It's okay to fail solo duties

[Minali]

In the process of the discussion and double checking with a friend, I learned people playing with a controller quite literally are unable to read tooltips, unless they have a touchpad or mouse around or so and jump over half a dozen hoops. This is incredibly absurd and I can see how this makes it harder to navigate skills in solo duties, even though they have roughly the same pattern. Sometimes it's the minor differences making, well, a difference. How CBU3 never came up with a good solution for this is beyond me. Of course this isn't the only thing that might be between you and a win if you consider these mechanics difficult in itself, but it's certainly not helping.

[Alice_Rivers]

I was gonna chime in and say "It's in no way okay to fail solo duties, they're way too basic and easy for that and probably by design, it's not even a bad thing." but then I read Minali's post above and if accurate it's an inexcusable oversight by CBU3. It doesn't entirely obsolve players of responsibility for being bad enough to fail these things but it does make it understandable in the cases of controller players.

[Minali]

I found the post again where someone in the forum explained it and it sounds incredibly clunky and link a thing you won't know about unless you accidentally unlock your mouse by random button smashing. (Unless you play plenty of games where you need to activate this "mouse cursor" but I can't imagine a lot of them to be out there.) My friend didn't know hovering about skills without a mouse is possible at all, until she was playing Endwalker, and only after she read about it on reddit.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post6524586

The friend I mentioned uses a touchpad, which also seems to activate the cursor, but I'm not sure how many controllers actually have one. I only play with my controller from Steam once in a blue moon and am not sure if it has one. I certainly don't remember ever needing one in a game. Maybe it is a standard for new ones today, I don't know, but how often do you actually buy a new controller? Back in PS2 days I replaced mine once after it had serious signs of decay from using it a lot and that was after using it for 8 years or so. And either way it's very unintuitive and apparently hard to find.

Considering controllers are so popular in JP from what I know, one would expect them to be aware this is an issue. (Maybe they consider it obvious because JP people are so used to controllers? I have no clue.)

[17cupsofcoffee]

In the process of the discussion and double checking with a friend, I learned people playing with a controller quite literally are unable to read tooltips, unless they have a touchpad or mouse around or so and jump over half a dozen hoops.

This isn't true - virtual mouse mode (L1 + R3) allows you to bring up a cursor and hover over things without plugging in a mouse.

I'm not a controller player, so I don't know how well this feature is signposted, though.

EDIT: D'oh, reply beat me to it.

[EiraWoqiso]

I know a few controller players that seemed to know to do that pretty instinctively. At the very least, it was one of the first things my brother did when he wanted to use the cursor on the PS5 version.

[Sida]

My biggest problem with solo duty fights on borrowed jobs used to be the binds. I use somewhat peculiar arrangement and the game forcefully putting the skills in 1 2 and 3 was detrimental for me. However nowadays you can reorder the hotbar to your hearts content before starting the fight. It gives both, time to arrange them in manner that makes sense to you, as well as read the tooltips in peace. I have not tried on controller side but I'd assume the reorder option is there too. The fights give an impression of urgency and people are conditioned from group duties to jump into the pull to a point they might do so and feel hurried even in solo ones. But in solo ones you can always take time, examine and adjust the toolkit before committing to start the fight part which is easily missed. Do I kinda dislike being forced in melee jobs, yeah, as I naturally play ranged. But I play to learn to be better.