Quote Originally Posted by Tsurayu View Post
While Macros are generally fine to use, it's often often better to ween yourself off of them, nor never use them to begin with.

For example, the popular Physick/Adlo + Embrace Macro is okay. It essentially gives you a 700 Potency heal spell at all times, which is nice. However, Eos and Selene's Embrace has a longer cooldown than your Physick or Adloquium, so if you constantly force her to cast with you, eventually your spells will fall further and further out of sync. You'll notice this if you try to use this macro immediately after you finish casting the first one, Eos or Selene won't be ready for around another half-second. Continue to spam the macro, and it'll just become even more chaotic. It's a much better to learn to Physick and Adlo while ordering your Faerie to use Physick on the same, or different target, manually. Yes, it takes practice, but will save you a headache once you master it.

Another popular set of macros is targeting (<t> <tt> <ft>) macros to your attacks. Just.. no. Don't do it. If you macro your Bios and Miasma spells, for example, you lose the ability to pre-cast those spells. You know how you cast Bio II and around say... .20 before it finishes you can hit your Miasma button and as soon as Bio II finishes the game automatically registers your Miasma cast? Well, you can't do that with macros because of the different internal sever timings used for macros. Sure, that's not THAT big of a deal, but over the duration of a battle, you will start losing significant DPS. Just learn to quickly switch between an enemy target and an allied target you need to heal and forego the use of targeting macros altogether.

At the end of the day, macros can be useful for certain situations, but you really need to do a lot of playing around with them in order to optimize them. There are many out there that seem useful, but if you really look into the mechanics, they are often a hindrance in the long run.
You make a lot of good points. I agree there are a lot of sub-optimal macros out there and I have also observed many of the same issues (like faerie cooldown being different from character's). However, I have come to a different conclusion, which is to be smart about macros instead of avoiding them.

I'm gonna wager you are probably a PC user. For those of us on PS3/4, switching targets is not so easy. Max efficiency and speed on a controller for targeting is simply not as good as max efficiency and speed on a mouse. For a skilled PC player, such macros can be a loss in efficiency. For controller players, it is a gain and it severely reduces the probability of making mistakes.

I am a big proponent of <t> <f> <tt> macros for Scholar due to the unique targeting requirements of attacking and faerie healing at the same time. As others have noted, faerie auto healing is pretty on the ball under 80%. The main goal of my DPS macro setup is to be able to spam Embrace when the tank is over 80% while DPSing. As you have pointed out, the 0.5 second difference between the scholar's GCD and the faerie's GCD is a challenge. My solution is to keep the tank as main target and use macros for attacks. Keeping the tank targeted also saves precious split seconds if I need to throw out a lustrate or switch to healing.

As for Adlo+Embrace, the range on Embrace is bugged. The max range is 25y and she will only auto-cast within 21y. I have Embrace macro'd into my Physick and Adlo to ensure my Faerie is still healing at long ranges. It also comes in handy for healing people outside my range because she will fly over to heal them before I realize they are out of range.