Keybindings and Hotbar Setup for Dragoon — Endwalker 6.58

This document is intended to be used as a guideline for setting up your own hotbars. While the ones we are showing here are tried-and-true, it's more about the methodology and creating hotbars that are comfortable for your own manual dexterity. You should only use these as a template - a baseline - on which to build out your own bars. Of course, you may just lift them wholesale, if that's what works best for you!

FFXIV incentivizes players to play multiple Jobs in the game to get the most out of the combat system. It can be very difficult to set up hotbars across different Jobs that will mesh with one another and allow for a cohesive game feel. One thing that you may find particularly helpful is to map skills within role specs with similar features to the same buttons. For example, picking one button that is always Feint for all of your melee classes or a single button for Sprint across every Job, so your muscle memory doesn't need to change when changing classes. The latter is why Sprint is placed on such a strange bind on my controller bars, for example. Consistency.

• General tips:
  1. Map similar skills to identical buttons. You might try to keep Battle Litany or Lance Charge on the same button as Arcane Circle, for example.
  2. Make sure you take into account your comfort in pushing important buttons. Your specific hotbar setup will only make you better if it's YOURS.
  3. Your hotbars should be centralized so you can easily see them in your periphery while paying attention to your character and the enemies. Ideally keep them from covering that important area of the screen while remaining centralized.
  4. While not directly related to hotbar layouts, keeping your Job Gauge AND your "Enhancements" and "Conditional Enhancements" segments of the Status Info close by the hotbars makes tracking things like your Power Surge buff from Disembowel or Dive Ready from High Jump easier. You can split your Status Info in the HUD Layout under the Status Info settings. Splitting it into 4 groups allows you to pull external enhancements (raid buffs, shields, etc.) into a separate space from your personal enhancements (like Power Surge or Lance Charge).

• Controller tips:
  1. Keep your GCD actions and often-used cooldowns on face buttons for ease of movement.
  2. Utilize the normal horizontal/vertical hotbars to track your cooldowns for you. They can show you the timers on the actions you keep stashed on your Expanded Controls, for example, to help you stay on top of your rotation.
  3. Turn off the help text! You should know each action by its icon once you have a handle on any given Job, and the flying blue help text clutters the screen, making your hotbar overall take up more screen real estate. This can be done in Character Configuration → Hotbar $rarr; Cross via the "Display hotbar help" option.

• Keyboard tips:
  1. Try to map all of your actions to keys within normal, comfortable reach of your movement keys for your particular hand size to mitigate wrist strain and fumbled actions due to long stretches.
  2. Utilize modifiers that feel most comfortable for your fingers to activate. You should generally only need two out of Shift, Alt, and Ctrl to access all buttons.
  3. Your hotbars, contrary to popular belief, do not need to form a giant block. Chunk them. Split them up according to modifier or type of skill or something similar to aid your eyes in tracking your actions.