Evidence that Macros Do NOT Cause GCD Delay or Lost Casts

[LilimoLimomo]

This appears to be a major flaw in testing, or in interpretation of the original problem.

Cool, let's go over your critiques piece by piece.

You're testing by stacking the same spell over and over into the macro. Nobody is trying to macro in this way.

Technically this isn't true, as I macro this way, and I know others do as well. But you are correct that not many people macro this way, and often that's because they don't understand that they should be macroing this way to actually access the queuing benefit that macros have to offer. That's part of the misinformation I'm hoping to correct.

When players are attempting to create combat macros, they're trying to put together a whole chain of skills....But what you briefly noticed but failed to recognize the implications for, is the "wait" command cannot increment in fractions of a second. Any player creating any combat macro that uses a "wait" command is naturally introducing further drift into their rotation, and given how the premise of combat macros is to chain several skills, several "wait"s will naturally need implemented.

I don't doubt that some people are trying to make these kinds of macros, but this is far from the only way to macro. Macros can do a lot of powerful things...just not this! Which is to say, you're correct that using /wait to line up several actions in sequence with the press of a single button will generally lead to lost DPS. To be clear, I do not recommend using this kind of macro. But again, that is just one kind of macro. I say this with no shade intended, but I guess when I made my initial post I wasn't aware of the extent to which people had such a misconception of what macros could be used for, so I'm grateful you're sharing this with me. Later in this post I will show you an example of a different kind of macro, one that benefits the player without a loss of DPS.

This is certainly one way to macro, but it's far from the only way to macro.

If you want to actually test this, you need to create an actual viable macro, one that unaware players would likely attempt to create to save space or make combos easier.

I'm guessing you didn't finish reading my post, because if you did you would find that I did test with a more complex macro:

/macroicon "Blizzard"
/macroerror off
/ac "Aetherial Manipulation"
/ac "Blizzard"
/ac "Blizzard"
/ac "Blizzard"
/ac "Blizzard"
/ac "Blizzard"
/ac "Blizzard"
/ac "Blizzard"
/ac "Blizzard"
/ac "Blizzard"
/ac "Swiftcast"
/wait 0.5
/ac "Sharpcast"

This is a great macro that I actually use on my Black Mage. It does a lot of cool stuff:

• If pressed while targeting a party member, it uses Aetherial Manipulation to teleport to them.

• Otherwise, if pressed in the queue window for a GCD, it casts Blizzard (or Paradox if available). And then, if the cast was Paradox (which has an instant cast instead of a cast bar), 1 second later Sharpcast will be weaved while the GCD is still on cooldown.

• Otherwise, if pressed outside of the GCD queue window, it casts Swiftcast. And if you still haven't pressed another button 1 second later, it will also cast Sharpcast.

As I've previously mentioned in multiple posts, during combat, it's generally a poor idea to use /wait, but this is one of the use cases where I feel it works well. I never need to double-weave after Paradox (which would be the only downside of automating the oGCD after an instant-cast GCD), so this automates my single-weave so that my brain can focus on other things. And it's nice to have all of this functionality on a single button, so that depending on the context in which I press the button I get different functionality.

And this is just one of the great things you can do with macros to make your life easier without losing any DPS. Hopefully this helps clarify that macros are more than ill-fated /wait chains!