To obey or not to obey! That is my question!

[Transient_Shadow]

Hey all! so I've been learning to coordinate with Lilly By using macros while she's under 'Obey' and honestly I've kind of had mixed results. On the one hand we can now pack a punch with out targeted healing doing over 7000 hp and I can hold her cool-downs untile their needed.

However, on the other hand I find myself a bit more strained with trying to manage both my actions and Lilly's. I'm not exactly used to her casting time so I'm starting like she's rather sluggish when activating her covenant/illumination combo

so I'm on the fence. what do my fellow scholars think?

Ps. Fairy glamours! give them to us square!

[winsock]

Use obey. /10 char.

[Taika]

Use obey, don't use macros. Start casting your own spell and then hit your Embrace (or whatever) button while you're casting.

[AmeliaVerves]

Leave her at one point and try to not move her unless you need to!
She can't cast while moving, just like you, so if you make her follow you even tho she is save from 80% of mechanics you loose a lot of potency. D:

ontopic:

• always obey!
• never use macros!

Only exception: changing eos/selenes skills when casting the fairy. That way you only need 3 buttons/keys for both.

[Dzian]

You don't really want to combo illumination and covenant.

The best combo really is to rouse illumination and whispering dawn. Almost doubles the regeneration effect of dawn when you pair all 3 together.

Should pretty much always use obey. There's nothing worse than watching her pop all her buffs at once when your fighting 1 trash mob or something such.

also as someone said above a well placed fairy helps a lot as she doesn't move so she'll embrace more frequently. just remember to heal... ( my bad habit number of times I run after a fight and she despawns cos I was too far away)
on the topic of placement though can othen use the fairy to spread deployment tactics over a wider area. if you put her inside the hit box and slighty to the back you'll get the tank and all the melee much easier especially on bosses with the bigger hit boxes..

macros. there are a couple you can use.
both shadow flare and sacred soil can be macrod to a target.

ac shadowflare <t> for example will drop that flare centred on your target. soil will do the same. just a bit easier than placing them I find

[Sebazy]

Disclaimer: Whilst I've been roped into playing SCH in progression teams, I don't consider myself a career or top tier SCH at all so my methods may not be to everyone's taste.

My first SCH stint was in 2.0 for BCOB, I didn't know better and macroed embrace onto everything, I still cry at night thinking about it.

For the curious, actual testing and parsing further down the line showed me that doing this cost me a couple of GCDs a minute or roughly 10% of my throughput. Naturally the macros went in the bin and I went back to the drawing board.

A simple way to spam your fairy with embrace casts is simply to bind your mouse wheel down to your embrace hotkey and spin away, bonus points on offer if you can free wheel it (A G900 can spin for 15+ seconds with one flick!).

Personally tho, for 3.0 and Gordias progression I settled on a method that did use macros, but only for embrace itself, everything else was direct hotkeys so my personal throughput and ability to queue stuff was completely unaffected by the embrace macros.

First up, I had 3 hidden hotbars, two were the same bar but adjusted for either Eos or Selene and I used the macro copy function mixed in with my Fairy summoning macros to apply the relevant abilities to one of my visible bars to save having either macros or redundant hotkeys on important abilities such as Whispering Dawn and Fey Illumination.

The third bar was simply 8 macros that would cast an embrace on the corresponding party slot. With a 9th specifically for Rouse/WD. These were mapped to a repeating macro on the matching programmable G key on my keyboard (via Corsair's obtuse but capable software) that would spam said macro on a toggle. Simply put, tapping G2 would spam embrace on party slot 2 until I tapped it again, hitting my 9th key would pause the embrace spam, interrupt the current fairy cast, then cast rouse and whispering dawn and then resume the embrace spam again.

My thinking behind this was that the fairy seems to operate on a slower GCD than the player so simply tapping embrace in time with regular character ability wouldn't always actually line up correctly whereas mashing embrace for 5+ hours straight for 7 days a week wasn't really an option either. This seemed like a great compromise to me and really let me maximise my fairy throughput with no impact on my ability to DPS or queue casts.

[Feyona]

I was taught to only use 1 mcro with fairy and that embrace on tank. i guess you could have embrace for every posion in the group. Not tried it and idk if theres enough room. I was told if you macro others spells onto fairy it slows the spell down too much but taika is right in general dont use them. Even though Im not as expert as taika.

[seekified]

Use Obey at all times. The only macros you might want are summoning macros that assign each fairy's unique skills to your hotbars to save space. I use these:

/micon "Summon"
/ac Summon
/hotbar pet "Whispering Dawn" 3 1
/hotbar pet "Fey Covenant" 3 2
/hotbar pet "Fey Illumination" 3 3
/wait 2
/petaction Obey
/wait 4
/petaction Obey

And

/micon "Summon II"
/ac "Summon II"
/hotbar pet "Silent Dusk" 3 1
/hotbar pet "Fey Caress" 3 2
/hotbar pet "Fey Wind" 3 3
/wait 2
/petaction Obey
/wait 4
/petaction Obey

These take care of everything. Micromanaging Embrace and the like really isn't necessary.

[Nicodemus_Mercy]

I usually WHM when healing groups but I SCH when solo. My Broil is macroed to make my fairy cast embrace on my target's target. That makes her heal me constantly when solo and if in a group, she's healing whoever my target is attacking (usually the tank). I won't claim its the best way to do things but it's made doing dungeons really easy since I can just dot things up, spread the dots when applicable, and spam my nuke. Since I'm the type of person who constantly mashes their buttons, my fairy is constantly casting embrace he he. I do keep her in Obey though. The fairy cooldowns are very powerful and far too valuable to waste letting her cast them at inopportune times.

While those who downplay using macros are correct in their assessment of its reduction in potential performance, if you aren't good at managing everything manually, macros can be worth using. The logic being that if you can't perform up to the maximum potential doing it without macros, but using them gets you closer than not using them, then using macros is actually good. Remember not everyone is good at micromanaging multiple things at once and not everyone has the same level of manual dexterity. I'm "of a certain age" :P my fingers just aren't as nimble as they used to be. That Broil macro to make the fairy cast embrace has eased my SCH play immensely.

[Gemina]

I'm with those who agree to always have Lily on obey, and never use macros. Macros are inefficient when doing multiple actions, and it is better to just manually input your commands, but still set your abilities in convenient locations on your cross/hotbars.

I struggled too at first with micro-managing our fairies. How I was able to adjust was by seeing their abilities as an extension of my own. IOW, the pet hotbar does not exist; It is just another one of MY hotbars. Fairy abilities that have cast times such as Whispering Dawn, I select and use while casting another spell. This is also the time that I will manually use embrace on another party member. Shadow flare, Bio II, Broil, and Miasma are all good candidates to cast to give yourself time to use a fairy CD. After some practice, it is literally no different than using any other ogcd.

What I do wish for though since I play on controller, is the option to automatically go back to the previous hotbar set after using a fairy ability. You'd think just tapping R1 to do so is very easy, and it might be for some. For me though, I find myself going to the wrong hotbar set ALL the freakin' time!