The Ultimate Newbie Macro Thread for Newbies to Macros like me.

[Joe_Schmoe]

If your macro is just /assist with nothing else, you might want to just use the keybind for this, save yourself some bar clutter. It'll also help avoid weird macro interference issues.

I know about it, but thing of it is is my button setups are different for each class. It's easier to just macro it, since I can put it to wherever I need it to go. Whereas the keybind menu is universal - keybinding "alt +`" might work on my scholar, but not on my melee classes, as an example - unless I'm missing something.

[Canadane]

OK, so the sense I am getting is that Macros are problematic maybe one day this will be fixed as I see the potential for them.

I doubt they will be, only because there's nothing to be fixed. It's not broken.
They were specifically designed this way in order to have the player play the game, not have a macro play the game for them. They didn't want macros to be close to actual player skill.

There was a dev post about it a number of years back when ARR launched.

[dotsforlife]

TL;DR Don't use macros in combat aside from maybe targeting ones. Especially if you do some annoying shit with it like spam messages or sounds. I remember when Ninja players were telling other Ninja players to macro their mudras. Lol... that still blows my mind.

[Freyt]

Yeah... I only ever used macros for Blood Weapon/Blood Price, and for Thunder back when it was 4 or 5 different skills. I've never used macros for healing, not even for reviving. Some people rely on them and they do well with them, but I prefer to have an immediate response to my key presses, as well as uninterruptible. I have switched, for the time being, to using macros for mouse targeted skills to center around my target, mostly because I just have a habit of losing track of my mouse cursor.

[Raldo]

Fellow macro hater chiming in here. I have one macro, and it's to slap Salted Earth directly under my current target. It takes me far too long to fiddle around with the ground target marker, so the macro actually makes it faster for me. I'm so glad they got rid of Flaming Arrow.

/ac "Salted Earth" <t>

[Rongway]

Here's a set of macros that will become even more useful with the addition of new jobs next summer:



While we think of only "hotbar 9" as a single hotbar, there is actually a hotbar 9 for each class and each job, and additionally a separate hotbar 9 for "shared". These macros take advantage of the distinction between a class/job hotbar and the shared hotbar to store the many versions of one hotbar on various classes/jobs and switching which currently occupies the shared hotbar.

Overview:

• Turn on hotbar sharing for the bar(s) you want to use for switching. (/characterconfig, Hotbar Settings, Sharing)
• Create macros for each class/job/menu category you want to use.
• Make multiple versions of the bar, each with a different category "expanded", saving them on classes or jobs.

Example macro set:

Magic DDs  : /hotbar copy thm 9 share 9
Ranged DDs : /hotbar copy arc 9 share 9
Melee DDs  : /hotbar copy pgl 9 share 9
Healers    : /hotbar copy cnj 9 share 9
Tanks      : /hotbar copy gla 9 share 9

Crafters   : /hotbar copy crp 10 share 10
Gatherers  : /hotbar copy min 10 share 10
Hunt Bills : /hotbar copy fsh 10 share 10
             Aside: my example shows this macro with the Battle Stance icon: /micon "Battle Stance" emote

Set up hotbar 9 as your caster gearsets, then put the macros for each other job category on the bar so it looks something like

RDM BLM SMN Healers Tanks Rangers Meleers

in whatever order you prefer. Then save the bar to where your magic DDs macro says it should be, which is just manually running the reverse command:

/hotbar copy share 9 thm 9

Then set up hotbar 9 for healers, something like

Casters WHM SCH AST Tanks Rangers Meleers

Then save the bar to where your healers macro says it should be:

/hotbar copy share 9 cnj 9

etc.

Once finished, you'll be able to click a category to "expand" it, and therefore be able to fit all your jobs on one bar. If you want all combat jobs and all non combat classes on one bar, you'll need to combine (healers and tanks) and/or (casters and rangers) to make them fit, since the number of categories plus the highest number of options in an "expanded" category can't exceed 12. Or, you can put two hotbars together, and have each macro switch both bars.

[Tint]

Here's a set of macros that will become even more useful with the addition of new jobs next summer:

Well, that's fancy and all... but why not simply use this one (especially for people on Playstation):

/gearset

It opens the list with all gearsets and you can select from there.

[Rongway]

Well, that's fancy and all... but why not simply use this one (especially for people on Playstation):

/gearset

It opens the list with all gearsets and you can select from there.

It's cleaner than searching a list of forty gearsets for the one job you want, activating the submenu, and choosing "Equip Set". Besides, they're not all just gearsets. One of the categories in my example is a collection of combat checklist activity key items (hunt bills and wondrous tails), and each gatherer activates a bunch of stuff on equip, so I can see all nodes of any type regardless of which class I'm on:

/macroicon 31 gearset
/gs change 31 <wait.1>
/ac "Triangulate" <wait.1>
/ac "Fathom" <wait.1>
/ac "Truth of Mountains" <wait.1>
/ac "Truth of Forests" <wait.1>
/ac "Truth of Oceans"

[CorbinDallas]

So, as this is still questionable for me what I will do before I do a dungeon (my Healer is only level 20 and only qualifies for Tam-Tara I believe) I'll do guildhests with Macros as a Healer to see how this works and to see if this is optimal.

Why is it still questionable? It isn't optimal to heal via macros outside of fairy micromanagement. Far more experienced players have come forward and told you this, after healing for years. It's no wonder people who offer advice get so frustrated and come off as "elitist" when sound advice backed up with experience and proof just fall on deaf ears. Go ahead, go and do your macro guildhest, enjoy your waste of time.

[MoroMurasaki]

Thanks for anyone who replied. I'll check in this thread probably tomorrow.

I promise you you will not every be able to play a healer competently this way. At all.

At cap most content features 8man parties. That would mean for every targeted healing ability you would need 8 separate macros. On WHM that means 8 times 8 just for the native targeted healing skills (Cure/2/3, Tetra, Bene, DB, Raise, Regen) not to mention things like E4E and Rescue from the cross-role section. This takes WHM from around 25-30 buttons up to a conservative estimate of about 80 buttons.

You will literally never be able to play even semi-competently this way. At all. I guarantee you. I'm not trying to be harsh but you need to understand how bad this entire venture will go. Do not do it. It is objectively a horrible idea.

I use a gaming keyboard with extra keys to the left of the rest right now and often use tab to target enemies while having I believe Q and W mapped to quickly target the first two members in my list other than myself? This covers both tanks in 2/2/4 content and the tank and other healer in 1/2/5 things. Find something like this that works for your existing keybinds. Don't do this macro thing, it is awful.