They’re set up all wrong. Every time I see someone’s Final Fantasy XIV setup, it’s obvious they must be crazy to raid with such a nonsensical layout.
In FFXIV, skills are automatically added to your hotbars as you earn them, instead of being sorted in a way that makes sense. It’s up to you to sort them.
In ninteen hours thirty-three minutes and thirteen seconds, the servers will go offline. One day after, a new expansion will have been released, making sweeping changes to every job, forcing me to redo all my hotbars.
I will memorialize them.
▲ Playing Astrologian is what made me buy a MMO mouse. Too hard to draw cards while running away from attacks otherwise. The mouse
bindings are the pad to the right of the compass.
▲ Paladin was my first job. Half of those buttons are defensive. If you know what they do and when to use them, you’re unkillable.
▲ The key bindings do not change from job to job, so this is more a map of my muscle memory than it is a good visualization of my skills.
(Warrior)
▲ Most of these jobs, like the Dark Knight, I have not played seriously, but the game allows you to place actions you have yet to
unlock on your hotbars, so you could make them right from lv.1.
▲ The White Mage was greatly simplified in Stormblood, the expansion we’re about to exit. Many of these buttons aren’t skills, but
shortcuts to useful utilities, for example the A B C buttons can be used to place waymarks visible to the team on the floor.
▲ All jobs have a gauge, sometimes two. Their usefulness varies. The Scholar has two gauges, but I have yet to unlock the second.
▲ All of the Monk’s attacks have positional requirements. The combo on the bottom row should be performed from the back of the enemy,
the one on the top row from the flank, and the combos should be mixed as to refresh timers optimally.
▲ The Dragoon’s AOEs are bound to X and Q. On every job it has, to the extent it’s possible, a similar meaning. On healers, it’s for
their AOE heals rather than their AOE attacks, due to the ease of reaching those buttons.
▲ Ninja is why I started binding FGHJ. The mudras must be input much faster than most skills, and the notches of the home row help me
get it right.
▲ As a Samurai, I’ll generally be the one to execute the limit break, at the top right of the main hotbar segment. Because wasting it
is a raid-wiping sin, I do not bind it to a key, I have to click it. That works out for me because I never otherwise click on skills. I’m revolted
that people ever do that.
▲ I have not really played Bard this expansion, so there’s no mapping for the mouse.
▲ By default, the gauges, a big Stormblood gimmick, were right in the center of the screen, more or less. Mercifully, the UI is fully customizable.
(Machinist)
▲ For the Black Mage, I made a visual separation between ice and fire spells, rather than a tactile one. To play efficiently, you do
everything you can to avoid using ice more than necessary.
▲ Some of the Summoner’s skills are struck out, because I didn’t play the job since Heavensward, the first expansion. Stormblood
removed many skills from Heavensward.
▲ It was difficult to include the Red Mage’s gauge above the compass, so I did it this way.
▲ The Blue Mage is a pointless solo mini-game I didn’t care to explore much.
▲ It’s impossible to fit all my crafting actions on my hotbars. I keep only the essential. But like everyone else, I mostly craft
using macros, which are bound to mouse buttons, so I rarely actually press those skill buttons myself.
▲ Gatherers are a mess. Most of those buttons are pointless and never used.
▲ Fishing can be done absent-mindedly one-handed using the mouse.
2019-06-26