Gambit System - an alternative idea to combat macros

[TheDustyOne]

This is an idea I've had, mostly out of frustration with the games current macro system and to help the dev team with an official alternative to some add-ons. Here's a relatively simple-sounding macro for Astrologian.

/ac "Play" <mo>
/ac "Play"
/ac "Draw"

In theory this would allow you to either play a card on whoever is being moused over, or play that card on yourself if no one is moused over, or draw a new card if there's no card to play, in practice this doesn't work as intended a lot of the time and has a few issues.

Chief among these issues is lack of skill queueing, if an action can't be used while the macro is running, it'll skip to the next line. With the above macro this could either not do anything as you remain in animation lock, end up playing a card on yourself despite intending to use it on mouseover, or draw another card and overwrite your current card.

The idea behind this gambit system is to have a dedicated system where you can bind to a button up to 3 skills with an appropriate target, and will choose the first viable skill within that gambit. Below is an example, excuse my poor GIMP skills.



If I were to use this gambit, the game would check to see if I could use Intervention on the target, if I can't it'll then check to see if I can use it on whoever is moused over, if that's not available either then it'll try to use Sheltron on myself. So long as one of these skills is viable, the game will then queue that skill to be used on the appropriate target.

There are potential problems with this though, one problem I could see would be Bard using a gambit like;
Refulgent Arrow > Target
Burst Shot > Target
to effectively automate Refulgent procs. Red Mage could also have similar issues with Verstone and Verfire procs, as well as Dancer with their weaponskill procs.

If the above issue is too much of a problem, then we could simplify it to only be for one skill with up to 3 different target gambits like in this example, again excuse my poor GIMP skills.



Here, when I use Intervention it'll first see if it can be used on whoever is moused over, or if that doesn't work, it'll try going for the target of my target, before finally trying to use it on party member 2.

The primary idea behind the system is to give a little more control and quality of life over how skills can be used in combat, it would certainly make playing cards on Astro less painful if I didn't have to rely on clunky macros or constantly have to retarget.

Thoughts?

[TheDustyOne]

Giving a quick bump, don't mind me.

[Darthgummibear]

Interesting idea from an operational standpoint, I wonder how well it would work with the game's server ticks.