Community Question | Your Favourite Shifting Method

Growing up my father had bad arthritis, so he always used an automatic. With losing dexterity in his fingers & the last 2/3 of his peter pointer finger due to a lumber cutting incident...it was hard for him to grab and shift an - automatic column shifter (the cars he owned). While on holidays (Florida) we were always given a car with a - floor mounted auto shifter. My father had to turn and use both hands, the left to push in the button the right to shift the lever. When I first saw paddle shifters on Ferrari (driving cars) I said...I can't wait for when they finally work there way down to gaming wheels. I never saw the need to remove a hand off the wheel your steering with to grab onto a shifter, shift and put your hand back.:O_o:
 
H Pattern Shifter + heel toe. Nothing beats doing a Senna 6-2 shift at the end of a straight. paddles leave me cold,
because
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I prefer to use whichever shifting method is used in the car I'm driving. Although when using H-pattern in VR with most cars the shifter in game is on the wrong side. Because as a Brit I have the shifter on the correct side of my sim rig.
 
Rowing is a lot of fun, but it's not nearly as much fun in a sim as it is in real life for some reason. Maybe sims are just too forgiving, or maybe it's the lack of physical linkages that mean you can "game the system" very easily.

For that reason, I went sequential. There's something extremely satisfying about a big, dirty sequential lever with a solid feedback in a race car.

I hate paddles. Not as much as I hate automatics, of course, but still.
 
As many have said, whatever the real car uses I stick to without exception (I'll even configure the H-pattern to match the gates used IRL if it's not setup like the standard pattern)...heel-toe is always the most fun by a country mile.
 
I use what the car has in real life. I mean it would be weird to use a h-pattern in a modern GT car and it would also be weird using the sequential shifter or paddles in a car from the 70s.

On modern cars I use a mix between paddles and sequential stick. I upshift with either the right paddle or the sequential stick and downshift with onlt the seq stick, the left paddle is used as a handbrake (I have the DFGT). In GT cars I use the paddle+stick, in rally I would use the stick for both up and downshifts, because the DFGT has small, wheel mounted paddles, it's sometimes difficult to find them, when you need to shift mid turn.

On the other hand H-shifter is more interesting to drive and it's even more satisfying since I made the shifter myself.And there's an added bonus of realism when you lose a gear in pratice and have to "rebuld your gearbox" (resolder the switch) just befor the race. I've had that happen a few times :D But I'm improving it and it's been working better lately

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I agree with having an additional option to vote for. In assetto corsa, when you have both H pattern and sequential assigned, the car you choose allows you to use only whichever the real car has.
Sometimes I have a good laugh driving around in Forza Horizon 4 in a Lambo Huracan with H pattern being too lazy to remap controls from jumping from a BMW E30 to a modern hypercar. :D

I am tempted to hijack this thread but I'm not allowed. Whoever knows me probably knows why.
The best shifter is a DIY one. I'm obsessed with them. ;)
 
Whatever the car I'm driving has. Currently only has H-pattern+clutch and paddles in my rig, a sequential shifter stick is on my wishlist/DIY list. But I do sometimes use sequential paddles for cars that aren't in the game, such as powerful 2WD cars in DiRT Rally to simulate classes like Group H, a national rally-class here in Sweden that is awesome, 2WD tuned cars that almost always has a sequential stick. But for most of the time I use whatever the real car uses. :p
 
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