BLM macros

[Zeviand]

Like everyone mentioned, macros are a bad idea since they

[Zeviand]

I'm on my phone and can't edit lol but yeah macros are a bad idea since you lose the ability to queue your next ability, which in turn delays everything enough to affect your dps. As far as rotation goes I always quelling before the pull and try to blizzard 3 as soon as the tank pulls, then I t1, f3, f1 x5, swiftcast flare, convert, f1, b3, t1, b1, f3, repeat. I play with a controller and have no issues mapping all my abilities. I probably wouldn't virus anything besides boss adds since your virus isn't as potent as smn/such and the antibodies debuff could prevent the application of another virus during a critical moment.

[Jamez82]

Lol OP asks for advice and two pages later there's only one person who actually gives advice.

On a side note though, I don't use macros except for one athereal manipulation taking me to player 2 for when I won't be able to targer someone fast enough. So aside from that I can't really offer anything.

Also I use keyboard and mouse, not sure how people can juggle hotbars on a controller.

[Arkenne]

There is one macro I can suggest to you, despite populace's hatred for such:

Aetherial Manipulation to party slot 3 (usually your healer)
Use it when you get hurt and want heals :v
Add a /hug at the end v:

Dont place it in your usual hotbar.

[Garotte14]

Just FYI to anyone that doesnt know this cause I'm seeing alot of people saying party member #3 for aetherial. While this is fine if you have have your tanks first and then healers and DPS. This would put your healer in the #3 spot on 4 man dungeons. But on 8 man content #3 would be another tank. You can actually setup in config which order you want your party list. I prefer to put healers first, then dps and tanks on bottom. With healers first, you can now aetherial manipulation to party member #2 and it's the healer in 4 or 8 man content.

[Arkenne]

Party order

Well, I was suggesting it for the fun of it anyway, I still rather scroll the party list, use Aetherial manually, and hug my healer by hand :v

[Elky]

I use macros for a few things, mostly debuffs and buffs.
Virus/EE
/ac "Virus" <t>
/ac "Virus" <tt>
/ac "Eye for an Eye" <t>
/ac "Eye for an Eye" <tt>
I like this one because I can use it on my scholar and black mage. All it does is cast virus on my target, and EE on my targets target and vice versa. It lets me do whichever job I'm doing without switching targets.

Aetherial Manipulation
/ac "Aetherial Manipulation" <t>
/ac "Aetherial Manipulation" <f>
ports me to my target, or my focused target, I normally focus the healer to get me out of a tight spot. Also lets me finish a cast without switching targets or running.
Apocatastasis
/ac "Apocatastasis" <t>
/ac "Apocatastasis" <tt>
This one again allows me to not have to swap targets if I don't need to. I like to set up all of my macros to take variables into account.

BlizzardIII
/ac "Blizzard III" <t>
/wait 2.5
/ac "Thunder" <t>
Now this is my only damaging macro I use on my Black Mage and may be the most, it casts Thunder right after Blizz allowing me to keep ThunderIII for procs and an extra slot on the bar.
So those are all of my blm macros, thoughts?

[Malevicton]

BlizzardIII
/ac "Blizzard III" <t>
/wait 2.5
/ac "Thunder" <t>

No such thing as wait 2.5. You can enter it but the game rounds up to 3. Add spellspeed into the mix and you're losing around .6-7 seconds every rotation.

[Roxas_Andrade]

I use macros for a few things,
BlizzardIII
/ac "Blizzard III" <t>
/wait 2.5
/ac "Thunder" <t>
[...]
So those are all of my blm macros, thoughts?

No such thing as wait 2.5. You can enter it but the game rounds up to 3. Add spellspeed into the mix and you're losing around .6-7 seconds every rotation.

I don't know about this rounding-up thing. IMO, the game uses the next skill as soon as the other finishes, considering recast of 2.46... Is that a thing?
But I noticed some latency... I had macros for my mudras (#DumbMe, I know) and I noticed that if I let a /wait of 0.7, sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. When I changed it to /wait 0.8, they got better, almost always working... Then I noticed that the cast time is 0.5, and that i'm much faster doing them myself. Only hard at the beginning until you memorize all the combinations...

Elky, now I don't think you should use /wait in macros, they have to be well planned (my exception to swiftcast, wait 1.5, raise, /p raise) or else you may be caught in a situation where you don't want to cast the blizz3, and have to stand there waiting for the thunder to start charging (or not) because you don't have it mapped in another slot...

[m3eansean]

I don't know about this rounding-up thing. IMO, the game uses the next skill as soon as the other finishes, considering recast of 2.46... Is that a thing?.

It rounds up, dev confirmed and player tested. The game only deals in wait times of whole integers with macro commands, due to server delay and latency this is a required practice. During macro commands, the game cannot queue your next action as you are not performing a next action according to the server yet.

When selecting skills manually you can actually press the button at about 75% complete GCD and the game queues that request to happen as soon as the GCD is up. This is implemented to accomodate for variances in player pingtime to the server at any given time, so that it is a smoother experience, should latency increase and the commands still occur as they normally would.

What this means is when you are doing macros with wait 2.5, it is actually wait 3.0, every time without fail. This can be easily tested as well.

When you choose to macro any GCD ability as a dps player, you are absolutely impacting your own performance in a negative way. Adding seconds to your rotation and going noticably slower than a manual player. This results in an enormous dps lost, which again, can be tested quite easily with a target dummy and just doing a macro vs non-macro rotation.

This is a design decision, so that players who can master pressing all the buttons will have a distinct edge. So if you are at all serious about being a good player and pushing your job to the max, then macros for GCD abilities is something you want to avoid.