Astro Reboot : Party Cards

[Kamishawe]

You never played on controler or never did a proper set-up right? because it's : draw, scroll the party list with up or down arrow of the D-pad to highligh the member you want to play your card on, play the card then the mob is automatically selected again.... It's called soft select.
You don't need to hard select a member to heal, buff or play a card, you just have to do a soft select.... The only moment when you an hard select as an AST, it's when the tank is doing a very big W2W.

It's doesn't take long to select the member on 4 people dungeon.... On a 8 party it take just tiny wesy bit longer.

I do not play controller and no one on earth would make me try it. That was my best description of what I see most of them do, granted they also blur thou what you call "hard" select so fast I can't "SEE" every step of the process either, just the basics. I think only one of the 4 does something close to a "soft select".

I have no idea if that's a lost-in-translation-issue, a compatibility controller issue, a lack of knowledge issue, or just looking at the same thing thou different lenses for them or they're just not very good at it. What I do know is that it's not just my friends. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But you can also say this about a lot of counter intuitive things your learn though the ARR experience and leveling process that stick, even 8 years later for one of them.

[Lorika]

I do not play controller and no one on earth would make me try it. That was my best description of what I see most of them do, granted they also blur thou what you call "hard" select so fast I can't "SEE" every step of the process either, just the basics. I think only one of the 4 does something close to a "soft select".

I was like you 6 month ago.
Then, after 25 years of MMO on PC and 10 years of FFXIV on Pc, i didn't had the choice but to swtich to controller on PS5... And you know what? it's different but work very very well.
It's even better on some point, but well worst on others.

And, seriously, your answer smell like someone that is trying to find a culprint, because soft select it's on by default on controller.... So all the player using controller have experienced it and only low level newbie doesn't use it.
And another thing : what you saw it's, with a very high chance, casual PC player that do Mouse click.... Thoses are legion.

Sp, i'm doing you a favor : Controller player aren't your culprit.

[Kamishawe]

Congrats on liking the transition from PC to Console! What I'm trying to say, is thank you for telling me about Soft Select even thou it is one among many topic points up for offer. I'm not trying to argue with you, their problem isn't that they're "newbies", they're "old". Maybe that makes Point#1 irrelevant to newbies since your also a "newbie" trained to Consoles despite you playing FF14 PC for 10 years.

I just don't play console myself. I think MY last console game was Alice Madness Returns, fabulous game. Most Game Developer design choices just drive me up a wall and down another, that why I don't play them. Personal preference in the end. I'm aware of phony PCers pretending to be console players, lol. I've listened to enough of my friends problems with other PS4/5 issues to know they're not pretenders and visit 2 of them regularly to see them Hard selecting the entire time.

I'm not trying to point fingers and find culprits, or judge people on how they play since I had to teach my Stormblood Astro friend how to do a proper opener, what proper gcd up time, and a 2 mins burst on Astro could look like last year and is one of the Hard Selectors. The Game itself taught them to play as Hard Select, kitchen sinking, and that it's ok to be hard carried. If you want another interesting nugget, I did Raid with a Laptop player for a year and change that refused to use custom key bindings, zero macros and would only use her mouse to click activate skills as a War despite people trying to help set-up something more streamlined. That particular one was her personal choice.

It's off-topic but it does make me wonder, is it a flaw in design if you have to have extensive pre-setup to play efficiently let alone raid as a class? I don't have any Card Macros, and neither do any of my friends but I've heard of them. It's a mot point at this point where to draw the line of game design convivence when Astro is reworked every expansion.