Help with using macros to heal friendlies

[Duuude007]

prefix
/ac action (any ws or spell)

action
"x" skill name (if only one word, quotations not needed)

target
<t> target (casts on whoever is targeted)
<tt> target's target (performs action on whoever your current target is targeting. if you are nuking the boss and use dthis, you would heal the tank)
<me> cast on self
<p2> cast on 2nd person in party list
<mo> cast on the next character your mouse arrow hovers over

[Reauland]

As an FFXI player, one big adjustment I've had to make is targeting before activating a spell/ability (I used a lot of <stnpc> and <stpc> placeholders that don't apply here), and as such I spent my first week trying to figure out the most effective ways to target enemies and players.

Duuude007's covered pretty much all the bases already, but I'd like to throw this in mix as well - if you go to Character Config and check the "Target filters" tab, you'll see where you have a drop-down box on "Weapon Drawn" that's defaulted to "Enemies." If you change that to "Friends," you'll still be able to target and attack enemies using the L2/R2 + L1/R1 "tab" function and also target other players using the d-pad, whether they're in your party or not.

[Niwashi]

if you go to Character Config and check the "Target filters" tab, you'll see where you have a drop-down box on "Weapon Drawn" that's defaulted to "Enemies." If you change that to "Friends," you'll still be able to target and attack enemies using the L2/R2 + L1/R1 "tab" function and also target other players using the d-pad, whether they're in your party or not.

Setting this filter to whatever you most want for your current class seems a clearer way than setting up macros for it. You can also then set it up to switch to something else based on L1 + (triangle, square, X, or circle), for cases where you want to target someone not included in your default filter. (The latter is only for a one-off action, though. As soon as you perform an action, it will change back to whatever you set as your usual defaults.)

The only things I don't like are (1) that you can't set up your preferences on a per-class basis — when you switch between a healer class and a dps or tank class, you'll have to go back into the configuration here to change whether you want to target friendlies, and (2) It combines NPCs and Objects into the same category. There's dungeons where you need to interact with objects during battle, so I like to set my default to include objects in my target filter. The problem is that in FATEs, you often wind up battling alongside a cople dozen NPCs that you don't want in your targeting filter, but they end up included if you were including objects.