Questions about Machinist Macros

[Jonnykit]

Hello there my fellow Adventurers. I played MCH a little back in HW but didn't like much, but I picked it back up recently cause I've gotten my Main where I want it for the next patch and wanted to play something else for a bit while I waited. As I got higher level on MCH the more micro management came into play with wildfire phase, hot shot buff, heat gauge etc.

So to help me a bit I thought I make some macros for all the weaponskills that include all the ogcd attack abilites. Just to give an example of one of my marcos:

/micon "Split Shot"
/ac "Split Shot" <t>
/ac "Heartbreak" <t>
/ac "Gauss Round" <t>
/ac "Ricochet"<t>

So my questions to the community today is this. Do you know if its better this way or does it harm your dps output? Is there a better way to do the macro like say put the weaponskill at the bottom of the list?

[HyoMinPark]

It's the general opinion that using macros on battle jobs like what you've laid out in the OP is suboptimal, and it is advised against using them. So I would advise you against using these macros for MCH.

Your macro is also a triple-weave of oGCDs, which means you will clip your next GCD when you use it. And that's not a good thing to do. You also will not be able to watch the cooldowns for the individual abilities either; I don't know about you, but I prefer to keep an eye out on all my cooldown timers for oGCDs.

The only macros that people use for battle jobs are usually Ground AOE macros (<t>); macros for things like Shadewalker, Smookescreen, Nature's Minne, and Palisade (specific target in party list or <tt>); Raise macros; macros to switch out cross-role abilities (at least until Tuesday); and select few mouse-over macros for certain healer spells and things like Dragon Sight. Macros like the one in your OP are not typically used.

[Jonnykit]

Okay, how bout changing it up a bit. Say, on my split shot just have heartbreak, slug have gauss round, and clean with ricochet? I wanna keep all these on spreadshot because I'm only using that one for AoEs. I knew going into this that it probably won't get me to where I would need to be for fresh Savage content and maybe not even after if I tried to make up for the loss thru gear progression with weekly token items. I think we got lucky a bit with the recast timers in that you won't have ricochet up til your next wildfire anyways and Gauss is only a 15s so If I use it right before wildfire It'll be back up near the end when I'm doing my 3rd slug shot which is usually around the 1 sec left on the timer for wildfire. What do you think?

[HyoMinPark]

I still advocate against using macros. They won't queue like normal skills, and you risk them not going off properly in any content. So I would suggest not macroing at all. This isn't coming from a raider perspective; general battle content is just not designed for macros to be used on most DPS jobs and them be efficient.

[Kitfox]

Macros like that take all control away from you making it impossible to do the rotation correctly so I would strongly advice against them. MCH rotation is very rigid and needs to be carefully planned and carried out. Every ogcd has a specific spot where you want to use it and you'll want full control over the timing instead of baking them into gcds, especially not into random procs like Slug and Clean Shot. Macroing gcd abilities also makes them unqueueable which means it'll introduce micro delays to all of your normal gcds causing further dps losses.

The only macros you should use on MCH are a Palisade targeting macro (<tt> Target's Target, <mo> Mouse-over) and possibly a turret placing macro (<me> to place Rook on your location without manual targeting, <t> to place Bishop on target) though you should still keep manual placement available for special circumstances.