Mouse Over Macros

I thought about submitting a bug report and still might... but I wanted to vent here.
Way back in ARR, I couldn't heal myself no matter what, unless I deliberately hovered the mouse over me in some way. I liked that. MO working as intended. Now, however, I can heal myself whether I want to or not. Just like how targeting other objects regularly works.
I hate, absolutely HATE healing myself unless it was completely intentional.
I can now unintentionally heal myself with mouse over macros.
Oh well, time to get used to another style of healing. MO has become unreliable and... a healer needs reliability.
On a less ragey and more serious note, there are times where I have my mouse over someone else and I end up casting w/e it is on myself anyway. I know I'm in range, so that isn't the problem. No, I don't have <t> or <tt> or <me> in the macro either. Also, I usually use the party list as it's easier than trying to do it in the active field of mechanics.

I had to edit this a lot cause I have a 1k text limit for some reason.

Edit: Oh, you mean how if you mouseover an NPC/object or hostile target, it (wrongly) corrects to self target.

This issue has been around as long as I can remember, at least as early as 2.1. As much as I would personally like for beneficial spells not to self-target when I use target tags, I don't remember a time that they did not do that.

In what cases is this an absolutely terrible thing, though? If the mouse is over a party member but they are out of range or out of sight, it tells me they're out of range or out of sight, and I don't waste a heal on myself. And if I'm soloing, I'm not pressing my heal button unless I intend to heal myself.

My big question about mouseover macros is if they're responsive enough for healing. I was using mouseovers for a bit and kept running into issues where they were just not quite responding quick enough.

In my experience they are. The vast majority of my macros are all ones that target other party members which I have switched to mousover targeting because it's so much more fluid then "normal" targeting. Like... I don't even know how healing without mouseover targeting would work now...

You can't queue them and sometimes you have to time a heal or ability while camera movement is needed. There are downsides but I also use them. Mouse over is great for embrace so you can dps while topping off. It's also nice for rescue to quickly target someone's character model standing in one shots because you can't be bothered to remember where they are in the party ui.

<f>? Do you mean <t>? If you have that and your targeting something not heal able (like an enemy) you will default to yourself. If you have both <mo> and <t> in the same macroom and neither is being utilized (not targeting or hovering over a valid target) then you will again only heal yourself.

You cannot queue any macros. Queuing is where you press a skill will the current action is still in the process of completing and it will execute your next ability as soon as it can. It's a subtle effect that makes weaving alot smoother.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by execool

You can queue with a macro, I do it every day lol.

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Macros can't be queued in this game.

Edit, easy way to test this:

Make a macro /ac Stone <t> and place it on your action bar. Bind another key to Stone without macro. Cast a Stone with both buttons and hit the button again when the cast bar has less than half a second left. Using the macro, you will not cast another Stone right after the first. Without the macro, you will.

Trying this myself, I seem to be having some trouble queueing my single target heals, though (Medica and Medica II work just fine, Cure and Cure II don't seem to). I realise this is going a bit off topic, but does anyone know why this is?

Also pretty sure you can't. If you can take a video, by all means show us. One of my biggest peeves with mo macros is how some skills get lost when weaving/(mis-judging my gcd). If they queued properly I wouldn't encounter these issues.
Mouse over macros are amazing though, so long as you keep them as one liners. If you go for macros that heal another target if your <mo> doesn't exist or is out of range then it's really clunky.

Is this not a side effect of using the macro while your gcd is still up? It will try and execute each line in succession but the first ones will fail because of the ongoing gcd. The end result being that perhaps <f> will default to healing you if your focus is non-existent or out of range?

This was what I meant about macros being clunky if they're multi lined. Especially for button mashers like myself.

I've always used /target <mo>, /ac "Cure II" <t> for my healing macros. Haven't tried /ac "Cure II" <mo> as a single line before.

I raid with mouse over healing macros. You can't make them too complex but you also have to be very aware of the macro sequence priority sequence.

The most reliable mouse over macro is to have mouseover the ONLY option and mouse over the party faceplates (this also works on alliance raids):

Quote:

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/macroicon "Benefic"
/ac "Benefic" <mouse>

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The most unreliable way to do a mouse over macro is to have two or more target conditions. The FFXIV macro system doesn't do what you would expect necessarily when casting becomes available and check if there is a mouse over option first and then general heal situation (target or self if you have smart casting enabled). Instead when you use the macro regardless if you can cast or not the macro starts. If casting becomes valid in the middle of macro execution it can skip the mouse over clause and default to healing our target or yourself. This occurs frequently since the Macro system doesn't queue and when using macros you have to spam click to heal effectively. Not a fun implementation.

Quote:

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/macroicon "Benefic"
/ac "Benefic" <mouse>
/ac "Benefic"

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The following is a compromise which I use for raiding, solo and general party play. You can use /mlock to force the current macro to finish before another macro can start casting, this avoids weirdness of cutoff macros when spamming. Then you duplicate the scenario which should be checked first. What this does is artificially check the first condition many times, before "risking" checking and executing the secondary condition. This greatly raises the consistency of a mouse over macro with a secondary condition. Also target of target is often the secondary condition you would desire over mouse over, especially if you tend to hold your right mouse button down while moving/dpsing/tankhealing.

Quote:

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/macroicon "Benefic"
/mlock
/ac "Benefic" <mouse>
/ac "Benefic" <mouse>
/ac "Benefic" <mouse>
/ac "Benefic" <mouse>
/ac "Benefic" <mouse>
/ac "Benefic" <mouse>
/ac "Benefic" <mouse>
/ac "Benefic" <mouse>
/ac "Benefic" <mouse>
/ac "Benefic" <mouse>
/ac "Benefic" <mouse>
/ac "Benefic" <mouse>
/ac "Benefic" <tt>

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Anyway those are my thoughts on how to compensate for mouse over healing problems in this game.

The problem I'm having is healing myself when I'm trying to heal someone else. It's EXTREMELY annoying.

My macro line is simple
/micon "skill"
/ac "skill" <mo>
nothing else.

Healing anything other than the being I'm trying to heal is absolutely irritating.

Just to be safe, you are hovering over the party window to heal them? It's alot more reliable than dealing with character models.

Also are you using them for gcds? If youre spamming the macro and then moving your mouse it may find a new target (such as a monster in which case you will heal yourself ) this isite, again, because macros don't queue

Yeah, I use the party window. It'd be nuts trying to heal specific allies if they're on the move or grouped up in a bunch.

As far as accidentally healing myself instead of my intended target, no idea. My mouse is clearly in the right place, but here I am, healing myself instead... occasionally. I mean, for crying out loud, at least heal the person above or below the intended target on the list. Then I'd at least know I misclicked. And considering my UI set up, the odds of a boss being under my mouse when I heal an ally is EXTREMELY low.

The whole reason I went to mo macro is cause I wanted to stop healing myself, (way back in ARR) I used to do click healing and would randomly heal myself, which I thought happened cause they went out of range or something, so I switched to MO. This must only be happening to me... No one should be able to give me any arguments about healing myself instead of my target with click healing. And yes, it was obviously on an ally and not on an enemy.

If only I could just turn off the possibility of healing myself without targeting or putting the mouse over my name... this includes the garbage of healing yourself if you're targeting or have your mouse over a target that can't be healed. I swear that wasn't a thing once cause I'd have to use target of target to heal myself when I soloed. With MO healing, that is...

At some point in the SB patch cycle <mo> behavior has changed to include default self-targeting. The previous behavior was that a spell would only default to self-target if it had either no modifier or <t>, while <tt>, <f>, and <mo> would all only target the specified way. Now they all self-target if the specified target is invalid, which is a significant downgrade from the previous behavior. And also just makes no sense - sure, if we don't specify a targeting modifier let the game have whatever default behavior it wants, but if we've specified anything other than <me>, it should never target as if we had.

Interestingly, we can now also assign modifiers to spells that only self-target. For example, [/ac "Sprint" <t>] will only execute if you have something targeted. I don't believe this was possible before, and it does now allow simple true/false statements.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DKage

The problem I'm having is healing myself when I'm trying to heal someone else. It's EXTREMELY annoying.

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I find this boggling, as when I try to heal someone with the same macro, it heals them or it says they're out of range/sight. It does nothing if nothing is under the mouse, and it never redirects to me unless the thing under the mouse is a hostile or noncombatant object/NPC.