Quote Originally Posted by ty_taurus View Post
AST is currently disliked for a number of reasons. What is very likely the biggest reason is the amount of single targeting you have to do to play cards. I have very little doubt that whatever we get in 7.0 is going to kill playing cards on individual players because it's driving away the common player.
I just want to see if there's any sort of universal design solution that could be helpful here.

In a few other MMOs (mostly recently added on WoW, but GW2 and --though a bit differently-- TERA are probably the most common examples), targeted skills may use soft targeting or preferential targeting rather than necessarily hard targeting. (Preferential targeting is essentially soft-targeting, except in that it can snap to or prefer your hard target when applicable -- i.e., the right type [party|friendly|hostile] and in range when the skill is queued or actuated.)

That soft-targeting is handy because if you have a skill that can, say, only attack enemies, you can just keep your current allied target and the skill will simply target will simply follow your cone-center targeting (admittedly, not super polished in XIV, but workable for all but small AoEs) at the time you give the command.

Most relevantly to most AST concerns, one wouldn't have to worry about tabbing back to the given enemy after selecting an allied Card target, and can generally just use Target of Target to handle the current tank while otherwise leaving one's target among the dps, where they'd only have to tab up or down the party list twice at most per draw in order to appropriately place a Card. (Granted, if we go back to more than a single Card effect, it'd still have some troubles.)

There are a few other other features, too, though, that may typically be bundled with this (at least when one includes addon features):
  1. action-specific cone starting points and widths (ally-buffing actions may start further back and/or use a wider cone, as to still be able to tab through or be aimed through allies behind or well to the sides of you),
  2. a game might set actions to set their target on button release, while indicating the target while that button is still held down,
  3. variable indicator opacity and appearance (e.g., when there are more relevant targets in the cone of detection, the indicator may),
  4. automatic deployment at end up uptime period (as not to be potentially punished for releasing the button, and therefore setting the soft-targeting, too late),
  5. optionally longer queuing periods (if one wishes to almost all their targeting in this way but wants to be sure also that they've enough time to get their targeting in correctly),
  6. skill-specific target interception (an ally-targeting skill cannot be intercepted by enemies), and
  7. action-specific target snapping (a no-falloff AoE will prefer targets nearer to the center of the enemy/ally pack, while a skill that increases %damage may snap to the nearest DPS and skill that increases %eHP would snap to whomever highest eHP).

Put those together and even controller-based AST players wouldn't likely struggle with the job regardless of oGCD single-target Cards. And the whole game benefits.