Evidence that Macros Do NOT Cause GCD Delay or Lost Casts

[Frizze]

Ally/enemy-sensitive cure/damage macro
If you're targeting an ally, this casts Regen. If you're targeting an enemy, this casts Dia. It's going to cost you a single frame roughly have the time; whether the convenience and reduced button bloat is worth that cost is up to the individual.

/macroicon "Regen"
/macroerror off
/ac "Regen"
/ac "Dia"
/ac "Regen"
/ac "Dia"
/ac "Regen"
/ac "Dia"
/ac "Regen"
/ac "Dia"
/ac "Regen"
/ac "Dia"
/ac "Regen"
/ac "Dia"
/ac "Regen"

Except that if you cast regen while targetting an enemy instead of not working, it casts targetted at yourself. This one might need some work.

[Mikey_R]

That's not a failure because that's not what the macro is meant to do. The point of that macro is not to press it once and have it cast two skills, it's to have it activate a different single ability depending on the timing of its use. It's supposed to not cast an oGCD if it successfully casts Ruin 2.

Until it does. You can flip the scenario and you hit an early Ruin 2 which then activates the oGCD as it is late enough it could potentially come up later than the action lock, especially if you don't plan to use the resource in that time (in this case, any action that uses Aetherflow that isn't Energy Drain).

Again, reducing flexibility to make something that isn't necessarily reliable just to save some space, if space is even needed at all. Again, I don't care (mostly) whether someone uses macros or not, however, understanding the limitations imposed on yourself by using said macro is just as important.

[Mikey_R]

I use this for my Bard to split it into fewer buttons, tell me what you think (songs are on their own keybinds ofc)

I know I'm not the OP, however I would hope that they would agree with me on this one. No, all bad and shows you have failed to understand what the OP is talking about in regards to macro creation and getting around their limitations. This should hopefully highlight why it is important to have all information laid out clearly.

However, for the sake of this poster, I am going to start from the beginning. The reasons macros are generally considered bad is because they do NOT interact with the action queue system. This system is designed in a way that, with the normal actions pulled from the actions menu, you can press it early and it will still go off. This timing is generally considered at about 0.5 seconds. You can test this out yourself by going to any striking dummy (Summerford Farms has some level 1 ones right by the Aethernet Crystal), use a GCD action and, before the GCD comes off of cooldown, press another GCD action once. You will find it will still go off.

Now, Macros, as stated, do not interact with this. Even if your macro was only one line of, /ac "Heavy Shot" <t>, it still would not have the same action queuing as I described in my previous post. Instead, it will only have a chance at activating once the GCD has come off of cooldown completely. Since noone can spam a button to ensure it goes off as soon as it can, it leads to a delay between the cooldown and the action going off, which is not present otherwise. What the OP describes is putting multiple lines of the same command in the macro so that it is effectively being pressed between your presses and therefore has a higher chance of going off exactly when the GCD ends.

What your macros are aiming to do do not fit and is what is generally considered when people talk about macros, however, they are, objectively, bad. With only 1 or 2 instances of the main GCD being used, it is likely to not go off (keeping the GCD rolling is by far the best thing to do). However, this is also a good time to talk about macros again. You CANNOT have 2 macros going off at the same time and each line is executed in order, they do not go off at the same time. If you were to rapidly press it, it is likely you wouldn't even make it to the end of the macro before you press it again and restart it, defeating the whole point. I could go on, but it would be better to advise you to rethink what you want out of your macros and what you want to achieve. The extreme button culling you are going after is just not feasible.

Automatic Sharpcast after Ice Paradox:
/macroicon "Blizzard"
/macroerror off
/ac "Blizzard"
/ac "Blizzard"
/ac "Blizzard"
/ac "Blizzard"
/ac "Blizzard"
/ac "Blizzard"
/ac "Blizzard"
/ac "Blizzard"
/ac "Blizzard"
/ac "Blizzard"
/ac "Blizzard"
/wait 1
/ac "Sharpcast"

Because I'm such a helpful person, as another tip, you can put <wait.1> at the end of a line to execute the wait command, which means you can replace the /wait 1 with /ac Blizzard <wait.1> and it should work out exactly the same, just with a tiny bit of extra time. You're welcome.

[LilimoLimomo]

Except that if you cast regen while targetting an enemy instead of not working, it casts targetted at yourself. This one might need some work.

Good catch! I had forgotten about that aspect of healing spells, thank you for the correction. I've gone back to add clarifications that that specific macro does not actually work.

[LilimoLimomo]

To which I say, why would you run the risk of messing up a mudra due to macro shenanigans and not just put it on a different button?

You could put it on a different button if you prefer; it's really up to the preferences of the user. I personally haven't had any difficulties with this macro.

As an FYI, there is a chance this will fail as if it is one of the later Ruin 2s that is activated, the macro will continue on and try and activate Energy Drain and Aetherflow, but you are still in the animation lock for Ruin 2.

That's actually the intended design of this macro: that if Ruin 2 gets cast, it should never cast any of the oGCD's.

In all my time using macros on PS4 and PS5, I've never experienced a situation where a single press of a macro without /wait resulted in 2 actions being cast. This is because (at least in my experience) every animation lock is longer than the duration of a macro. I just did a few quick tests with a variety of swift-casting actions like Chi and oGCD's on my PS5, designed to coax out a second non-wait cast if possible, but they didn't.

However, since the rate at which macros process is affected by framerate, this may not be a universal truth that applies to everyone? It's possible that folks with lower framerates might be able to cast 2 actions in the same macro without /wait. That would be interesting! I presume it would be double-edged, as you might be able to perform some additional functionality that people with higher framerates can't, while also needing to remove some of the padding from your macros to ensure that they don't extend past animation lock in the contexts when you don't want that.

Also, there is technically an exception to this rule: if your macro leads with a move like Hide or Iron Will that can be "deactivated" on the second cast, such deactivations do not have animation lock. So a macro is capable of deactivating and then immediately following up with another action. My best guess is that most people wouldn't want to make a macro that did this, but maybe some enterprising soul will prove me wrong.

[Natalyah]

If you test the macro and put the skills seperate on the bar you will see they go off without any issue.

[LilimoLimomo]

I use this for my Bard to split it into fewer buttons, tell me what you think (songs are on their own keybinds ofc)

Single target

/macroicon "Heavy Shot"
/targetenemy
/macroicon "Heavy Shot" <-- redundant
/macroerror off
/actionerror off
/ac "raging strikes"
/ac "Bloodletter"
/ac "Straight Shot"
/ac "Heavy Shot"
/ac barrage
/ac "empyreal arrow"
/ac "bloodletter" <-- redundant
/ac sidewinder
/ac "refulgent arrow" <-- redundant

aoe

/macroicon "Quick Nock"
/targetenemy
/macroerror off
/actionerror off
/ac "Rain of Death"
/ac "empyreal arrow"
/ac "Shadowbite"
/ac "Quick Nock"
/ac sidewinder
/ac "refulgent arrow" <-- will never be cast, better to remove

Dots

/macroicon "venomous bite"
/macroerror off
/actionerror off
/ac "venomous bite" <wait.3>
/ac "Windbite"

For me that's a lot less buttons. Wish I could make something for Paladin,but I imagine that's too complex.

It really depends on how much you care about achieving optimal, high-level play. If I were going to critique these macros for someone looking to do Ultimate fights, I'd point out a few things:

All 3 macros
None of these actions are designed to benefit from the pseudo-"action queuing" I describe on my first page, so that will likely result in some clipped GCD's.

Single target macro and AoE macro
Removes some control of when to cast certain oGCD's, especially "Raging Strikes".
Macro seems like it might lead to mashing because the timings of the different actions are so varied.

DoT macro
Clips roughly +0.5 seconds of GCD time
Can't weave without cancelling the Windbite cast.
If something happens where you need to cast Windbite but not Venemous Bite, you can't.
Depending on your settings, if the target of Venemous Bite dies before Windbite is cast, Windbite may be cast on a different enemy, which is only a problem if you don't want that.
All that said, the problems with this macro are only problems relative to the amount of times you cast this macro. So if you only cast this once during a whole boss fight, and then just cast Iron Jaws to keep these abilities up the whole time, it's not that much of a loss. At least in theory.

But it's not always about optimal play.
I wouldn't recommend these macros for someone looking to achieve optimal, high-level play...but that's not what everyone is aiming for. If your goal is to be able to play at a casual, "good enough" level (like getting through the MSQ and some chill side content) while pressing one button for single-targets, one button for AoE's, one button for DoT's, and one button each for songs, I think this is fine. Generally speaking GCD's will clip a handful of frames on each cast but it won't be the end of the world. The most important thing is that it works for you and gets you where you want to be. So if you are aiming towards optimal play, let me know and we can discuss different options. But if you just want functional macros that consolidate your buttons and you're fine with losing out on some DPS to get this result, I don't see any problem with that. I do have a couple notes, and depending on what your preferences are, you can choose to incorporate what works for you and discard the rest.

Also, warning that I don't play Bard much, so if I try to suggest something that is intended to be optimal for Bard but I actually chose the wrong move or combo, please feel free to correct me ^^;

1. just to make sure, I encourage you not to button mash these macros. Each of your macros do so many things, and mashing will cause the macro to start over before it gets to the end, meaning it might end up adding additional delay to your casts if you mash.

2. Assuming that you press your AoE macro when the GCD is available, your Refulgent Arrow line will never cast, because Quick Nock will cast fist. So I would remove the Refulgent Arrow line, as it isn't doing anything.

3. Your macros have some redundant lines; I've pointed them out in bold above. Some of the moves in your macro are the same move; for example, Straight Shot becomes Refulgent Arrow, which means if you have Straight Shot in your macro, it will already cast Refulgent Arrow when you have that upgrade.

4. If you want, there is an option in the settings to make it so that if you do an attack without a target, the game will select a target for you. I would guess this may use the same criteria as the /targetenemy command. So if you want that functionality for all your attacks, regardless of whether they are macros or not, that could be something to look into, and it will also free up macro lines.

5. Especially since you're packing so much functionality into every single macro, I would probably recommend splitting GCD actions and oGCD actions into their own macros. My main reason is because I worry about you getting a repetitive motion injury from your fingers repeatedly pressing the same button for so long; adding even a little variation or reducing the frequency of presses can help mitigate this. However, the other benefit of this is that you'll be able to get into a better rhythm of pressing buttons, which will result in more optimal play if you're interested in that. The idea would be that you have two buttons like the below:

/macroicon "Straight Shot"
/targetenemy
/macroerror off
/actionerror off
/ac "Straight Shot"
/ac "Straight Shot"
/ac "Straight Shot"
/ac "Straight Shot"
/ac "Straight Shot"
/ac "Straight Shot"
/ac "Heavy Shot"


/macroicon "raging strikes"
/targetenemy
/macroerror off
/actionerror off
/ac "raging strikes"
/ac "Bloodletter"
/ac "empyreal arrow"
/ac sidewinder
/ac barrage

So you can press the top GCD macro when GCD is available, and then use the bottom oGCD macro for weaves between GCD's. You could alternate the two to get single weaves, and depending on your timing and your system you might even be able to do GCD -> oGCD -> oGCD to get some double-weaves when you wanted to.

A couple notes about a few other changes I made:

• I changed the macroicon of the GCD macro to let you know if you have the stronger shot available, in case that affects how you want to play. And either way, it shows you when your GCD is available.
• I rearranged the order of some of your oGCD abilities. My goal was to make the abilities with the lowest cooldowns the highest in the list, so that we can cast them ASAP and thus get more damage out of them. The lone exception to this rule is Raging Strikes, which you would want to cast before your other abilities so you can increase their damage. With Raging Strikes as the macroicon, you can tell when your damage buff is available so you can unload, if you prefer to coordinate like that.
• In the GCD macro, I added repeated lines for "Straight Shot which will allow you to "queue up" straight shot shortly before the GCD is available; this might make it more comfortable to play with this macro without waiting for the GCD to be available to press it. Give it a try, and remove the extra lines if it's not your thing. Note that this will result in potential frames delay for any Heavy Shot casts, so while I'm guessing you're not concerned about that, let me know if you are and we can discuss alternatives.

The main downside with this oGCD macro in my subjective opinion is that Raging Strikes is coupled with all of the oGCD damage attacks. Which means that if you had a Bloodletter proc and you wanted to cast it without activating Raging Strikes, you wouldn't realistically be able to with this macro. But that's also probably not worth fretting about unless you want to, as "good enough" play generally doesn't require you to optimize for such things.


Edit: Alternatively, instead of splitting the oGCD's into their own button, you could simply automate them:

/macroicon "Straight Shot"
/targetenemy
/macroerror off
/actionerror off
/ac "Straight Shot"
/ac "Straight Shot"
/ac "Straight Shot"
/ac "Straight Shot"
/ac "Straight Shot"
/ac "Heavy Shot" <wait.1>
/ac "raging strikes"
/ac "Bloodletter"
/ac "empyreal arrow"
/ac sidewinder
/ac barrage

Each press of the button will give you a GCD and then an oGCD if one is available. The upside of this is that you've still got a single button for all your single-target stuff and you only have to press it once every 2.5 or so seconds, which will still reduce the possibility of a repetitive motion injury. The downside is that if you don't want to use an oGCD, you would have to accept the fact that one would be used, or manually press another macro to cancel the follow-up action before it gets cast. So maybe this would work better for you, maybe it wouldn't.


Also, if you're not already doing something like this, I'd recommend having some visible space for the actions with cooldowns so that even if you aren't pressing those buttons, you can see when the cooldowns are available. I like to have visible hotbars just under my actual crosshotbar that I explicitly use as a sort of "tray" for this purpose, as shown in the image below:


Anyway, I hope that makes things a bit easier on your fingers and mind while giving you the same easy access to "good enough" play! And if you're looking for something more optimal (no pressure if you're not!) let me know and we can work on other macros.

Edit: I may just come back and try to add some more optimal macros regardless, just to show what the difference would be. But it might take a few days, we'll see...

[LilimoLimomo]

Because I'm such a helpful person, as another tip, you can put <wait.1> at the end of a line to execute the wait command, which means you can replace the /wait 1 with /ac Blizzard <wait.1> and it should work out exactly the same, just with a tiny bit of extra time. You're welcome.

Haha, I think you're right! I used to think that the embedded <wait.1> command only worked if that was the specific row of the macro that had its action executed, but if I recall I did a test recently to prove that wasn't the case. I should do the test again to burn this fact into my brain, since clearly old habits die hard. Thanks for helping me to be the best I can be!

[Deceptus]

I use this for my Bard to split it into fewer buttons, tell me what you think (songs are on their own keybinds ofc)

Single target

/macroicon "Heavy Shot"
/targetenemy
/macroicon "Heavy Shot"
/macroerror off
/actionerror off
/ac "raging strikes"
/ac "Bloodletter"
/ac "Straight Shot"
/ac "Heavy Shot"
/ac barrage
/ac "empyreal arrow"
/ac "bloodletter"
/ac sidewinder
/ac "refulgent arrow"

aoe

/macroicon "Quick Nock"
/targetenemy
/macroerror off
/actionerror off
/ac "Rain of Death"
/ac "empyreal arrow"
/ac "Shadowbite"
/ac "Quick Nock"
/ac sidewinder
/ac "refulgent arrow"

Dots

/macroicon "venomous bite"
/macroerror off
/actionerror off
/ac "venomous bite" <wait.3>
/ac "Windbite"

For me that's a lot less buttons. Wish I could make something for Paladin,but I imagine that's too complex.

My old Bard macro was similar. Basically every OGCD that would come off CD would be used immediately. And I was never in the bottom of the DPS doing this. Often toward the top.

/macroicon Heavy Shot
/ac Straight Shot<t>
/ac Sidewinder <t>
/ac Empyreal Arrow<t>
/ac Heavy Shot<t>
/ac Bloodletter<t>
/macroerror off

Aoe:

/macroicon Quick Nock
/ac Shadowbite <t>
/ac Rain of Death <t>
/ac Sidewinder <t>
/ac Quick Nock

DRG can literally be macrod to:

/macroicon Vorpal Thrust
/ac True Thrust <t> <wait.3>
/ac Vorpal Thrust <t> <wait.3>
/ac Full Thrust <t> <wait.3>
/ac Fang and Claw <t> <wait.3>
/ac Wheeling Thrust <t> <wait.3>
/echo Macro #1 finished <se.3>
/ac True Thrust <t> <wait.3>
/ac Disembowel <t> <wait.3>
/ac Chaos Thrust <t> <wait.3>
/ac Wheeling Thrust <t> <wait.3>
/ac Fang and Claw <t> <wait.2>
/echo Macro #1 finished <se.2>

You'll lose roughly 2 gcd based on your spell speed due to the wait timer but again, you'll still be doing better than "certain" other players.

[ThatQEDguy]

I can't wait to see the practical test in an endgame setting on this.