If you want to see this through, I'll say don't give up yet. For what it's worth, this game was my first MMO that I put effort into learning and it probably wouldn't have happened without the extensive controller support this game has. I've gotten to a point where I personally feel I can comfortably play all healer jobs. Part of the issue is that playing AST is a lot of busywork, and giving cards to party members is the most cumbersome part of the job. It's not impossible to manually give a card to a party member in between GCDs, but it does require some fast reflexes and preemptive targeting.

I would start by recommending you turn on "Expanded Hold Controls" and use the corresponding hotbars. These are the hotbars where you hold the triggers in a certain order to access them (L2 > R2; R2 > L2). I personally find them more intuitive to use. WXHB double-tap is doable, but the sensitivity is finicky most of the time imo, even if you can change that value. Personally I use WXHB as a last resort for when I can't fit all of my skills, and even then I make sure to put skills that have long cooldowns on them.

The game never tells you this afaik, but if you hold a trigger button (L2 or R2) and then hit a bumper button (L1 or R1), it allows for quick enemy targeting relative to character and camera position. I believe this is equivalent to what KBM users call "tab-targeting" (correct me if I'm wrong on this). You can change the properties of how this function targets enemies in Character Configuration > Control Settings > Target > Target Type: Target Closest Enemies.

Make sure to fiddle with the cursor speed for ground-targeted skills in Character Configuration > Control Settings > Target > Ground-Targeting Settings (Controller Mode). Less useful for AST since the AOE range was massively buffed on Earthly Star, but useful nonetheless.

Something to also note is that there are two different types of targeting.

I would say the first kind of targeting people learn to do is hard targeting. Let's use the party list as the example here. This is when you scroll down to the party member on the list you want to target and then hit the confirm button. Your target selection is hard-locked until you manually cancel out of it. This is what you normally want to use for targeting enemies.

The second is soft-targeting. This is just when you highlight your target without pressing the confirm button. You can tell if you're soft-targeting when you see the targeting ring continuously circle over the target's model. This form of targeting allows you to still cast your skills on that target, but after using any one skill, it will return to your original target automatically. This is extremely useful when trying to maintain DPS uptime as it saves you an extra step having to retarget the enemy.


The last thing is just general expectations. You're undoing muscle memory. You're going to mess up, and that's okay. I get that it sucks when you fail to do the most basic of actions, but give yourself some time and patience, and you'll click with it eventually.