How To Train Your Faerie: A Comprehensive Guide

[Lovemonster]

1. Fights with frequent knock back.
2. One specific part of T5. After divebombs, my group runs from that ditch to almost the other end of the battlefield for the snakes.

It is a small percentage of fights. Most it just doesn't make a lot of difference either way.

As far as use of macros goes, I use few or no macros for most classes. I'm usually looking to do one of three things with a macro:
1. Save hotbar space.
2. Improve efficiency with no or negligible trade offs (such as having rouse in my whispering dawn macro).
3. Fix things to operate the way I feel they should.

Most of my scholar macros fall under #3. Faeries don't queue your commands, which necessitates macros to ensure consistent execution of cooldown abilities. Faerie also waits until 80% to start healing the tank, which isn't as fast as I want. In order to manually command the faerie to start casting while the tank is above 80%, you have to have the tank targeted. If you want to DPS while the faerie heals, you have to target an enemy, which basically means a scholar has to have two separate targets at once, which is impossible. Then there is the whole thing where targeting an enemy triggers a self heal, which applies for faeries as well. Other classes don't need to have a healing target and an attack target simultaneously. These are all problems unique to the scholar class.

Then there is the issue of auto heal range only being 25y, so if you are healing someone towards your max range, your faerie will just stand there and watch you. That is the only reason I use heal+embrace macros. It could be useful as a space saver to avoid a dedicated embrace command or macro, which I might end up needing after the expansion.

So basically, you're trying to reduce the amount of effort you have to put in while sacrificing versatility. I think this is the wrong way to approach scholar. If you play on a PC you can have so many keybinds and there are more than enough hotbars for them. If you do to shiva ex you'll see how often pets die because they are given no attention probably because they are placed in the middle and forgotten or given the heel command and so lag behind you and eat the aoe.

Using target of target and focus target macros reduce your versatility. For example in t7, how would you actually target the archer adds? You'd have to individually target them either by clicking/tabbing or using the enemy list. This trains your ability to quickly change targets and improves your reactive healing, reduces downtime searching for targets and raid awareness. I think it only brings more trouble to people who use these macros, especially when they use their skills and don't notice that nothing is being done because of an incorrect target (tanks don't always target the boss, for example).

I think macros decrease versatility and improvement and this overweighs the increased effort you have to put in.
1. you can achieve everything that a macro does by simply being a quickthinking player who has practiced healing enough to switch between targets rapidly and control both self and pet simultaneously
2. you have to compensate for macros failing or not applying to the situation at hand -> you have to do it manually
3. you start to think that anything that your macro cannot do is too much effort and not worth it

I'm not saying the being efficient is wrong or anything but it definitely isn't optimal and the difference really does show between the good and great scholars. I think that learning scholar by doing everything manually from the start is a better training approach than using macros that other people have made.