BLM macros

[Garotte14]

I understand where you're coming from, but you're issue just sounds to me like you are relying on macros to do the work which is in turn not allowing to get better and faster at doing it manually. You practice at it and then it becomes muscle memory and you will be much faster than any macro. I also think you are over complicating your hotbars. You should have on your main hotbar fire 1, 2 and 3, transpose, thunder 1 or 2 (depending on which you use) and thunder 3, swiftcast, flare, blizzard 1 and 3. That's it. Those are the abilities you are constantly using in your rotation, single target or aoe. You don't need an aoe hotbar and a single target hotbar and then a buff hotbar and all these macros. I just gave you 10 skills. That leaves 6 on your hotbar to put whatever you want on there. The rest of your skills have cooldowns and you use them situationally. You still have 8 or 16 more slots on your expanded that you can put buffs/debuffs in. My only point is we are honestly trying to help and I think you just need to get in there and start practicing. You'll be far better off in the long run.

[m3eansean]

DPS macros are bad for GCD abilites, please do not use them if you are serious about your DPS output. You will always put out much lower DPS than a person who can manually perform the skills.

It is like this by design.

[Brabus]

I use a gamepad and only have 16 visible slots, I can access other 16's easily by right shoulder button. I personally wouldn't use macros on blm and I don't. lets say you make a macro that combines several spells and abilities. What if you get interrupted. Your macro set would be thrown out and as it cycles you cant do anything until its completed. If your cycle is 20 seconds long including spells then your stuffed. Also during this time if you come under attack and need to use defence spells once again the original cycle is still running causing you more grief.
Macros can make life easier but with blm where you cant do much in the way of spellcasting while moving then its going to hurt. Also, lets say you go through a cycle and fire 3 procs, your not going to be able to use that due to the macro cycling.
Hope it helps

[Elky]

I use macros for a few things, mostly debuffs and buffs.
Virus/EE
/ac "Virus" <t>
/ac "Virus" <tt>
/ac "Eye for an Eye" <t>
/ac "Eye for an Eye" <tt>
I like this one because I can use it on my scholar and black mage. All it does is cast virus on my target, and EE on my targets target and vice versa. It lets me do whichever job I'm doing without switching targets.

Aetherial Manipulation
/ac "Aetherial Manipulation" <t>
/ac "Aetherial Manipulation" <f>
ports me to my target, or my focused target, I normally focus the healer to get me out of a tight spot. Also lets me finish a cast without switching targets or running.
Apocatastasis
/ac "Apocatastasis" <t>
/ac "Apocatastasis" <tt>
This one again allows me to not have to swap targets if I don't need to. I like to set up all of my macros to take variables into account.

BlizzardIII
/ac "Blizzard III" <t>
/wait 2.5
/ac "Thunder" <t>
Now this is my only damaging macro I use on my Black Mage and may be the most, it casts Thunder right after Blizz allowing me to keep ThunderIII for procs and an extra slot on the bar.
So those are all of my blm macros, thoughts?

[Malevicton]

BlizzardIII
/ac "Blizzard III" <t>
/wait 2.5
/ac "Thunder" <t>

No such thing as wait 2.5. You can enter it but the game rounds up to 3. Add spellspeed into the mix and you're losing around .6-7 seconds every rotation.

[Roxas_Andrade]

I use macros for a few things,
BlizzardIII
/ac "Blizzard III" <t>
/wait 2.5
/ac "Thunder" <t>
[...]
So those are all of my blm macros, thoughts?

No such thing as wait 2.5. You can enter it but the game rounds up to 3. Add spellspeed into the mix and you're losing around .6-7 seconds every rotation.

I don't know about this rounding-up thing. IMO, the game uses the next skill as soon as the other finishes, considering recast of 2.46... Is that a thing?
But I noticed some latency... I had macros for my mudras (#DumbMe, I know) and I noticed that if I let a /wait of 0.7, sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. When I changed it to /wait 0.8, they got better, almost always working... Then I noticed that the cast time is 0.5, and that i'm much faster doing them myself. Only hard at the beginning until you memorize all the combinations...

Elky, now I don't think you should use /wait in macros, they have to be well planned (my exception to swiftcast, wait 1.5, raise, /p raise) or else you may be caught in a situation where you don't want to cast the blizz3, and have to stand there waiting for the thunder to start charging (or not) because you don't have it mapped in another slot...

[lacrimosaangel]

Snip

Oh gosh no, I didn't mean to insinuate that I'm relying on them, I still like to do things myself and do not - under ANY circumstance - use them for any of my fire/blizz skills, I just seem to find that a LOT of the time when I use flare manually, I mess up the timing with transpose and miss the umbral/astral switch. The number of times this has happened has led me to think that perhaps I would be better off just testing a macro.

My X-bar set up:

Fire I, II, III, Blizz III
Scathe, Thunder I, II, III
Sprint, Physick, Convert, Transpose
Virus, Flare, Sleep, aetherial

and then on bar 2 I have my other buffs/debuffs etc. But I don't like using convert for mp gain unless I REALLY need to, I don't like having to rely on healers to get that hp back up, especially as most of the healers I've found in parties are too busy focus healing on tanks!

[lacrimosaangel]

snip

Hehe, 20 seconds?! Woah no way, like I said, the flare macro is ONLY for flare, which I use ONLY when swiftcast is available and usually only after I've done 2-3 of my regular rotations - the macro lasts less than 5 seconds, and is quite a bit quicker than inputting it myself! I'd never use it for standard rotations, just Flare ^_^ Wouldn't use it for fire/blizz either and the only reason thunder was at the end of the other one is so that the procs could tick and I could slot them into my usual rotation without worrying about having to stop my rotation to cast it ^_^


Thanks for all the tips about the party list, I've got the AM set up so that it goes to <4> now (healer in 8 man party) as I have never found that I need it in a 4 person duty

[Hysterior]

only macro I can think of are some <tt> macros for things like eye for an eye or apocatawhatever
BLM don't really need macros

and party chats like:
/p The end is near!

avoid this, everybody hates them and it looks super childish =)

[m3eansean]

I don't know about this rounding-up thing. IMO, the game uses the next skill as soon as the other finishes, considering recast of 2.46... Is that a thing?.

It rounds up, dev confirmed and player tested. The game only deals in wait times of whole integers with macro commands, due to server delay and latency this is a required practice. During macro commands, the game cannot queue your next action as you are not performing a next action according to the server yet.

When selecting skills manually you can actually press the button at about 75% complete GCD and the game queues that request to happen as soon as the GCD is up. This is implemented to accomodate for variances in player pingtime to the server at any given time, so that it is a smoother experience, should latency increase and the commands still occur as they normally would.

What this means is when you are doing macros with wait 2.5, it is actually wait 3.0, every time without fail. This can be easily tested as well.

When you choose to macro any GCD ability as a dps player, you are absolutely impacting your own performance in a negative way. Adding seconds to your rotation and going noticably slower than a manual player. This results in an enormous dps lost, which again, can be tested quite easily with a target dummy and just doing a macro vs non-macro rotation.

This is a design decision, so that players who can master pressing all the buttons will have a distinct edge. So if you are at all serious about being a good player and pushing your job to the max, then macros for GCD abilities is something you want to avoid.