Controller options to use standard hotbars? Or something similar?

[LilimoLimomo]

Since taking a break from FF14 to play Baldur's Gate, I had noticed that my arthritic hands were generally feeling a lot better. I came back yesterday to play the new content and noticed that halfway through the new dungeon my hand was aching from holding down the shoulder buttons on my controller. I'm going to gather more data on this, but it's enough to make me think that I may need to find a different way to play FF14 if I'm going to both enjoy myself and take care of my body.

My hypothesis is that there are two factors that are synergizing to create this situation:

• Using the crosshotbars to perform an action at least once ever 2.5 seconds means you're holding a shoulder button down for almost the entire duration of a fight; that's a lot of holding!

• The PS5 controller has a concave boomerang shape, which makes it difficult to grip the controller in the palm. My guess is that because of this, the L2 and R2 triggers become more strenuous to hold down, since your overall grip on the controller is less stable.

So my guess is that there are two different areas where I can make changes to try to improve my situation. I'm considering going shopping for a different controller that is more ergonomic, but before dropping a lot of money on something like that I wanted to make sure I had fully explored the control customization options in FF14 to see if that could meaningfully change my experience. Here are the options I found:

• I briefly tried the control option where instead of "holding" shoulder buttons they "toggle", but was disappointed to find that it seemed to remove access to the R2+L2 crosshotbar. I'm going to try this one more, but I'm hoping there may be even better options.

• Rebinding to swap the back shoulders with the front shoulders seems like a possibility, but after trying this I found that this changes the controls for things like menus as well, which is less than ideal because I have my R2 and L2 swapped from the defaults, meaning in every menu left and right are backwards. Again, I could experiment with this more, but I'm hoping something better exists somewhere.

One thing I was a bit surprised to not find while exploring was a way to use the non-cross hotbars without a cursor. I recall that in FF11 you could traverse the normal hotbar a bit like a menu, selecting the skill you wanted and then pressing the confirm button to use it. I was thinking that if something like this was possible in FF14, that maybe I could avoid the crosshotbar entirely and just have a grid of hotbars where I select my skills. So if something like this does exist, I'm hoping someone can let me know where to find it!

Also, if there are any other options that you think might help, please let me know! I just want to make sure I've explored all the possible options before I decide what manner of solution to attempt. Thanks in advance for any help my fellow Warriors of Light can provide!

As a note, WXHB is unfortunately not for me because double-clicking the shoulder buttons kills my hands.