Getting the fairy to heal a highlighted player.

[LoganNinefingers]

@Vid - yeah, if you play using controller (or keyboard without mouse for that matter - yay FFXI control scheme!) the targeting system's very different from the mouse-based one.

To translate for the benefit of any keyboard/mouse players, "Hard-target" is effectively the player you've actually clicked on. You probably just refer to this as your 'target'.
Then "soft-target" is analogous to your moused-over target.
However, the control schemes are rather different from here on.

Using the party menu and clicking Up or Down on D-pad (or whatever the default keyboard keybind to cycle through party members is), you can first click A/X on someone (say the MT in position 2) to make them your clicked-on hard-target, then press Down again to briefly target e.g. the DRG in position 3.
If you don't then click A/X on them, but use an action from your hotbar, the action will proc on the DRG but then you'll snap back to targeting the person you last clicked on. You can also click B/O to cancel soft-target and snap back to your hard-target without doing an action.

It's a really neat system, and makes raid healing much easier than it would be otherwise, as you can throw a single heal out on someone other than the MT without then having to cycle back through the list to the MT for your next heal.

The bitter-sweet benefit/issue here is that both hard- and soft-targets use the <t> placeholder, as you're technically targeting the DRG (albeit reverting to your last hard-target as soon as you fire an action off) rather than mousing over them.
As such, the same hotbar slot serves both purposes (whereas with mouse-targeting, if you have a clicked-on target and have mouse-over on someone else, and want the option to heal either one at a given moment, you need two separate macros), but means if you decide to heal the tank instead of the soft-target you need to hit B/O to cancel first.