Are macros necessary?

[Thunda_Cat_SMASH]

Personally, I only use macros for provoke, Raise, Eye for am Eye, Virus, and Collective Unconscious. Plez don't cleanse my pacification! My arms are tired after triple fell cleaving, I need a quick breather to relax.

[nexas506]

Definitely helpful, like having one for provoke and reviving to better communicate what you're doing to your co healer /tank.
But my favorite has to be the one where you can make a ground targeted AOE can't directly on your target.
I also haven for my bard that lets me hear a sound effect when its time to reapply my DOTS.

[AskaRay]

As a bard, I like certain Berserk macros...the simple ones letting me know you've used it.

That's all I need.

I do not need fifty countdowns. You don't need to time it. The Warden's Paean buff lasts for 45 seconds and Berserk is active for like...what...20? I sing that shit as soon as Berserk is up. No need for a countdown for when it disappears; it's too late then, I won't care.

[Destous]

For tanks and DPS, they're hardly ever worth the effort. Healers should have macros for focus target and mouseover healing.

Outside of skill based macros, macros that have chat alerts built into them are very useful; such as a WAR with a macro on berserk to let the WHM know they'll need an esuna soon.

[Arduno]

I use a couple of macros as a bard
They are life! :O

[Alkimi]

Certain abilities I have as mouse over macros, Apocatastasis, Aetherial Manipulation, Goad and Warden's Peaean are a few examples where I prefer to just use macros rather than have to manually select the targets to use them on.

[Dzian]

Some can be incredibly useful. Not really necessary though.

For example my ninja has a macro
/ac shade walker <2> which will always put it on the tank so they get the enmity boost.

Bard you can macro flaming arrow to <t> so it will always centre it around your current target. Without having to manually place it.

My scholar has summon macros that swap pet commands. So when I summon eos L2 square is whispering dawn. When I summon serene l2 square is changed to fey wind for example.

Then simple macros like /target <f> or <attack1> can be really helpful.

Or can't remember who told me this. But macroing /levelsync on to your mount. Is really nice for fates.

[Alistaire]

Yeah, it's the /party line announcing you're doing these things that isn't so useful. Ground targets are great, it actually made freeze useful in big pulls that you wouldn't want to get in range to bliz 2, as well as faster casting of all the others.

And yeah for controller some are necessary for the limited space issues. That's more of a sign of how bad controllers are for this game rather than macros being good though.