Advice needed - Healing on a gamepad (from KB/Mouse)

[RinaShinomiya]

Im gonna be brutally honest with you.
Don't play AST on a controller.
I mained WHM and SGE fine on a controller (SCH is basically green SGE so its also fine) AST is just ridiculous for controllers right now.

[Tiramu]

Thanks for all the replies, and advice. It sounds like I'm not configuring my cross bars/buttons/macros in the best way and AST is just special with a controller. So, I'll have a play with your ideas and give it a little more time to get used to, and to build muscle memory.

[BlueMageQuina]

I main AST on controller (PS4) and I have to say that card macros have never been very helpful for me. I’ve found that you cast cards way too often for the macro delay to be conducive to good gameplay, and that macros are way too buggy to use on a button you’re going to press every 30 seconds. I also found that having 8 extra macros for each party member takes up too much real estate in your cross hotbar (although you being on PC may work out differently if you can hybrid controller-mouse.)

Honestly, I just use the up and down on the DPad to target the players while looking at the party list, not looking at the players in the fight. This has the added benefit of telling me who has higher aggro and is therefore likely doing more damage.

Secondly, when I first played AST on controller in Heavensward, when I had any real trouble targeting players, (which mind you wasn’t very often even then), I used to just rearrange my party list.

For example, putting the melees at the top just beneath myself in order of descending expected damage so that the best person to give a card is one click down, and the ranged at the bottom in order of ascending expected damage so the best player to give a card is 1 click up (me, SAM, NIN, Tank, Tank, Healer, RDM, BLM).

The last thing I can say that really helped me is how I have my crosshotbar set up. My card skills are all together in the left trigger side while the right trigger is mostly attacks. This is done because cards are mostly thrown out between Malefic and not normally between heals. Any additional spaces on that page are macro heals. All my normal heals are on a different hotbar page.

I think you need to play around with different things, to see what feels natural to you especially if you’re new to gamepad/controller for this game. The last point is very important. The placement of all skills, spells and abilities is inherent to how well you will perform on any class on controller. Anything that feels unnatural and jank to switch from one skill to another means you need to find a better location on your hotbar.