saving your sprout ass right this instant

For mouse and key­board play­ers only. ^{[1] Link to foot­note 1}

put limit break on your hot­bar

The game does not add Limit Break for you, de­spite you very much need­ing it more than you need the play guide on your hot­bar. You can drag it onto your hot­bar via the Actions & Traits win­dow hid­den in your menu, but if you still have that stu­pid play guide on your first hot­bar, right where it force­fully placed it­self, you can in­stead paste this com­mand into the chat box to over­write it with Limit Break.

/hotbar general "Limit Break" 1 9

1 is your hot­bar num­ber, 9 is the slot it’s over­rid­ing; the play guide by de­fault, on every job, is on your 9th slot of your 1st hot­bar, so you should prob­a­bly do this on every sin­gle com­bat job you ever pick up in the game. Both DPS and Tank have points in the MSQ where you have to press this; with three bars of LB, heal­ers can raise the en­tire party, which is ex­actly as nice as you think it is. Just re­mem­ber that the party shares the LB, and you’re chill­ing.

move around like any third per­son videogame re­leased af­ter 2005

Go into Character Configuration in your main menu, and on the very first menu the game makes you look at, make sure both op­tions in the red box is checked.

Hit ap­ply, and walk around with WASD to see what this af­fected. Congratulations! You can walk around like a nor­mal char­ac­ter, and not one from Silent Hill for the PS1. If you did­n’t set this, you would have a down­right un­for­tu­nate num­ber of deaths from slowly walk­ing back­wards; take heart, when you see at least three peo­ple every al­liance raid dy­ing to a slow back­walk, that you aren’t one of them.

let your­self see

Same win­dow, go to the Character tab, set your shit like this:

Hit ap­ply again. FFXIV has a funny habit of mak­ing the screen less and less vis­i­ble, the deeper into the ex­pan­sions you are, if you don’t do this. (If you’re a Summoner, you, uh, might want to set your own ef­fects to lim­ited once you get into Endwalker. Just trust me here.)

get an ac­tual amount of hot­bars

By de­fault, the game shows you two hot­bars, with the thought process that you’re sup­posed to, like, cy­cle through the rest with one of them? I guess? Gonna be hon­est here, I think even if you asked the most in­sane turbo-ca­sual on planet earth, no­body would tell you they’ve will­ingly done this. Are the kind of peo­ple who play like this even real?

Probably not, any­ways go into HUD Layout in your main menu, make sure hot­bars 3 and 4 are vis­i­ble (right click­ing while one’s se­lected to tog­gle its vis­i­bil­ity), and stick them to­gether (holding shift aligns them bet­ter, if you’re the type to care). Level 90 jobs do not have four hot­bars’ worth of but­tons, but hav­ing four is go­ing to make or­ga­niz­ing your shit way eas­ier. (Plus, you can put, like, food, and po­tions, and your chocobo mount, and the aether com­pass you get dur­ing Heavensward and shit there. Extra space is nice to have!)

fix your binds

To ex­plain why you need to do this now, and not later, I would need to first ex­plain why your raid­ing friend, who’s been play­ing for five years and ex­clu­sively hot­bar-clicks on White Mage, is prob­a­bly a PF ter­ror­ist. Rather than bore you with those de­tails of how bad binds can make your life mis­er­able, I’m go­ing to just let you in on a lit­tle se­cret, right now, while you still have time to get used to any­thing you change:

With the sole ex­cep­tion of your tab key and mod­i­fiers, every sin­gle key sur­round­ing WASD is bet­ter-used as a hot­bar bind than what they’re cur­rently be­ing used for.

Your Q and E keys? Useless, thanks to that move­ment change we did ear­lier. Auto-run is nice, but con­sid­er­ing where your sprint is by de­fault (the equals key!?), that be­ing set to R is silly. Your F key, in par­tic­u­lar, is set to Face Target. You know, like, the thing you al­ready do when you at­tack. These keys, at best, are not so use­ful that you need them right next to you; the hot­bar but­tons that rep­re­sent your ac­tual com­bat ro­ta­tion are.

I can­not tell you which of these keys are per­fect for you, be­cause I have freak­ishly large hands and you prob­a­bly don’t, but I can tell you that, at min­i­mum, six of your hot­bar keys are a waste of time. Go into Keybind on your main menu, click the Hotbar tab, and try to give them a bet­ter place. Some easy tips:

• 1-5 are the keys you were prob­a­bly able to press any­ways, so no need to touch those. 6 is kind of far away, but still doable, in case you want to put a cooldown you don’t want to ac­ci­den­tally press there; un­bind the rest.
• Put the rest of the keys in or­der from eas­i­est to hit to hard­est; since you’ll nat­u­rally want to put the shit you press more of­ten on the eas­ier keys, this lets you com­press your most com­mon cooldowns into the same bit of your HUD.
• Once you pick out all your keys, do the same for hot­bars 2-4, but with each mod­ifer, so a hot­bar for Shift+[Key], a hot­bar for Ctrl+[Key], and a hot­bar for Alt+[Key].
• If you still can’t get enough keys to fill out the whole hot­bar, and you’ve got big enough hands, you can just bind all your move­ment keys one to the right (so WASD -> ESDF). This gives you an en­tire left col­umn of keys for your pinky to press, but if you were strug­gling to reach shift or con­trol be­fore, you can ba­si­cally as­sume it’s im­pos­si­ble now.
• If you ever rock a fancy MMO mouse, pick one good mod­i­fier, and have two hot­bars for the MMO mouse but­tons, one with mod­i­fier and one with­out. Centralizing every­thing to just the mouse sounds nice, and then the con­se­quences of you bind­ing every­thing to one sin­gle thumb sud­denly comes up, and you’ll have hand pain for weeks.

Here’s a hap­haz­ard ex­am­ple of what I’ve come to use, af­ter years of flail­ing: two hot­bars for the MMO mouse (one with a shift mod­i­fier), one hot­bar with im­me­di­ately avail­able keys (other than tank in­vuln be­ing on an in­ten­tion­ally-hard-to-mis­press bind), and then a mix of what­ever else I think is reach­able (LB is on shift and tilde, it just looks weird).

all the other shit

Whenever you’re wait­ing around in duty finder, dig deeper into your Character Configuration win­dow, be­cause there’s a lot here. I’d rec­om­mend tak­ing note of each op­tion, but for some easy rec­om­men­da­tions:

• Control Settings -> Target -> Enable full auto-tar­get makes dun­geon en­e­mies a mil­lion times less mis­er­able for tar­get­ing
• Item Settings -> dis­abling Store all newly ob­tained items in the Armoury Chest is go­ing to get use­ful as you quickly out­grow the gear lev­el­ing roulette keeps forc­ing on you
• Display Name Settings -> General is how you get all the shit that lets the stream­ers have pretty names on every­one in the party
• Hotbar Settings -> Display -> set­ting Recast Timer Position to Type 2 lets you have a nor­mal-sized cooldown timer on your hot­bar

Try to hit your weapon­skills/​spells the mo­ment you gain the chance to, as of­ten as pos­si­ble; when peo­ple tell you to keep your GCD rolling, they’re re­fer­ring to this. Hitting your but­tons wrong is rarely as pun­ish­ing, in this game, as not hit­ting them at all.

Some AOEs are bet­ter on two en­e­mies than your sin­gle tar­get at­tacks are; the mo­ment there’s three or more, you’re go­ing to al­ways AOE. ^{[2] Link to foot­note 2} This is es­pe­cially so if you’re in a dun­geon where the tank is pulling as many en­e­mies as pos­si­ble, be­cause you need to kill those en­e­mies faster than they kill the tank; press your AOEs when this hap­pens, and wit­ness true sero­tonin when you see like fifty dam­age num­bers pop up in a row.

Finally: if you say the words you don’t pay my sub at some­one in-game like that ex­cuses what­ever goofy-ass shit you know you just pulled, know that they are, as a re­sult of in­ter­na­tional diplo­macy agree­ments, now ob­lig­ated to shoot you IRL. I did­n’t make the laws, I’m just telling you.