Evidence that Macros Do NOT Cause GCD Delay or Lost Casts

[Zakuyia]

It's one thing to say they are not optimal when done in certain ways. However, it's wrong to say they can never be. For example, I have intervention macros, nascent flash macros, shirk macros, rescue macros, aetherial manipulation macros, sacred soil/asylum macros, etc. It would definitely be sub-optimal to not macro them and even make me lose whole GCDs.

Where they are sub-optimal, this is often minor unless you macro a combo/combination of things, where the waits cause a whole 0.5 delay minimum or skipped casts in the macro.

For example, you can "macro two things together" to create a priority system where the macro will only actually use one based on factors such as level or if one of them is on cooldown.

Also, I think part of the point of these posts is that it's made more sub-optimal by pressing the macro more than once, restarting the macro before it can even execute.

I guess but with all pros telling you not to do that with macros it really leads me to wonder if this is a bad advice thread.

[LibitIncarne]

I guess but with all pros telling you not to do that with macros it really leads me to wonder if this is a bad advice thread.

Certain oGCDs like Jeeq mentioned are actually worth macroing since you can press the button and it'll come out on whatever <2>, <focustarget>, or <mouseover> is without having to click multiple times.

There is barely ever, if there even is, any reason to have a macro that is /action <t> or just /action instead of making it come out on a specific preset target or being a Mouseover macro.

[LilimoLimomo]

I guess but with all pros telling you not to do that with macros it really leads me to wonder if this is a bad advice thread.

This is so real, and I feel it.

From both history and life, I've learned that the greatest minds of every generation have always managed to be wrong about something — from thinking the world is flat, to thinking women are incapable of leadership, to thinking that reading books is bad for your mind. And despite standing on the shoulders of giants, our generation is no different.

That being the case, I'd recommend trying to find a balance between looking to others for guidance and thinking critically/doing your own research. Even with the best of intentions, every one of us will misjudge something or miss something sometimes, so look to others to check your work, but also do the work yourself when you genuinely want to know more.

A short anecdote:

Since I first started playing FF14, I've had a disability that has been gradually getting worse, and for that reason I had been using simple macros to play; not the kind that run a sequence of actions one-after another, but the kind that put a few different actions on the same button and let the context of the game determine which one is suitable to use. These macros really helped me to access more of my kit than I would have been able to otherwise. So after a few months when I stumbled across someone saying that macros lowered your APM by clipping your GCD, I was devastated. I tested it out, and they were right; my macros were getting clipped!

I struggled with this knowledge. On one-hand, these macros had served me really well, and I hadn't been experiencing any meaningful problems in the game because of them. But at the same time, a part of me really didn't like knowing that the techniques I was using were sub-optimal; there was a discomfort in that. I didn't know what to do, and I was feeling incredibly torn.

At some point in this turmoil, I stubbornly decided that I would try to make macros work. Part of me figured that this was hopeless, that this was nothing but the futile and final protests of a paradigm at the end of its life. But part of me desperately wanted to hope that I could do it. "I've been programming for most of my life, surely I can find some way to make it work!" I meekly tried to convince myself.

But as it turned out...I did discover something. Eventually, I tried writing the same action repeatedly in a macro, and tests showed that I could press the button a short time before my GCD was ready and that the action would cast when the GCD became available. I can't describe to you my happiness at finding a way to be able to use the macros that made my gaming possible, and without clipping the GCD!*

All of which is to say: if I had just accepted what I had been told at that time, I might not have ever learned the truth. But by getting my hands dirty, by putting in the effort, I was able to to get closer to the truth and feel confident in my knowledge because I had done the science myself.

So if you find yourself unsure of what to believe, I can't recommend a better tie-breaker than rolling up your sleeves and getting the answers yourself. It would probably only take you a few minutes to write a macro that repeats the same line a few times for queuing purposes, and then you can test it in combat and get a feel for when you need to press the button depending on how many repeated lines of queuing the macro has (you can add or remove them to get that feel). The more you play around, the more you'll learn.

And maybe you'll learn that even though macros have this queuing behavior, it's not long enough for you, or it's just not worth the hassle, or whatever. And that's entirely valid! But you'll only truly learn that by giving it a good faith effort.

I hope this helps in some way! ^^


*And over my years of playing, I've further refined my macro techniques to do all sorts of neat things and learned more about how to optimize macros depending on what results the user is after. My stubbornness and curiosity have made macros something that I've developed some level of expertise at, and I genuinely enjoy exploring new kinds of macros, learning more about them, and sharing that knowledge with others.

[ThatQEDguy]

When are you going to show this off in content? I would love to see that.

[Venks]

I'm sorry that you struggle with a disability. Good on you for finding something that works for you. But to say that Macros do not cause a GCD delay or lost casts, as your title suggests, is WRONG. It is a falsehood. Sometimes Macros don't fire. Sometimes you don't press it every 15 frames to make it work. There WILL be inevitable GCD losses for GCD macros. half second buffer > 1/4 second pseudo-buffer.

It isn't inevitable. It's literally down to timing. GCDs only clip if you can't continually hit the correct timing.
Like for sure this can potentially be a skill issue for some. But like personally I speedrun games that require me to consistently do frame perfect inputs over and over again to pull off certain tricks. Like when I'm warmed up I'm not going to miss a single 2/60 window, I can't personally comprehend calling a 15/60 frame window impossible to stay on top of.

[Shurrikhan]

It isn't inevitable. It's literally down to timing. GCDs only clip if you can't continually hit the correct timing.

Which means a far, far larger group will see a net loss than a net gain --and much more significantly unless unable to change between regular keybinds within a GCD's time-- from using macros on all but a few skills (those requiring specific and different targets, which would otherwise require 3 or more button-presses for that single action), as he already pointed out.

Frame-perfect button-presses themselves only gets you within 1/n frames' time of maintaining perfect uptime.

Using a regular skill, on the other hand, gets you to perfect uptime any time you hit the button within a half-second of its being ready.

[LilimoLimomo]

Which means a far, far larger group will see a net loss than a net gain

Setting aside the fact that this statement is conjecture, this doesn't really have anything to do with what I'm talking about. If I said something like "everyone should use macros, they'll improve your play" then you might have a good point here. But I have said nothing close to that. I've explained how macros work, I've gone over both the pros and the cons, and I've suggested that each individual player decide for themselves whether macros will make their situation better or worse. If only a small handful of players find that macros are the better option in some cases for them, then this thread will have served its purpose.

[Shurrikhan]

this doesn't really have anything to do with what I'm talking about.

It was not a reply made to you. Else it would have quoted you, not the poster it replied to. Any use of the third person in my reply to that poster who was in turn replying to someone else will then be about the person they replied to, not an unrelated person -- be they the original poster or otherwise.

My point, to the person I quoted and thought I had there y made clear I was replying to, was that hitting consistently hitting each GCD skill with frame-perfect precision is not only still allows for slight GCD loss (i.e., within that frame's time) but is also far harder for the typical player. It is not an insignificant, let alone nonexistent, cost.

A single "But *I* do frame-perfect speed runs!" anecdote is not a decent refutation of statistically sensible advice.