Macros are a useful little feature in FFXIV that you can use to truncate things that you would ordinarily need to sift through multiple menus for down into the push of a single hotkey. It’s also good for healers who want to cast Raise and simultaneously ask the fallen player to stop dying because that really is quite annoying.
In order to create a macro, you must first go into the system tab in the menu and scroll down to User Macros. You will find this screen here.
The game has provided a couple example macros already. You can edit over those, as they aren’t particularly useful. Today I’m going to be making a macro to initiate a ready check.
First, I’m going to want to change the icon it will use on my hotkey bar. I’ve chosen the attack icon, but really you can choose whichever one you want.
Next, we’re going to want to go into the meat of the macro. If you don’t know what the command you’re looking for is, there is a helpful list in the bottom right corner of the screen. Scroll through until you find the one you need. In this case, I need “/readycheck”.
You can even save yourself the time of writing the command into the box yourself by left-clicking or pressing Square on your controller.
Now, since a popular use of macros is to say something in the party chat window while using abilities, let’s go over that. It’s actually very simple. Just type in “/p” followed by what you want to say. In this case, I’ve written “/p Is everyone ready?”
Finally, we go up and give our macro a title. For this one, I’ve chosen “Ready Capitalism” because apparently, that’s what my PS4 thinks I wanted to say.
And that’s it. We have successfully written a macro that will initiate a ready check when used.
There are many other ways you can utilize macros. While the most popular ones are healers scolding you for dying or Dark Knights taking the roleplaying portion of the MMORPG acronym way too seriously, you can also have it switch in and out hotkey configurations for you.
Say, for example, you are a higher level healer. While it’s standard practice to cast protect at the beginning of the dungeon, ideally that’s a spell you only have to cast once. After that initial cast, it’s taking up a class ability slot that could be better spent on Swiftcast or Lucid Dreaming.
You can turn abilities on and off by using the shortcut “/aaction [ability] [on/off]”
So, if I, a Monk main, wanted to have access to Crutch in a pinch but find Bloodbath to be more generally useful, I could write a macro like this:
Another good use of macros is if you have too many hotkeys to keep track of, and need a way to switch hotbars on the fly. This would be especially helpful for Scholars and Summoners who need to keep track of their hotkeys as well as their pets’. To make a macro that can switch hotbars you only need to type in:
Or, if you were so inclined, you could write your entire rotation in macros. I would not recommend this. Using macros for your rotation will put your macros on macro time and not the cooldown timer the skills would use if you used them the regular way. It's much slower than just pressing the buttons by yourself. It’ll tank your DPS, but if you really want to here’s an example.
Note the quotation marks around the ability names. While you can get away without them for abilities that have one-word names, such as Bootshine, the game will not recognize abilities of two or more words without the quotation marks.
So, if you wanted to write a good raise macro, you would write
In order to create a macro, you must first go into the system tab in the menu and scroll down to User Macros. You will find this screen here.
The game has provided a couple example macros already. You can edit over those, as they aren’t particularly useful. Today I’m going to be making a macro to initiate a ready check.
First, I’m going to want to change the icon it will use on my hotkey bar. I’ve chosen the attack icon, but really you can choose whichever one you want.
Next, we’re going to want to go into the meat of the macro. If you don’t know what the command you’re looking for is, there is a helpful list in the bottom right corner of the screen. Scroll through until you find the one you need. In this case, I need “/readycheck”.
You can even save yourself the time of writing the command into the box yourself by left-clicking or pressing Square on your controller.
Now, since a popular use of macros is to say something in the party chat window while using abilities, let’s go over that. It’s actually very simple. Just type in “/p” followed by what you want to say. In this case, I’ve written “/p Is everyone ready?”
Finally, we go up and give our macro a title. For this one, I’ve chosen “Ready Capitalism” because apparently, that’s what my PS4 thinks I wanted to say.
And that’s it. We have successfully written a macro that will initiate a ready check when used.
Other Useful Examples
There are many other ways you can utilize macros. While the most popular ones are healers scolding you for dying or Dark Knights taking the roleplaying portion of the MMORPG acronym way too seriously, you can also have it switch in and out hotkey configurations for you.
Say, for example, you are a higher level healer. While it’s standard practice to cast protect at the beginning of the dungeon, ideally that’s a spell you only have to cast once. After that initial cast, it’s taking up a class ability slot that could be better spent on Swiftcast or Lucid Dreaming.
You can turn abilities on and off by using the shortcut “/aaction [ability] [on/off]”
So, if I, a Monk main, wanted to have access to Crutch in a pinch but find Bloodbath to be more generally useful, I could write a macro like this:
Another good use of macros is if you have too many hotkeys to keep track of, and need a way to switch hotbars on the fly. This would be especially helpful for Scholars and Summoners who need to keep track of their hotkeys as well as their pets’. To make a macro that can switch hotbars you only need to type in:
Or, if you were so inclined, you could write your entire rotation in macros. I would not recommend this. Using macros for your rotation will put your macros on macro time and not the cooldown timer the skills would use if you used them the regular way. It's much slower than just pressing the buttons by yourself. It’ll tank your DPS, but if you really want to here’s an example.
Note the quotation marks around the ability names. While you can get away without them for abilities that have one-word names, such as Bootshine, the game will not recognize abilities of two or more words without the quotation marks.
So, if you wanted to write a good raise macro, you would write
