How To Train Your Faerie: A Comprehensive Guide

[Jeckyl_Tesla]

Sounds like the cooldown interrupt macro is the one you want.

I have the interrupt macro for my cooldowns, and that works perfectly. The queue macro doesn't seem to do anything for me. As in, it doesn't even cast Embrace when I press it and Eos is doing nothing. Maybe I'm not understanding it's use?

[giantslayer]

New updates for HEAVENSWARD. I put a note at the beginning of the guide and will eventually get around to updating everything else.

Interrupt macros now work properly on all cool down skills again.

Faerie range and auto-heal range are still wrong.

Selene's speed buffs have been replaced with new skills:
- Fey Caress: sounds like a an area Leeches/Esuna. Have not had a chance to test it.
- Fey Wind: a 3% buff to "attack speed." I tested this and it affects healing as well as attack spells. Presumably, it affects weapon skills as well. For me, it reduced GCD time from 2.44 seconds to 2.37 seconds. That is pretty modest compared to what we used to have, so you can call it a nerf.

[Blitzball]

Has anyone else been having issues with the interrupt macro:

/pac Steady
/pac Guard
/pac Whatever ability

For some reason since 2.5 these no longer work for me as well as they did before. If somebody is below the hp threshold for auto-embrace she'll switch stances and just cast embrace rather than the command I tell her to cast. Anyone else having this trouble? Or is it just me? Any ideas on a fix too?

[Manuka]

Anyone else having this trouble? Or is it just me? Any ideas on a fix too?

Yup, the fairies underwent a stealth change to their AI in 2.5. As of now fairy abilities will be refunded if they are interrupted prematurely. Really good if Whispering Dawn gets interrupted, but terrible for the embrace interrupt macros. As it is now whenever you use those macros while people are under 80% her embrace gets refunded an she instantly starts casting again. From my experience it's basically a 50/50 whether you can sneak the action in-between the auto-embraces.

That said not all is bad news, the fairies now seem to be able to queue their CD's while auto-embracing. From what I've tested if multiple people are under 80% and you tap say, Fey Illum, she will finish embrace, immediately cast FI and then go back to auto-embracing. Warning though this only seems to apply to Embrace's done by the AI, if you manually click embrace then tap FI it won't queue up.

[giantslayer]

Yup, the fairies underwent a stealth change to their AI in 2.5.

Thank you so much for the info! I have spent most of my time crafting since 2.5 but have noticed the faerie's behavior seemed off. On the bright side, it sounds like they may have fixed the underlying problems most of my guide spends addressing. I may have a lot of work ahead of me to test things and rewrite this guide. :/

P.S. Thank you, Manuka. The best part of my guide (interrupt macros) I learned from you originally.

[giantslayer]

Preliminary test results:
Note that all tests were performed with me below 80% hp.
- Auto-cast range still gimped. Tested at 20y today. Not sure if previous 25 was wrong, it changed, or my 20 is now wrong. :/ The important thing is it still isn't 30.
- Embrace and Whispering Dawn get their cooldowns refunded when interrupted.
- If Embrace is auto-cast, her other 3 abilities can now queue (yay!).
- If Embrace is manual-cast, there is still no queue.
- WD Interrupt macro still works as it did before.
- Fey Illum and Cov interrupt macros currently result in her immediately recasting embrace and doing the ability afterwards utilizing the new queue. Same results using Heel as the interrupt command. These macros are now counterproductive, except in the case of interrupting a manual cast. My ghetto queue macros are now preferred because they can ensure an eventual casting of Cov/Illum in a manual Embrace situation while still utilizing the new queue in an auto-cast situation.

Guess my guide isn't as obsolete as I was hoping it would be. The only change in my recommendations is to utilize a queue macro for Illum and Cov instead of an interrupt.

[Manuka]

-snip-

No prob and great guide btw

Also after spamming WoD and doing coil for the week I would personally advise against using the interrupt macros. When testing them on myself they seemed to work fine however in high activity places like in dungeons an raids they can occasionally become sticky and unresponsive (ie. no skill follow-up after auto-embrace). My assumption is that with the new queue feature both actions are now being registered server-side simultaneously. This is problematic since the reason why the interrupt macros worked so well before is that ever since 2.1 pet stance/movement actions were moved client side while the abilities remained server-side. This effectively placed a 'pseudo-wait' in between both actions since Steady/Guard/Stay would be registered at button press while the fairy action would be sent, registered then performed on the next server cycle. But now with the queue I believe that pseudo-wait is gone which means it's easy for multi-lines macros with no waits to get 'scrambled' en route when a lot of stuff is going down on-screen. I think this is resulting in an action queuing to an embrace that is immediately getting busted by stance-swap followed by a new auto-embrace with nothing queued to it. This can inevitably lead to very annoying situations at times lol

I'm gonna play around with different macro/ un-macro'd fairy setups in this week an see how they fare~

[DarkerOrange]

So is there a general consensus that the guard/steady interrupt macros should be dropped now? I've still been using mine and haven't had any issues yet, but I'm interested to know what other people think.

[Blitzball]

I've resorted back to just manually clicking the abilities once I see her finish a cast. I think i'll just stick with this until somebody smarter than me finds a macro that works haha

[giantslayer]

So is there a general consensus that the guard/steady interrupt macros should be dropped now? I've still been using mine and haven't had any issues yet, but I'm interested to know what other people think.

For Fey Covenant and Illumination, drop the interrupt macros. I recommend using a queue macro instead.

Example:
/macroicon “Fey Covenant” pet “Eos”
/pac “Fey Covenant”
/wait
/pac “Fey Covenant”
/wait
/pac “Fey Covenant”

For Whispering Dawn, interrupt macros still work and are recommended.

I've resorted back to just manually clicking the abilities once I see her finish a cast. I think i'll just stick with this until somebody smarter than me finds a macro that works haha

Interrupting Cov and Illum is a lost cause now. Using my queue macro will ensure the ability goes off even if you hit the button while Eos is casting. It just won't interrupt her.