PLD Defensive Buffs Grouping

What buffs are you guys macroing together for your self buffs?

My current ones are:
Rampart + Convalescence
Bulwark + Foresight + Awareness

I have Sentinel and Hallowed Ground ungrouped solo actions

You shouldn't use Awareness with Bulwark. Blocks cant be crits, so increasing your block rate by 60% is already pushing a huge number of crits off of the table. Use awareness at other times, preferably when you have no cooldowns up to normalize incoming damage.

In general you shouldn't be stacking cooldowns except in fringe cases. Relying on 1 at a time should be sufficient in most cases.

Macroing Rampart and Convalescence together is not a good idea since they're both very powerful by themselves.

So your saying you guys don't group any buffs together?

The only things I use together with any regularity are Awareness and Foresight, since both are relatively weak on their own.

rampart by it self is powerful enough no need to combo it.
I usually pop Convalescence after the big hit, it help recover faster.

My best advise is to not rely on macros at all. Learning to use individual skills as individual skills will allow you to better adapt to any situation.

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Originally Posted by Ladon

My best advise is to not rely on macros at all. Learning to use individual skills as individual skills will allow you to better adapt to any situation.

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This. I've found the way FFXIV's battle system is set up, there's little need for macros, as everything you can just map to your hotbar anyway. This isn't like FFXI where every ability and spell had to be macroed in order to make battles more efficient. As Ladon said, using an individual ability means you can adapt better to unexpected situations during a battle - macros are too restrictive.

Only ones I combo are Fight or Flight with Bloodbath and awareness with foresight.

I'd rather have an extended time with buffs than a short time with a lot of buffs.

If you really do want to use macros for your defensive buffs to cut down on key presses, one thing you CAN do is have two reverse-order macros. I used this for a while and it was surprisingly efficient. Both macros will only pop one ability when pressed, whichever is first in the list and off cooldown, and spamming the key will pop lots of them in sequence as you see fit.

Macro 1 has the buffs in the following order:
Sentinel -> Convalescence -> Rampart -> Bulwark -> Foresight -> Awareness.
This is the "oh no I'm about to take a huge amount of damage" emergency macros, basically a Best-to-Worst list. This is for when bosses do something huge and unavoidable, or when someone pulls 3 packs of adds and your healer dies.

Macro 2 has the buffs in the following order:
Rampart -> Bulwark -> Foresight -> Awareness -> Convalescence -> Sentinel.
This is my "trash" macro. Not worst to best, but more designed to pop the most efficient stuff in order, whilst saving the two biggies (Conva and Sentinel). This macro is more about just popping "something" to smooth out my damage intake on trash pulls.

So when I'm tanking trash in an instance, I can just pop Macro 2 regularly to ensure I have some kind of mitigation buff up on most pulls, whilst saving the two best cooldowns for last so they're available when things get really bad. Macro 1 is what I'd press to mitigate any big incoming boss hits.

It's not as flexible as having all six tanking cooldowns on separate keys, but it DOES save 4 keybindings and there's very very few instances where you specifically need a different cooldown than the one provided in line by each macro.

Fight or Flight and Bloodbath I find are cooldowns you generally want up 100% of the time anyway, so rather than macro these into any cooldown macros I've tended to just stick them on Fast Blade so they're up at maximum uptime without having to think about it.

Here's a snippet from the Turn5 spreadsheet prepared for my FC:

http://puu.sh/4KD54/9d0214d858.png

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Originally Posted by Syncness

Here's a snippet from the Turn5 spreadsheet prepared for my FC:

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Interesting.

I can understand Convalesence + Foresight being used together, and Rampart + Bloodbath (+Fight or Flight if available?). The Damage taken would be reduced for the duration (slightly in the first, moreso in the second) and there'd also be a constant stream of extra healing over the duration (moreso in the first, slightly in the second).

I take it Sentinel and Hallowed Ground are kept for situational purposes? Do you bother using Awareness much or are enemy crits not that common?

I'm generally using my buffs situationally at the moment... but Convalesence, Rampart and Sentinel tend to be my "Oh rubbish" cooldowns that I keep until I really need them. I'm far more likely to use Foresight and Bloodbath on trash, and cycle Fight or Flight on Cooldown.