I hate looking after my inventories especially with a total of 9 retainers, 6 different DoW classes, 2 different DoL, and 6 DoH classes. Obviously things get cluttered, the below took about 1.5 hours in total to sort everything out.
Pre-work:
* I found a retainer with a completely clear inventory, and i moved everything from my main Chars inventory there, so that my main inventory was 100% clear; to put this another way it just meant that I wasn't having to sort out mats and which gear i may or may not be interested in at the same time! :)
* I also found it useful to make a note of what classes and what levels each of my classes were on a piece of paper for reference.
Take stuff out
* I went into my Armoury Chest and I removed all the hats from it and placed them into my main inventory, by right-clicking and chosing 'send to inventory'.
* In my inventory, I right clicked on a random item and chose 'Sort"; mine sorts in the default way with the high ranking stuff at the top of the screen and the low-ranking gear at the bottom.
Put stuff back into the Armoury Chest
* Still in my main inventory I added back the gear that I absolutely knew 100% was used i.e. my botanist is level 64, so i moved the hat back in because i only had one that it could possibly be. Anything that I wasn't 100% sure about i left in the inventory. I started working with the highest level gear first as I thought it would be easier to handle.
Check what's missing in the Gear-Set
* I then closed the inventory screen, and went to the characters screen, and loaded the first gear-set. If there was a head gear item missing then there would be a notification that it's not possible to load all items.
* I'd go back and load up my inventory up again, and find a head-gear item that was nearest the level that the gear set was missing. Right-click and send it over to the armoury chest, and finally check that it was now no-longer showing as 'missing' in the gear-set screen, and then I'd load the next gear-set until I'd worked my way through all of them checking that they all had hats. If it's the correct item then it will just appear as normal in the gear-set.
* During this whole process I never saved a gear set-without all the gear back in it's proper slot. It's the fact that the gear-set doesn't complain that a piece is missing that ensures that you've placed the correct piece of gear into the armoury chest :)
Tips:
* I found it easier to do it one section at once i.e. all the hats, once the above had been done i moved onto the next section - main-body etc. Simply because i know it was going to confuse the heck out of me if i did it any other way.
* if your gear-set shows as missing a piece of gear, don't save the gear-set simply come out and go back into your main inventory, and after locating what you think is the right piece of gear send it into the armoury chest.
I'm pretty sure now that retainers gear is not stored in the armoury chest and is located somewhere else entirely, as I also checked the retainers gear and there was not a single thing missing.
I now have a mixture of 125 tools, hats, rings etc that is no longer taking up space in my armoury chest and i can start to do something useful with i.e. sell, make materia with (lots of spirit bound stuff), glamour, or desynth etc.
