Its ffxiv combat really so slow and boring?

[Dualgunner]

Getting back to your main bar though needs to cycle through R1 unless you do R1 + triangle. Plus, if you run a pet job, r1 is set aside for pet actions anyways. You can also access four bars instead of one via face buttons.

PLD isn't a pet job, so you're shifting the goal posts a bit there. You can set what bars are available to be cycled through both with weapon sheathed and weapon unsheathed in the options menu.



EDIT: Regarding the pet hotbar, this can be disabled, and all its abilities can be mapped to the regular bars as well. Would this be feasible? I couldn't say, but it's possible.

Unless its on the main tank, it's almost always reactively. Even if you know it's coming, you don't know who the mechanic will be on.

Only situation that comes to mind where you'd cover somebody but don't know who is O6S, and even then you know who gets targeted by the rock spire earthquake ability well in advance of it actually going off. Otherwise, you only really ever cover MT for tankbuster help or the BRD/MCH for knockback mechanics. Both of which you should know will happen and who to target well in advance of it.

It's the same issue with rescue, imo. It's actually really hard to use it effectively, and the processing time doesn't help.

There's a reason it's not taken much? It's so niche of an ability and its rewards are only tentative. Might as well take something else that would be more useful. In niche situations it's useful but again, in those situations you know who you're targeting: in O4S for example, you rescue the PLD back after the knockback tankbuster the tanks share, because PLD doesn't have a gap closer.

Sort of an issue with SB abilities overall bards that use palisade effectively are very rare for example.

In lower end content where it's not as important, yes, you'll see less people bother with mitigation.

Or say a BLM that uses apoc, the processing overhead gets high with moves targeting another, and the controller has a slight delay that doesn't help it.

BLM have their own problems with oGCDs in particular, given their cast time is larger than their GCD. However, they obviously find ways to do it or Aetherial Manipulation would be a borderline useless skill.

You're blowing the difficulty out of proportion, really.