Retainer interface still broke

people have been complaining for years about not being able to escape put of the retainer interface. I thought you have finally listened and fixed it but you have, we are still stuck in the same boat and cannot escape out of the interface. we still have to click when they speak. this is horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible. its sooo annoying and makes me not even want to use my retainers. how about finally fixing this how people have been suggesting for years.

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Originally Posted by Boldprint

its sooo annoying and makes me not even want to use my retainers.

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Seems like an extreme reaction.

The retainer system is very clunky from inventory management point of view. Sure, it's flavorful and fun in it's own way, but as a means to access your "storage" and put stuff up on market boards it really isn't good. Especially if you use it often. (Inventory management in general is painful in XIV.)

Retainer inventories really should be combined into one big storage inventory. And there shouldn't really be a mandatory dialogue bubble when they come and go. Rather let them just appear and show a text bubble above their heads. Would retain the personality without wasting your time.

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Originally Posted by Boldprint

...we still have to click when they speak...

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Me, I like it is that it is addressed to us and then it is a click among millions per day of play.
For the Rp, they all have a different character.

You can click and escape, it closes very quickly.

I wish they'd turned the greeting and farewell messages into overhead speech bubbles, but at least it's better than it used to be. The part that used to bug me the most was that after dismissing one retainer, we didn't even have the summon bell targeted any more and had to re-select it before we could summon the next one. Easy enough to do, but re-targeting what we'd already had targeted seemed the most pointless of the excess clicks.

To go from dismissing one retainer to interacting with the next one, we used to have to:

• click your dismissed retainer's farewell message
• wait for them to leave
• target the summon bell again
• use the summon bell
• select which retainer you want to see next
• wait for them to arrive
• click their greeting message

Now that's down to:

• click your dismissed retainer's farewell message
• select which retainer you want to see next
• click their greeting message

That new process still has two unnecessary steps and the one that is necessary is more complicated than it needs to be, but removing the wait times and the intermediate uses of the summon bell do speed it up.

The remaining improvement that I'd like to see, more so than the greeting/farewell messages, is in the interface to select your next retainer. It always defaults back to the top of the list. That might not matter to people with only the default two retainers, but for those with a longer list it adds extra hassle for keeping track of where you're at and who should be next when you're going through checking all of them. It'd be nicer if the selection window maintained the highlight selection on whoever you'd just summoned. It'd be easier to see who should be next that way.

1. They could keep dialogue to only the 1st retainer you click on when opening the bell, if you want different dialogue from different retainer you must completely exit interface and reopen bell.

2. Just like we have skip cutscene for MSQ, an option to skip retainer dialogue can be added