are macros important or a waste of time

[Edward420allday]

Should I even waste any time with macros? Is there any real perks here? I read one forum that sounded like it was useful and then I read three more that made them sound unnecessary. Please give feedback. Also if needed , I am working on paladin so I could use some good macros to play with.

[Sessurea]

Well on my bard, macros are amazing o-o Makes dpssing on my bard go from faceroll to...um, even more faceroll =D

[Akirakogami]

um... you need macros

you might not need to bind your important spells all together to save space or whatever. However, you need text macros to tell your party what you are doing. You're a PLD so you might want to have one that says "Silence used <se.1>" so that you can remind the other silencer that they are up next.

[Orophin]

They're definitely helpful in certain cases. On SMN I have Garuda's AOE attack bound to most of my offensive abilities. It's nice to have ones that announce when you're using Virus, Eye for an Eye, Benediction, Hallowed Ground, etc.

[Remn]

Macro to notify you party of the skill you using is useful. but macro to queue up you combo is useles (to me anyway). the reason beng is the macro in this game will never be detail enough for you to fire off skill as soon as GCD came up.
Most ppl GCS are something like this 2.45, 2.41 it vary. you cannot make /wait command to fire off with that exact timing, there will be little bit of delay.

[Bixby]

Depends on what content you're in and how quick/comfortable you are with your control scheme and tracking your cooldowns and such.

I would never suggest macros for your rotation combos. Like Remn said, macros can't fit the GCD that closely. They also tend to bug out if you spam them (you can have a three-line macro, and have the 1st line miss and the 2nd line fire if the timing on the GCD splits just right). And it leaves you unable to adapt if you need to delay one move or another for some reason.

Macros for communication are a good idea, but they're really not necessary until you're doing raids or primals. They can be nice for dungeons, but the difference it would make there is pretty minimal, IMO.

Macros for stacking cooldowns or throwing cooldowns in with rotations, or for making targeting easier, it depends on your class and how much space you've got on your bars, how fast you can hit them, how well you can track them otherwise, etc. I used to use a few cooldown combination macros on my Warrior, but I don't anymore. I just don't have trouble tracking my CDs and keeping them on separate buttons. On my White Mage, I use target-of-target macros for my damage spells, because I just hate the process of switching from targets to heal to targets to harm and back.

[Reishi]

As a bard, I macroed Heavy Shot, Bloodletter and Misery's End so that always the most effective one that is off cd triggers without me having to watch the cds seperately. As stated before - even more face roll.
Apart from that song macros are useful so that for example healers don't waste precious time shouting for mana while ballad is already up.
Stun of course. A text saying that I've stunned and 30 seconds after a text that says I can stun again now.

As healer I got all healing spells macroed as mouse-over commands and text bound to raise so the person won't just return to the entry of a dungeon or daydream while I waste swiftcast for them. Swift-raise also a seperate macro. Still thinking about making a macro to tell bards when my mana is low so that they play their ballad and don't forget about their job.

Then there are several tanking macros. Most important for me are provoke and a text to tell the healers that their heals will be more effective for the next seconds.

[givemeraptors]

I only use Macros for SCH fairy management.

[Lestrade]

Macros are awesome for crafting.

Macros are handy for communication purposes when tackling content that requires coordination.

Elsewhere.. macro usage is highly subjective. They can help or hinder you depending on your job and ability to create proper macros to benefit your playstyle.

For my PLD I use 2 macros ( other then provoke and silence announce):

/enemysign attack1 <t>
/ac "Target Forward"
/wait 1
/enemysign attack2 <t>

It works if you don't use targeting f2ilters (default setting).

/macroicon "Circle of Scorn"
/ac "Circle of Scorn" <me>
/ac Flash <me>

Neither of these saves me any space. I keep both Flash and <attack1> on my bars and use them as needed. These macros are mostly for lazy dungeon crawling in DR.

[PetiteMalFleur]

I knew another bard who used macros to bind all his OCD skills to his GCD skills. He kept missing silences during turn 2 and venting about lag. I asked him to remove all his macros and he was miraculously able to hit every silence after that. Binding skills supposedly nerfs dps potential but keep in mind also the risk of missing silences in later content and make changes to your hotbar accordingly.