Thoughts on Level Squishes

[Seraphor]

Nah, it's just a matter of adapting. It's fairly easy to R1 cycle through as many hotbars as you can memorize skill locations for. The hard limit is 128 hotbar buttons. I use 3 Cross bars on PS4 to maximize skill use, and for the jobs like PLD that have a couple skills more, and need the third crossbar. People just don't want to, but I mean, plenty of people don't want to press more than five buttons so...

There are three methods of swapping xhotbars, and none of them are perfect, they are all an extra step that can take time, and introduce additional button presses. When people complain about the extra time it takes to target other party members for AST cards, adding more hurdles like this is obviously a set back.

While it's a little subjective between 1 and 2, I find they're in this order of how cumbersome and disrupting of gameplay they are:

1. Expanded Xhotbar: Pressing and holding R2>L2 or L2>R2 opens up an addition 8 buttons each. +16
2. WXHB (Double Xhotbar): Quickly double tapping R2 or L2 toggles an addition 8 buttons each. +16
3. Scrolling through all available xhotbars with R1: Most time consuming, and progressively moreso the more xhotbars you have activated. Full 128 available. But it's not too bad if you limit it to just one more set (16 buttons) of skills.

In either case, each method adds unnecessary additional steps, and the more of them you have activated, the worse it gets. So it's reasonable that you should only be expected to utilise one of them at a time, so that they remain as options for ergonomic customisation.
This means you shouldn't need to use more than your basic 16 buttons, plus your additional 16 buttons from your additional chosen expansion method.

That said, if additional skills were more situational, and you could say, have set loadouts for certain types of content, that wouldn't be a problem with cycling through your xhotbars with R1 to get to the xhotbar you need for a piece of content and stick to that one.

I too use 3 xhotbar sets on Ps4, however one of those is purely for out of combat use. In combat I'm restricted to 2. I hate having to scroll or toggle mid fight, so I only use the 'holding down' method of the expanded xhotbar.

(I find I lose track of scrolling, so it'll take me a couple extra moments to cycle back through to get where I want, that's a couple of seconds of hesitation in battle, big no no. Also toggling xhotbars doesn't work well for me, I'm liable to accidentally hit the shoulder buttons twice instead of once for my expanded bars, change my xhotbar unintentionally, and then while I'm relying on muscle memory I'll hit the wrong skill, even bigger no-no. I've Rescued people instead of using my od shield (Benison/Intersection) before because of this)