Getting the fairy to heal a highlighted player.

[EvianEverdeen]

On console. Does anyone know the macro command for a highlighted target? I'm a scholar and I'm trying to create a macro to get my pet to heal the target I have currently highlighted. All of my macros with my own player actions using <t> will heal whoever I have highlighted, but the pet will not heal who I have highlighted, but instead the person who I have hard targeted. For instance I would like to have the main tank hard targeted, but when I move down to highlight another player to heal them, my player heal and pet heal both heal the highlighted person. As stated before, my player heal will function accordingly, while the pet stubbornly will heal whoever I have hard targeted. My macro is the following:

/macroicon "Physick"
/ac "Physick" <t>
/pac "Embrace" <t>

P.S. removing the <t> from Embrace does not fix this either. Thanks for reading.

[Vid]

Coming from PC this almost sounds like a case of Targeting VS Mouse Over, but with the controller being involved. So you mean to tell me you can have some one Hard-Targeted, as in that person shows up on your "Target" UI as a separate window away from the party display (or focus target?), but you can also highlight some one as well? Highlight as in through the party menu, or is there something I'm missing?

Although your main Physick <t> heals the Highlighted target, but your Embrace <t> Heals the Hard-Targeted. It just sounds very odd. As dumb as this may sound, have you tried using Embrace <mo>?

[LoganNinefingers]

@Evian: As you're a controller player, you're probably aware that anytime you use a Player Action on your soft-target, your soft-targeting system will proc, cancel, and focus back to your hard-target.

The issue you're having is that your own skill (Physick in your example) is proccing and then canceling your soft-target, making the next line act on the newly-re-targeted hard-target.

The nice thing is that pet actions don't cancel your soft-target (and I sincerely hope this never changes, as it's a huge part of my pet-microing muscle memory now!), so if you do the pet command first, you'll still be soft-targeted on whoever you selected, then your own action will proc, effectively "using up" your soft-target and popping back to your hard-target.

Simple fix should be to swap the order of commands, i.e.

/macroicon "Physick"
/pac "Embrace" <t>
/ac "Physick" <t>

etc.

Give it a go and see what happens!


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Side note: I don't recommend macroing pet heals in with your own heals at all - there're so many times a DPS or the OT need a very slight top-up and the MT only needs a single heal, at which point I Embrace the DPS/OT and Physick/Adloq the MT - saves over-healing and a whole GCD, even if the fairy heal is effectively cost-less.

My "big heal" button is just hitting q (Embrace) and w (Physick) on keyboard, or RT-A (Physick) and RT-B (Embrace), which takes a negligible amount of extra time over a single keypress.

In general, unless I know I'm gonna want to use an alternative Fairy action during the next global cooldown, I essentially hit Embrace immediately after any of my own GCD-triggering actions, which leaves plenty of time for weaving any off-CD abilities before the GCD rolls around again. If someone other than the MT isn't at 100%, I'll scroll down the party list to them (usually keep people I know will eat a plume just below the MT/OT) which takes less than half a second and Embrace them, otherwise it'll fire on the MT in case they take a little more damage in the meantime.

I find since switching to separating my own heals from Embrace it's much easier to manage the whole party's HP, since when it's lowish damage, we've effectively two heals to a WHM's single heal. Highly recommend trying it out for a bit.

[LoganNinefingers]

@Vid - yeah, if you play using controller (or keyboard without mouse for that matter - yay FFXI control scheme!) the targeting system's very different from the mouse-based one.

To translate for the benefit of any keyboard/mouse players, "Hard-target" is effectively the player you've actually clicked on. You probably just refer to this as your 'target'.
Then "soft-target" is analogous to your moused-over target.
However, the control schemes are rather different from here on.

Using the party menu and clicking Up or Down on D-pad (or whatever the default keyboard keybind to cycle through party members is), you can first click A/X on someone (say the MT in position 2) to make them your clicked-on hard-target, then press Down again to briefly target e.g. the DRG in position 3.
If you don't then click A/X on them, but use an action from your hotbar, the action will proc on the DRG but then you'll snap back to targeting the person you last clicked on. You can also click B/O to cancel soft-target and snap back to your hard-target without doing an action.

It's a really neat system, and makes raid healing much easier than it would be otherwise, as you can throw a single heal out on someone other than the MT without then having to cycle back through the list to the MT for your next heal.

The bitter-sweet benefit/issue here is that both hard- and soft-targets use the <t> placeholder, as you're technically targeting the DRG (albeit reverting to your last hard-target as soon as you fire an action off) rather than mousing over them.
As such, the same hotbar slot serves both purposes (whereas with mouse-targeting, if you have a clicked-on target and have mouse-over on someone else, and want the option to heal either one at a given moment, you need two separate macros), but means if you decide to heal the tank instead of the soft-target you need to hit B/O to cancel first.

[subteraneanbird]

Slight correction to the above: For PS3 the soft-targeting you are referring to can be accessed by macros through <mo>, though it seems to sometimes have issues defaulting <mo> to <t>. <mo> includes not just hovering a physical mouse over a physical person, but any highlighting through UI elements (such as the party list). You may wanna try that out, but again, accuracy seems to suffer a bit for console users.

[LoganNinefingers]

Not surprised that it derps from <mo> to <t> sometimes!

I play on PC and went from keyboard onry to controller as my main playstyle just after 2.1 - only experimented with keyboard & mouse for a brief period so have never used <mo> placeholders in macros myself.

As such, all I can say for sure is that on PC, if you have both a hard- and soft-target and use a macro'd player-cast action with a <t> placeholder, it always procs on your soft-target and then snaps focus back to your hard-target, whereas pet-cast actions do not cancel the soft-target. Thus, changing the order in the OP's macro will work on PC - might not be the case if it prefers <mo> sometimes on consoles.

The OP's macro will work if you don't currently have a hard-target, though, as PC controller behaviour is such that if there isn't a hard-target to snap back to, initiating an action on a soft-target will proc the action and make the soft-target a hard-target instead.

[subteraneanbird]

Yeah it is a bit unfortunate how <mo> misfires sometimes, but I think anyone wanting to use macros in any capacity should be willing to accept the occasional misfire as a trade-off for the overall efficiency boost.

[EvianEverdeen]

Slight correction to the above: For PS3 the soft-targeting you are referring to can be accessed by macros through <mo>, though it seems to sometimes have issues defaulting <mo> to <t>. <mo> includes not just hovering a physical mouse over a physical person, but any highlighting through UI elements (such as the party list). You may wanna try that out, but again, accuracy seems to suffer a bit for console users.

Nope, <mo> definitely does not work inside of a macro on a PS3 using a controller exclusively. Have tested it, the macro doesn't even execute, because there's nothing "moused over".

[EvianEverdeen]

Simple fix should be to swap the order of commands, i.e.

/macroicon "Physick"
/pac "Embrace" <t>
/ac "Physick" <t>

etc.

Give it a go and see what happens!

Side note: I don't recommend macroing pet heals in with your own heals at all - there're so many times a DPS or the OT need a very slight top-up and the MT only needs a single heal, at which point I Embrace the DPS/OT and Physick/Adloq the MT - saves over-healing and a whole GCD, even if the fairy heal is effectively cost-less.

Your code swap worked beautifully and exactly the way I wanted it to work! Thanks! Also, I am liking my Embrace macro's to all of my player actions at the moment, haven't noticed any issues yet, so for now I'm going to stick with it

[A_Magical_Unicorn_Rider]

Wait… you use macros for that? I'm on console and I NEVER use macros. For anything. I've never used macros in any games I've played. I'm not too fond of the "click this and afk" method of playing. Seems too boring.

As far as getting the fairy to heal a highlighted player, just put pet to obey, highlight the target and use the pet heal command. After that, just switch over to your normal hotbars and DPS/heal, etc. that you would normally be doing. The fairy SHOULD be doing what you commanded it to do; if not, then it might be a bug/technical error that you might want to report?