post-Dawntrail even story dungeons are harder and more punishing to heal than ever

[Caitamm]

Ring, middle, and index fingers on WASD. Thumb on Space. Pinky on shift, able to move to ctrl easily. This works wonders if you have an MMO mouse. I genuinely have no idea how people use the number row for their rotation and can expect to move with WASD, though.

Holding down both left click and right click will cause your character to move forward in the direction your camera is facing. Very helpful when long, continuous movement is needed.

[EiraWoqiso]

Holding down both left click and right click will cause your character to move forward in the direction your camera is facing. Very helpful when long, continuous movement is needed.

I tend to do that outside of raids, I've always found it to be a little tricky to use when trying to do mechanics. Cool to hear that people have it mastered though!

[Zano]

Ring, middle, and index fingers on WASD. Thumb on Space. Pinky on shift, able to move to ctrl easily. This works wonders if you have an MMO mouse. I genuinely have no idea how people use the number row for their rotation and can expect to move with WASD, though.

maybe that's what i need is an mmo mouse. In ffxiv I keep my ring, middle, and pointer finger on q, w, e respectively and move with legacy movement for ease of turning away from the boss for glare mechanics, and during movement intensive moments i can click all my abilities. When there are moments i can stand still I switch my wasd hand to 1-5 and click anything not in my main rotation, such as defensives or my spellcasting burst combo for pld. I can do extremes/savages pretty comfortably, but i think that my current playstyle would be an issue if I ever wanted to do an ultimate.

[jdtuggey]

mmo mouse really helps you reach more buttons, technically, rebinding the buttons around your hand helps a lot too. Even if you don't have mmo mouse, if you have additional buttons on it, binding them will help you immensely.
I use WASD to move, I've unbound strafe, if you hold left mouse button and press AD, you will strafe anyways. I almost always hold left mouse button to be able to quickly scan my surroundings, especially during a fight.
I've bound Q-E-R-F-T-G-` to hotbar buttons (qwerty keyb), these are easily reachable with the fingers you use to move, so are 1-2-3-4. You bind like... less used skills to those, you bind your 6 most used skills to your mouse, can only really comfortably reach 6 with my thumb myself, not because too short, rather because too long and I have to flex my thumb to reach more. You can also bind -all- of these buttons again to shift + the button, can do the same with CTRL and ALT.
I have nothing bound to keys further right-hand side of that, I'd need to hmm, change the position of my hand that moves my character to reach them, and then it takes a fair bit of brainpower and time to find the right position and resettle your hand.
If you're constantly doing this in combat, this is a huge loss in efficiency. ;o

[Arohk]

I genuinely have no idea how people use the number row for their rotation and can expect to move with WASD, though.

it is a combination of moving with your mouse as well, but you need quick fingers, i use Q and E to strafe though instead of A and D which is closer to the numbers buttons.

looks like this

[Zano]

I've bound Q-E-R-F-T-G-` to hotbar buttons (qwerty keyb), these are easily reachable with the fingers you use to move, so are 1-2-3-4. You bind like... less used skills to those, you bind your 6 most used skills to your mouse, can only really comfortably reach 6 with my thumb myself, not because too short, rather because too long and I have to flex my thumb to reach more. You can also bind -all- of these buttons again to shift + the button, can do the same with CTRL and ALT.
I have nothing bound to keys further right-hand side of that, I'd need to hmm, change the position of my hand that moves my character to reach them, and then it takes a fair bit of brainpower and time to find the right position and resettle your hand.
If you're constantly doing this in combat, this is a huge loss in efficiency. ;o

I use Q and E for strafing but i do keep important things on R and F. I'm very bad at finding where i am on the keyboard if i move my fingers too far away from q, w, e. lol

I just click the skill on the screen if I'm in a movement heavy part of the fight, it's on the far right of my bar, or on my 2nd/3rd skill bar. I have no doubt that changing to utilizing more hotkeys would probably make me a better player in the long run, but I'd hate the friction caused by relearning how to play the game.

This is basically how i organize all my tank bars:

[victoriate]

I also click my abilities. It just feels awkward to hit ctrl, shift, or ctrl+shift with the same hand I'm trying to also click 1-5 with.

With that in mind, now that you are through the problem dungeon, I suggest playing tank. You can make a handful of mistakes and, as long as you mitigate tank busters properly, vuln stacks in dungeons are glorified cosmetics. In addition there are less buttons to press compared to most healers, so it's much easier to parse which ability you need to click. There are occasionally tank specific mechanics in higher difficulty fights, but alternating with the other tank to soak a tower in the 1st DT extreme is way easier than healing the same content. lol

I rebound my ctrl and shift to mouse buttons instead.

[Jinglypockets]

I also click my abilities. It just feels awkward to hit ctrl, shift, or ctrl+shift with the same hand I'm trying to also click 1-5 with.

With that in mind, now that you are through the problem dungeon, I suggest playing tank. You can make a handful of mistakes and, as long as you mitigate tank busters properly, vuln stacks in dungeons are glorified cosmetics. In addition there are less buttons to press compared to most healers, so it's much easier to parse which ability you need to click. There are occasionally tank specific mechanics in higher difficulty fights, but alternating with the other tank to soak a tower in the 1st DT extreme is way easier than healing the same content. lol

I generally don't bind ctrl/shift/alt-number keys into anything rotational because it's too awkward to mash in a fight. When I use modifier keys, it's usually with QWERASDFZXCV, which is a lot more comfortable. There's some overlap with WASD on those, which is where mouse movement comes in. I used to use autorun (bound to ~) a lot in WoW too, but using abilities stops your autorun in FF for some reason, so I've had to get out of that habit. If it's something crazy like needing to hit Ctrl-A while strafing left, I'll usually jump and hit the key while my momentum carries me in the air.

[yoshinoharu]

Holding down both left click and right click will cause your character to move forward in the direction your camera is facing. Very helpful when long, continuous movement is needed.

I set my auto-run to middle mouse button and just do that instead tbh >.>

[royox]

yes but consider this:

finding the button and clicking on it takes time, while you're also trying to orient yourself and move in time, if you're using the mouse to both click on buttons and for camera control as you used WASD to move, clicking even instant cast buttons might cause you to die if the AoEs are too fast or too punishing. I typically find i can only toss out my instant casts towards the end of a movement phase for this reason, and because the boss does this 4 times in a row, there isn't enough "breather room" to use any abilities until the mechanic is over with and someone has probably either died to the aoes, the poison dot, or the spread markers.

Mayble the problem is that you are CLICKING buttons instead of having them on a keybind. I thought that was "MMO 101" since I started playing wow like 20 years ago.