BRD macro

[Drakkur]

First of all, macros are fine, mashing your buttons like a maniac is not. To minimize clipping you can actually feign activation of the macro, this takes skill and attention. For example, you use SS > BL > WB > Buff > VB > Buff > HS > OMG PROC ON RoB 1 SECOND BEFORE MY GCD IS UP WHAT SHALL I EVER DO????
pause
take a breath
just tap the next damaging GCD ability so it activates without activating the oGCD ability BL...

It takes a ton of practice and tricking your brain not to button mash, but you will become a better player and much more efficient.
I think maybe once in 100-200 GCDs I'll mess up and delay myself 1 second.

[Satsui]

First of all, macros are fine, mashing your buttons like a maniac is not.

It takes a ton of practice and tricking your brain not to button mash, but you will become a better player and much more efficient.
I think maybe once in 100-200 GCDs I'll mess up and delay myself 1 second.

Except you are slowing down your GCD's by using macros (because you can't queue macros for attacks). Therefore it is a DPS loss to use macros.

This is easy to test. Make a macro that just contains Heavy Shot and go shoot a dummy and count how many heavy shots you fire off in 5 minutes. Do the same test with just the base ability Heavy Shot (no macro) and you will fire more shots in those 5 minutes. You should also immediately notice a difference in how fast they are firing. A bard friend and I tested extensively and noticed that around every 5-6 GCD's I would lap him and gain an entire Heavy Shot GCD when I was using the base ability and he was using a macro.

[Drakkur]

A bard friend and I tested extensively and noticed that around every 5-6 GCD's I would lap him and gain an entire Heavy Shot GCD when I was using the base ability and he was using a macro.

I just did 6 1 min tests (don't have time to do 6 5 minute tests), because you saying "5-6 GCDs you gain an extra" should be show in a 1 minute test. For me, the results were incredibly insignificant. At ~58-58.5 I was hitting HS #24 with the macro, at ~59.5 I was hitting HS #25 without the macro. These #s were consistent whether I used the parsers built in timer or my iphone's stop watch/timer.
The grossly exaggerated bonus you pointed out, definitely does not exist. I will give you that I gained 1.5 seconds on my GCD over 1 min, in the context of practicality in raids, its minute.
For what its worth I use a mechanical keyboard with cherry MX red switches.
Reasons why you should only do test on one BRD:
Human error and latency to the server.