Fists of the Wind

So, the mechanic in question is Idyllic Dream. It is a nine-stage part of the fight which has a puzzle mechanic that needs to be solved, multiple memory games, and two different maps that need to be navigated.

Do not worry if you do not understand Idyllic Dream, do not want to, and will not be going into this savage fight. I only explain it to demonstrate the problem that my macro setup is attempting to solve, but you don't need to know the Idyllic Dream mechanic to understand what the macros do.

(in fact, I do not explain Idyllic Dream in near enough detail here to get you through the fight. There are better resources for that.)

To give you an idea of what you have to deal with, in stage 1, you are on map one. At this point, four 'characters' will start to spawn in, either all on the compass cardinal directions (N-E-W-S) or on the four intercardinal directions (NW,NE,SE,SW). You will need to specifically remember whether it was the cardinal or intercardinal 'characters' spawning in first, apply that knowledge in stage 7, and then again in stage 9.

IN THE SAME STAGE, those 'characters' spawning in? There will be eight of them, each of them being a clone of someone in the raid. You need to identify which one is your clone, and where that clone is well determines what debuff you need to pick up in stage 3. Whatever debuff you retrieve will then resolve in stage 5, and it will resolve again in either stage 7 or 9, depending on what happens in stage 3.

All of this while you are still needing to endure some pretty heavy damage output from the boss, and you still need to be doing your damage rotation, because you have to kill the boss before enrage.

Too much to keep track of. Enter: the macro system. Many players use macros to push messages to chat to help them keep track of the memory game portion of the mechanic. Those macros are fairly straightforward, and often will just be something like this:

/e North Clone sides safe

Which sends a message to their chat window, giving them something they can read back later.

It can get a bit muddled, though, because when you learn something and when you need to apply that knowledge does not occur in a nice 1-2-3 order. Instead you learn something in stage 1 but you do not need to apply it until stage 7, but stage 2 happens first and what you learn there has to be applied in stage 4, so while you are sending messages to chat as you learn things, applying what you learned is happening in a different order, and you have to sort it out all on the fly, and it's a mess.

Most players settle on something like this, using the command panel.

Don't worry if you don't understand this, just know that this is a one-stop shop for the macros any M12S player might need.

As a controller player, though, I found opening the command panel and hunting for the exact button I needed to be a bit awkward. Also, once I've hit a specific macro, I then still need to be able to rapidly sort through my chat log to figure out which message I would need for the next mechanic.

Which I got pretty good at!

But also, I decided that I could do better.

First, enter the swap macro. Using the swap macro allowed me to, with a single controller button click, swap out my damage hotbar with my macro hotbar. I could then click which macro I needed. Since a macro can hold multiple commands, the macro would update my chat, would perform a bit of magic which we'll get to in a moment, and it also contained the same bit of macro commands as the swap macro. So as soon as I pushed what I needed, my combat hotbar returned immediately.

This is the swapped control bar

You will notice it has many of the same buttons as the command panel does. Here's an example of one of the macros buttons, in this case, the big "+" one off on the left side

/e Cardinals First /hotbar copy acn 1 share 6 /crosshotbar copy pld 1 gla 2 /crosshotbar copy gla 1 pld 1 /crosshotbar copy gla 2 gla 1

So the first line, "/e Cardinals First" displays a nice message in chat for me to read back later. The last three lines are just the swap macro commands, they return my cross hotbar to its combat state.

That second line, though. That one has the magic.

But let's back up a bit.

If you've read the swap macro page (you should. that one's still in the realm of sanity. And may actually be useful to people who are not deeply unwell), you may remember that we used the class hotbars as basically spares. Since they shouldn't be in use, we can empty them, fill them with what we want and/or need, and use them for our purposes.

For this, I needed spares. Specifically, for Idyllic Dream, I needed 4 ACN hotbars, 4 THM hotbars, and 2 PGL hotbars to store what I needed, as well as a single ROG hotbar that I kept empty on purpose for reasons I'll get into later.

On top of that, I also used shared hotbars 5 through 9. An earlier version of this system also used shared hotbar 10, but I realised that I could get away without using it by re-using hotbar 8. This works because of the sequence of how things happen and resolve in Idyllic Dream, but let's not worry about that.

Here, allow me to tempt you. Here is an example end state of what I am going for.

What the hell, you might rightfully ask. What the hell indeed.

Let's start with the static parts of this display. Hotbar 5 never changes. Those are empty macro buttons, and I only used them so I could change their icons to the numbers that are used. I alternate colours for two reasons. The first is it makes it easier to differentiate them on the fly. The other reason is they tell me whether I am on map 1 or map 2 - Idyllic Dream alternates what map you're fighting on throughout the fight, and so the odd stages are on one map, and I used blue numbers with gold backgrounds for them. The even ones are on the other map, and those use the gold numbers with blue backgrounds.

The macros in share hotbar 5, again, do nothing. They're just there to label which stage of the Idyllic Dream mechanic I'm in. This is how we get started, and this is what it will look like.

Hotbars 6 through 9, however, are where the magic happens.

If you remember, up above, I mentioned that one of the things that happens in stage 1 of idyllic dream is that 'characters' start spawning in, four at a time, starting on either the cardinal positions or intercardinal positions. That is one thing I need to know, and I need to remember it again later for stage 7 and stage 9.

So if we revisit the "+" macro from earlier (here it is again):

/e Cardinals First /hotbar copy acn 1 share 6 /crosshotbar copy pld 1 gla 2 /crosshotbar copy gla 1 pld 1 /crosshotbar copy gla 2 gla 1

I already explained most of it above, but what we're going to talk about now is line 2, where I keep saying the magic happens. What it's doing is copying whatever is in hotbar ACN 1 and putting it into shared hotbar 6. The magic? Well, long before I got in the fight and in between gposing my character, I set up ACN bars 1 and 2.

First, I emptied them out, making them fresh and clean.

Then, I put some fake buttons in them. A "+" sign or a "x" sign in position one, the same sign in position 7, and then the other sign in position 9.

This is because during stage 1 of the fight, I learn whether the cardinal or intercardinal 'characters' are spawning in first. That goes in hotbar position 1. I need that same information again in stage 7, so I put it in position 7. I also know that the opposite configuration that hasn't been seen yet will be seen in stage 9 of the fight, so I put that in hotbar position 9.

So in the case that it's cardinals first, I push my "+" macro, which copies ACN 1 to share 6, and now my screen will look like this:

Now I have a nice visual reference. I know what happened to start, in stage 1, and when I get to stage 7, I can just glance down to row 7, and find out what I need to know. And the same again for stage 9.

If it had instead been intercardinals first, my screen would instead look like this:

Again, a nice visual indicator not only of what happened, but of what I will need to know in the future.

The rest of the set up continues in this vein. I think about when I learn something in the fight, and when I will need to know that information again later. I set up hotbars that contain that information, and then macros to swap those hotbars in when needed. During the fight, when I learn something, I push the appropriate macro, and the macro will swap in the correct hotbar, showing me both what I learned, and when and how to apply it.

For example, in stage 2, I learn about whether a north spot or a south spot will be safe to stand in. I don't need that knowledge immediately, but I need to know it again for stage 4 and knowing that information can help me resolve a different mechanic in stage 6.

So for north safe, I push my north safe macro, and now my HUD looks like this.

... and so on.

When it's fully filled out, I can just glance at what stage in the fight I'm in and what stage I will be going to, read across the row, and know what to do based on what I put there.

I won't get into the specifics any further than that, as they're not important, and my setup feels so personalised to me that I am not sure I want to fully share it. For example, I re-use share hotbar 8 at some point, for reasons that make sense to me, but might confuse someone else who's not expecting that.

And also Idyllic Dream is a very complicated mechanic. There are two events that happen during the mechanic that my setup doesn't record, because I found I didn't really need memory tools for them, but someone else might.

The point is less about Idyllic Dream specifically - it's just the impetus that caused me to make this - and more about how to use macros and hotbars to setup a complex UI that lets you store and recall information.

There's two last macro concepts we should talk about.

One, I do not need this HUD up all the time. I don't even need it up for most of M12S, and it's large and distracting and takes up a lot of screen real estate. What do?

I have two macros for that.

The first one is the reset macro. We went into Idyllic Dream, we wiped, and now I want that part of the HUD turned off so it's not taking up valuable screen real estate during the earlier parts of the fight. This macro handles that.

/hotbar display 5 off /hotbar display 6 off /hotbar display 7 off /hotbar display 8 off /hotbar display 9 off

This does exactly what it seems to. It turns off all the hotbars. It does not change what is in them, it just makes it so they are no longer visible.

And once we get back to Idyllic Dream, I will need that HUD again. But I will need it empty, back to its pristine starting state, and ready to go.

For that, I use this macro.

/e [ / / / / / / / / / / R E S E T \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ ] /hotbar copy rog 4 share 6 /hotbar copy rog 4 share 7 /hotbar copy rog 4 share 8 /hotbar copy rog 4 share 9 /hotbar display 5 on /hotbar display 6 on /hotbar display 7 on /hotbar display 8 on /hotbar display 9 on

This is the reset macro. It puts a big obvious stripe of text in the chat box, and that's to make it easier to differentiate between older messages that are no longer relevant, and the new messages that will be coming in on this pull.

The other thing it does is it clears the UI that was built up during the last pull. ROG 4 is purposefully kept empty, and by copying it over to the share bars, I make them empty as well, returning my HUD to its clean state.

Lastly, the "/hotbar display # on" lines turn the shared hotbars back on, making them visible again, and ready for another round through Idyllic Dream.

Now, after all that, you might (rather reasonably) ask what the hell's wrong with me, and I will tell you, neither Hydaelyn nor Zodiark knows the answer.

You might also (rather more politely) ask if this ridiculous macro setup helps at all.