About bars and controller users

[Niwashi]

As a controller user on either PC or PS4, here's how I layout my bars.
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The biggest drawback at first is remembering that you have to draw your weapon first, but just a little practice will take care of that.

I use a similar arrangement. To take care of needing to draw your weapon first, my weapon sheathed bar (in addition to having all my non-combat stuff) duplicates a couple of the combat actions from my main weapon drawn bar, the actions I tend to use first when initiating combat. I can run around with my weapon sheathed, spot an enemy and fire off an attack, which automatically draws my weapon, switching my bar to the one with all the rest of my primary combat actions. (I still need to manually sheathe my weapon when done, though. At first I tried it with auto-sheathe, but some NIN actions would sheathe my weapons while still in combat which kept screwing up my bars. With my current arrangement, it will automatically draw my weapon when starting combat and remain drawn until I manually sheathe it.)

I have:

• bar 1: primary combat actions.
• bar 2: less common, more situational actions. (Mostly combat actions, but includes things like Protect too, normally out-of-combat)
• bar 3: extra space if first 2 bars weren't enough (only used for SCH/SMN so far)
• bar 4: out of combat stuff + a couple combat initiating skills

With weapon drawn, R1 "cycling" is set to bar 1 only.
With weapon sheathed, R1 "cycling" is set to bar 4 only.
(Set to automatically switch whenever I draw or sheathe.)
Bar 2 is used with the R2+L2 and L2+R2 extended bar combos.
Bar 3 I only get to with R1+face button selection. This is a little more awkward, but still doable. (That it's a bit more awkward is probably why I'm not particularly good at Scholar or Summoner jobs. I have too much tendency to just leave my pet to do his own thing.)

All four of the bars I use are class/job specific. The out-of-combat one (bar 4) is set up with most of the same things on each, but needed to be job specific in order to add the combat initiating actions, as well as to simplify DoH/DoL.

Since crafting and gathering don't count as drawing your weapon (even though you do have your tools out), my weapon sheathed bar (bar 4) becomes my main crafting / gathering actions bar on DoH/DoL classes. That means regular out-of-combat stuff like mounts, minions, sprint, teleport, return, etc., which combat jobs have on bar 4, instead get moved to my extended L2+R2 bar (bar 2) for DoH/DoL classes.