#and yes. i'm using a mouse-remapper to actually hold ctrl/shift/alt. and an mmo-mouse would be really cool

[racke7]

Okay. So I think I figured out how this happened.

I made a Free-Trial account.

I installed a neat plugin that let me transfer settings to new characters.

When I bought the game, I had to make a new account (for reasons).

Upon starting the game, I had the same dalamud-settings as before, and so also the same plugins.

Since this meant that my settings transferred, I assumed that the plugin had told the game that I wanted it "like that".

In actuality, the plugin likely stored the setting in its own file-system.

When this plugin wasn't active, the game immediately reverted back to "default".

In order to prevent this from happening with future patches, and to make the game at all playable, I realized that I'd need to make all of those changes regardless of if dalamud comes back online tomorrow or next week.

So I sat down and did all of the crafters, and the gatherers, and PLD+DRK+SCH+AST+DRG+NIN+MCH+BLM+SMN.

And then I also did everything in PVP. (Which was easier, since there are a lot less skills to move around, but still very annoying.)

From this work, a few things became clear to me:

DRG has like... no skills. (And that's not necessarily a bad thing.)

NIN has about ten more skills than it needs to. Holy shit.

MCH always feels like playing piano, but there aren't actually that many skills. You just have to press a lot of buttons very quickly.

BRD is... weirdly insistent on me wasting a lot of time on putting DoTs on everything.

SMN is all about pressing the same button and having fifteen different things happen.

SCH has way too many fucking skills and also no fucking emergency-heals. (No wonder it stresses me out so much)

PLD has some weird dmg-skills later on, but most of its actual tank-skills are about protecting others instead of surviving nukes, which makes it awkward to design a "this button does the same thing across multiple jobs"-system around it (because nobody else fucking does it like that).

AST is genuinely really easy to understand, it just requires four different hotbars. But you probably won't use most of those skills anyway so it's fiiiine. Probably.

On a vaguely related note to MCH. Either I'm very good at playing it (unlikely) or there's something very weird happening with damage-aggro, because MCH is a ranged-DPS (and so is supposed to lose in singular-dmg-output to basically any melee-DPS), and yet I'm consistently seeing myself as "nr 2" on aggro.

Is MCH just bullshit-good at DPS? Does something very strange happen to MCH compared to other classes around lvl 50? Am I only managing to "stay nr 2" because I glance at it mid massive-combo? Am I actually a god amongst mortals?

On a different amusing note, it's actually possible to do some things with combat-macros.

For example, BRD has two skills tied to two "unlockable" skills, and you always want to use those unlockable skills if you can. So you just design a macro like:

/ac "Straight Shot" /ac "Heavy Shot"

and it will just... work. It can only use one of these skills because of how the macro-system works in-game, meaning that it picks "the first one" that it's able to use. So you put the unlockable skill highest, and presto, one button for two actions.

BRD is however something of a blatant outlier in this, but a while back I sat down to experiment and... there are a few other things.

You remember those "dmg mitigation"-skills that tanks are riddled with? Well, excluding a few specifically unique ones, you can just put them in a macro that will do the same thing.

And because the macro can only pick one skill to use? It will pick the first one that's off cooldown. So you just set up the longest cooldown highest, and you're good to go.

(I didn't end up actually doing this, because I don't entirely trust it. In no small part because I want to be able to easily see the cooldowns.)

I ended up also trying to see if I could use this to make an insta-rez macro, where I just double-click on it to first activate the Swiftcast and then (because that puts it on cooldown) activate the rez. But this proved... weirdly inconsistent? Dunno why. Except maybe I'm very fast at double-clicking, and the macro couldn't keep up?

So. For some fucking reason, all of my hotbars and hotkeys and macros and HUD-layout?

They're saved on dalamud somehow.

Base game? Pure default. All of it.