Are macros necessary?

[Lambdafish]

You shouldn't be stopping what you're doing to esuna a pacification. That's the main reason.

Destous didn't ask for that, they are saying that the berserk macro is communication, it's as simple as that. Berserk is the only skill in the game that gives a debuff, which means that it is the only debuff in the game that can be controlled.

As a healer, that is valuable information, and knowing exactly when a debuff goes up is valuable for both healers and bards, meaning that they can plan ahead, and prepare for the debuff, and heal the party optimally. Also, you should be stopping what you are doing to cleanse a pacifism if it is currently the highest priority action of the time, and knowing when it is coming in advance helps in making sure that the higher priority tasks are dealt with before it goes off.

Similar macros I have seen to the berserk macro: provoke, hallowed ground, virus, eye for an eye, living dead. All of these skills having shout outs makes others very aware of what actions you have taken, and allows them to be worked around

[Alistaire]

As a healer, that is valuable information, and knowing exactly when a debuff goes up is valuable for both healers and bards, meaning that they can plan ahead, and prepare for the debuff, and heal the party optimally. Also, you should be stopping what you are doing to cleanse a pacifism if it is currently the highest priority action of the time, and knowing when it is coming in advance helps in making sure that the higher priority tasks are dealt with before it goes off.

Similar macros I have seen to the berserk macro: provoke, hallowed ground, virus, eye for an eye, living dead....

That's the thing though, it's not valuable information. If you react to that you're being a bad healer, both for your sake and the warrior's. That whole topic has been beaten to death. You're either a healer sitting there doing nothing (bad), or you stop dps'ing to cleanse it (bad), or you stop healing to cleanse it (also bad).

Virus and eye for an eye as macros have their place because you don't want 2 people overlapping it. Same goes for a raise macro. Provoke is iffy, I find it's something used infrequently enough to not be a bother but when it comes down to it, a macro for that is unnecessary and nobody's going to change what they were doing because of it. Same for tank's ultimate defense moves. As a healer I'm going to see when a tank uses those.

I will say though, that I considered going that route on WAR and went through the abilities it'd be "useful for others to know to work around." But then it turned out the list included convalescence, vengeance, inner beast, provoke, holmgang, berserk, and it's just too much spam, combined with the fact that the people who would react to those have full capability to see when you've used them without the spam.

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.

That's fine for anything off gcd really. Also ground target actions. Though when you start adding /p lines to those it can be annoying, and is almost never needed.