I hate playing as other characters

[iheartlove42]

I've never understood this complaint, even though it pops up all the time. It's just a few duties. five or ten minutes of your life for said duties, and then it puts you back into your character.

You play as your character for hundreds to thousands of hours in this game... playing as another character for 10 minutes for a story related bit of content every now and then is not that big of a deal.

The fight as Thancred in SHB lasts like 20 minutes lmao

[Hasrat]

They always just replace hotbar 1 for me...

That's because most have the setting to replace hotbar 1 with the pet hotbar when the pet hotbar is available. It works similarly to when you need to use a beast tribe mount for one of their quests.

Because the NPCs are mapped to the pet hotbar, probably we'll never see them have more skills than said hotbar can contain.