It's not 1 second. It's .6 seconds per your example. I understand that the real time execution is 3 seconds. I didn't know that prior to this discussion, but if you read up a few posts, you will see that I totally understand that issue. People are making a big enough deal about how much time .5 seconds is, let's not add to the burden for the sake of discussion. I already disclaimed I haven't tanked end-game, and that I would need to assess my views at that point in time. I guess my question for you is have you utilized efficiently placed macros and know first-hand they don't work, or are you going off of the assumptions from your math which presumes perfect execution of abilities? In your example, since those are the threat-building abilities, it wouldn't be a huge deal to remove that wait macro. That only adds one button to the rotation. That's a petty thing to debate, but if it can be proven that the lag does not affect overall tanking abilities, then using the macros should not be dismissed entirely based off of math. I mean, that's the whole point of these discussions, right? And personally, I don't think there should be a penalty for using macros. It's not feasible for someone to do a:
heavy swing
skull sunder
butcher block
heavy swing
skull sunder
butcher block
repeating macro. That would be absolutely inefficient since a number of skills and abilities one would need to use could interrupt that chain. I guess that would be my ultimate focus: having the penalty removed. I mean, in a few patches/XPs, we're going to pick up several more abilities. I, personally, would not fare well having to keybind every single ability to its own button. Macros help me clean up my skills so that I can perform efficiently. I will continue to push this limit until I can see a definitive drop in my performance which renders macros a poor choice. Until that point in time, I think the discussion is really sticking to the highly speculative realm of thought.
And to clarify one other thing, my rotation for your example is manual heavy swing, manual skull sunder macro that then realizes the .6 second lag on the butcher's block. That makes a difference in the discussion, too.