as they are learning. So by the time they get to new content that relies on this, they would have an understanding.

The one thing though, Hornet, it's not limited because it is PC players only, it's limited because everyone isn't playing on it period. It would be the same thing if there was a PS test. If there isn't anything new in gameplay, no one will test it. GU31 everyone who wasn't interested in getting a PS4 that were on the PS3 and PC basically asked why bother with the update anyways. Thus, it had a lot of bugs that couldn't be seen. But look at DLC launches, OC and SoT had so many players on their tiny test server they had to create a queue (like f2p has) to get in. So with armories, when it hits test, expect a LOT of players on there.

I am hoping that the armories hold all of your weapons, and not just the one...

I like to collect all the best weapons for each role in the game and horde them just in case I have to switch for any reason.

I'd be kinda shocked if changing between armories actually changed your character stance.

My GUESS is that if I'm playing a nature character in dps stance, wearing dps gear and using a dps loadout, and I want to switch to my healer gear and healer loadout, that even after selecting that armory on the fly and in combat, I'll have to manually swtich myself from dps to healer stance (another words, I'm guessing switching between armories will not automatically switch our currently selected stance).

This would alleviate some of these concerns about switching mid-combat, since you can't change stance while in combat, so the above situation's result would just be a dps wearing healer gear and using a healer load out, until that individual got out of combat.

Could be wrong, but this seems like the best approach for the armory mechanics. It still would allow mid-raid or mid-pvp match switches when that individual is out of combat, but would prevent taking advantage of both roles during a singe fight using armories.

It depends on how many bases you have i believe

lol only if you pug with the wrong people

Some powers are dependent on your current role. I've gone up to a rogue as a healer and cast a couple of Soul Wells around him, and had him ignore them. Switching to damage also switches the SWs, and you get a suddenly very upset rogue.
I suspect that trolls PoTs use a different mechanic, which is why you can PoT and switch roles.

What do you mean?

I have 2 bases i bought an extra deed, in fnl they said you can have 16 load outs 4 per armory you can have 1 armory for each base you own everyone gets a hideout so everyone starts with one armory. You can have more but you have to have more deeds or bases. make sense?