SCH/pet really needs work (battle macros in general)

[Squa]

Yes, in 2.1 they released the ability for pet macros. The intention was, basically for every SCH to macro their heals to include /petattack <target> so you double heal. This is to make up for poor SCH pet AI in general. It is unclear if SE is unable to program an effect or helpful pet, or if they purposely make it bad AI to add a difficulty and challenge for effective users.

Here however is the problem. With the new pet macro system, basically SCH just macro /pac Embrace <t> to everything, so essentially the pet is just empowering their skills a bit. There are problems with this 1) pet cooldown is 3 sec, and your own cooldown is at most 2.5 sec. So they can't be cast in sync, so macro system seems like a failure here unless you are just supposed to non-stop jam keys as the 2 skills will almost always be out of sync. 2) this is boring, since you are basically having your pet copy everything you do it makes you wonder why you even have a pet if you have have to order it to do everything 3) Macro system in this game is broken, so if you do setup a /pac macro to your skills, you will lose your own healing efficiency, since when a skill is under a macro, it will not queue with FFXIV. So cast your macro .01 seconds before the previous cast is up, and it will be ineffective. So essentially everytime you cast a skill that is under a macro, you are losing at minimum .01 seconds, and I would guess an average of .3s for good reaction people. With a non-macro skill (a pure skill), the game queues it I think up to .5 seconds before the previous skill is done casting. So simple cast the skill sometime near the end of the current cast, and the next one will cast immediately with no delays. The problem is you just lost 12% of your healing output by having .3 s wasted each cast by using a macro, it would be like the system being on a 2.8GCD (instead of 2.5 without spell speed). So, it seems the macro system is quite broken in this game, for in combat actions or things besides crafting or automatic buffing before battles should not be used at all.

Ok, so don't use macros or pet macros. OK, well the pet UI is pretty horrible in this game. Your pet will wander around, if there is a target under 70% health, it may wander a bit, cast a heal, walk around a bit, look for another target, maybe heal it, maybe reposition itself. SCH pet has been proven to be inefficient at healing unless you manually spam the action constantly, or possibly put the pet on "place" setting. It is assumed, since the pet AI has less things to do on place setting, it will heal more often closer to every GCD. 2 party members take slight damage? It blows its load and casts your 1/2 minute cooldowns immediately. Since you always wanna use Rouse + Whisper Dawn combo as a SCH, this make its basically impossible to use the normal pet AI as it is so bad no one should ever use it (but yet it is still the default setting everything, even if your pet dies and needs to be rezzed)

So, it seems like there is a lot of issues here. Battle macros in general being bad, SCH pet AI being bad, SCH pet macros not fun just having your pet copy everything you do, and difficult to even work correctly due to different GCD.

It just seems the system is contradictory or poorly implemented relying on macros, but macros will make your gameplay worse.


EDIT: Instead of just complaining, I will add in some solutions that I see possible
-Improve pet UI. Make each pet ability to be toggled 'autocast'
-Improve pet UI. Make pet actually heal targets at 70% health and below, right now it just wanders a lot, heals sometimes, and probably 2 seconds between healing cast once the previous heal is over. So make the pet act faster, if it is purposely "confused" as a tactic to not make the pet overpowered or forcing the SCH to use macros or manually cast heals, then simply lower the healing amount from 300 to preserve 'balance.' If a target is low health, it should heal it constantly instead of wandering around, even using 'place' command it seems to take the pet a lot of time to find 'new' targets that need to be healed and actually figure out what it should do.
-Improve pet UI. Make Whispering Dawn only cast by Eos when at least 3 party members are under 70% health at the same time. Increase the distance, as right now even when manually cast, the range is low and often party members will be outside of range of heal. Since it has a 1 minute cooldown its quite unfortunate if this does happen with an already weak AOE healing class to begin with.
-Improve battle macros: Making skills in macros be able to queue just as normal skills not inside a macro will make macros actually useful in battle, instead of hindering your casts by approximately 10% with macro delay currently implemented.