Macro for forgetful players?

[Foxkid]

One thing I've done is position a hotbar where I can easily see it. This hotbar isn't keybound and has only half opacity. This hotbar keeps track of vital cooldowns for me.

How do you activate this additional hotbar if I may ask? I don't get super inclined in the systems to that extent, but it sounds useful for watching my machinist for Refresh/Tact as well as dissipation (sch) and the turret abilities.

Sort of.

So you can do something like this:

/ac "Swiftcast" <wait.60>
/recast "Surecast"
/echo Surecast is ready now!!

This is a macro that will try to use swiftcast, and 60 seconds later show you the recast (should be 0) and put a message in your log that it's ready. But there's a few problems.

The game has a small queuing system where if you push an ability, say, 0.1 seconds before it can be activated, it will still go off 0.1s later. Activating abilities via macro doesn't use this, which can make it feel very unreliable. Often times if you're tightly weaving, you'll find it just doesn't activate.

Then if you use any other macro, it interrupts this one. You'll no longer get the message 1 minute later about it being ready.

There are third party tools/mods with various forms of timer/ability/recast tracking, but of course SE says all that stuff is disallowed so we can't talk about it here. And with plans for official mod support dropped, there's unlikely to be improvements for what's available in game.

How come the "echo" command isn't featured when making a macro? It sounds more usable than making a whole new line to notify your abilities are ready again (like "/em has found a storage of wine coolers amidst the fight").